The Latin American Report # 566

9 days ago

In recent days, two topics have dominated debate in Cuba. I will refer to the first of both in this report. Last Sunday, the digital outlet La Joven Cuba ("The Young Cuba") aired a new episode of a podcast they call “La Sobremesa,” in which they invite personalities from science and culture to address “hot” topics. One first point to bear in mind is that, in the sui generis Cuban political context, new legislation enacted last year recognizes two types of media: 1) “fundamental” social communication media; and 2) “other” social communication media. The former are those that “have a strategic character in the construction of consensus, perform public service functions and constitute political, ideological and sociocultural mediators,” including “news agencies, radio, television and printed and digital social communication media that are of socialist ownership of all the people or political, mass and social organizations, and cannot be subject to other kinds of ownership.”

The other social communication media “[may] belong to State bodies, agencies and entities, political, mass and social organizations, associative forms or to other legally recognized economic and social actors,” and are conceived as “a communicational complement to the mission or the economic or social activity of their owner.” The legislation explicitly prohibits “the creation of these other media when their management is proposed as the constitutive activity of the social purpose ... of a non-state economic actor.” This last point means that a private company cannot have as its primary corporate purpose the management of a media outlet.

This corresponds with the provisions of Decree 107/2024 of the Council of Ministers, which regulates the activities that private actors, whether companies or self-employed workers, may not carry out. For example, they may not engage in the editing and layout of books, newspapers, or magazines, whether in print or digital format, nor may they operate as news agencies. Thus, a digital outlet like La Joven Cuba is outside the law, but, in practice, and somehow thanks to the cyberspace’s architecture, they end up being tolerated as long as they do not cross a line whose location and width depend on the context.

Anything that does not respond directly and organically to the political power’s interests in the communicative sphere—especially if it in some way criticizes the government, not necessarily in a confrontational tone—is viewed with suspicion, and so it is often presented as a threat to the State. Why the political, economic, and media system that prevails on the Island has the characteristics we know cannot be explained solely by the decisions or the alleged authoritarian character of the leaders of the Cuban Revolution. Rather, it is, in any case, closely related to—or justified by—the United States’ regime-change endeavor.

That is why, when projects such as La Joven Cuba are targeted by the official political communication system and its volunteers, they are also presented by default as part of that subversive policy and are associated with sinister objectives. Yet in this case, the evidence does not so far indicate a direct link with Washington-funded “democracy programs” implemented through the NED, USAID, and the State Department. What is known, and what the project itself acknowledges, is that they receive funding from the Norwegian embassy in Havana. That this latter may be operating as a proxy for U.S. funds is a plausible option consistent with history, but, again, it is simply not appropriate to make these claims without conclusive evidence.

In particular, it was the appearance of a popular and highly controversial singer on last Sunday’s program that intensified the scrutiny of La Joven Cuba. What irritates the national government is precisely the existence of a more incisive and comprehensive approach that subjects statecraft to a kind of tomography, rather than limiting itself to asserting the real but somewhat one-dimensional argument about the impact of U.S. sanctions. On the contrary, the government should understand why the message of these projects resonates far more with people than the one distributed by official media—generally simplistic, superficial, propagandistic—which does not correspond to the reality that Cubans see, feel, and wish to discuss.