Broadcasting Modernity: Cuban Commercial Television, 1950-1960
Yeidy M. Rivero is Associate Professor of Screen Arts and Cultures at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television, also published by Duke University Press.
Spectacles of Democracy and a Prelude to the Spectacles of Revolution
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Published:March 2015
This chapter focuses on the legalization of media censorship in Cuba at the end of the 1950s and the government’s transformative interpretation of morality and decency in entertainment programming. Between 1957 and 1958, as the Ministry of Communication regulated sexual content on television, the office also targeted material perceived to challenge the political status quo. Government officials claimed that these regulatory measures were intended to protect Cuba from communist threats, but they also came at a moment in which U.S. media were regularly questioning Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. By reporting on Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement soldiers, the...
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