If you're an island nation with one cable for all your traffic you are very susceptible to a variety of state actor attacks: traffic analysis, mitm, protocol downgrades etc.
If your traffic goes out one way and back in via a totally divergent link these kinds of techniques become significantly harder to pull off and much easier to detect their use.
Passive undersea fiber monitoring is well within the means of more than a few intelligence operations and quite popular. They're in international water, unguarded, unrealistic to regularly inspect and they can be modified to leak just enough light to see every bit while being pretty difficult to detect.
A cable strung between Venezuela and Cuba would be impossible to resist for anyone in the region with a highly advanced signals intelligence program and spent 40+ years defined by communism/socialism as public enemy number one.
A year delay in lighting at all suggests to me very strongly that they had direct evidence or strong indicators that their cable had been split/bent or their DWDM repeaters / inline terminals or other equipment came into question - most of it is made by companies pretty cozy with large state actors.
After traffic snooping your second big intelligence concern these days is data exfiltration. The classic radio bug is way more trouble and effort than malware mics & cams, keyloggers and mobile phones. Even more popular is just files - grab it all and see whats good. Mostly that's very hard to catch leaving the country because there are so many paths and the data volume is so large.
But if you've previously built a monitoring system for your only route out, and it's slow enough you can do a credible job of traffic analysis then you're probably loathe to give up on it. In comparison, the kind of gear needed to do DPI, anomaly detection, key weakening etc. at a 100G+ is very pricey and probably covered by export bans anyway.
Asymmetric internet works pretty well anyway. Most commercial service is tuned that way because thats what the use looks like, way more in than out. Sat latency ain't a ball of joy but for bulk data and web pages it's probably pretty decent service especially when compared to what it's replacing.