Cuban Media During the Presidency of Raúl Castro: A Multidimensional Approach to Understanding Patterns of Change and Continuity in Media Systems

Abstract

This paper analyzes the relationship between media and politics in Cuba during the presidency of Raúl Castro (2006–2018). It contributes to the theoretical discussion about the approaches concerning change and continuity in media systems with empirical evidence from interviews with communication and political science experts, and an analysis of non-standardized content in academic, political, legal, and professional documents. The (re)structuring of the media system is explained by the most important political, economic, technological, and cultural events of the period studied: the survival of the Soviet media model, the impact of the U.S. conflict with Cuba on domestic politics, and a (de)territorialized notion of system boundaries. The patterns of change and continuity are discussed through the relationships among the State’s participation in media and the fulfillment of media’s democratic functions, the media policy projection and journalism cultures, and the political articulation of the media and development of the media industry. The articulations among these patterns highlight the relevance of a multidimensional approach as an interpretive dimension of media systems.

Keywords

media systems change and continuity Cuban media path dependency hegemony

The announcement of Fidel Castro’s illness on July 31, 2006, transformed not only Cuba’s political system, but its media system as well. While Cuban Revolution’s leader made systematic use of the media, Raúl Castro (Cuba’s president between 2006 and 2018) only delivered two or three public speeches each year. This change opened the door to a political transition leading to changes in public communication, revealed the Cuban media system’s limitations, and exposed the deficiencies in the management of information of political, governmental, and business institutions.

Raúl Castro promoted a reform called “actualización” (update) and three political events marked this process: the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the United States during the presidency of Barack Obama, the generational transition in the country’s leadership, and the approval of the new Constitution in February 2019 that restructured the government. While socialism continues to be the philosophical-ideological base of the Cuban State and the Cuban Communist Party (PCC in Spanish) is the only legal, political force, Cuban society has undergone dramatic changes. At present, a matrix built in the 1970s through a Sovietization process (verticalism, homogeneity, participation deficit) remains and coexists with the expansion of inequality, the restructuring of the economy, the State and the Government, and the weakening (in some cases disconnection) of affinities between the political-social project and the personal and family expectations (Espina 2009).

Under Raúl Castro’s leadership, the media system continued to be characterized by the ubiquitous presence of the State, as the government intervened directly with partisan messaging and subsidies remained the primary form of financing for media outlets. Media content predominantly served informative-propagandist and educational-cultural functions, perpetuated a defensive-reactive stance to external aggressions, and upheld the centrality of national defense. The core of the media system is directly linked to the institutional framework that has shaped a partisan-state press model. But this configuration has changed, and its “limits” have been reconstituted as a manifestation of the ongoing transformations ushered in by Raúl Castro’s presidency.

Many studies have assessed media systems worldwide; however, Cuba’s media system has been understudied. An analysis of the Cuban political experience could contribute to developing “more sophisticated hypotheses about media system change” (Hallin and Mancini 2017: 10). This paper aims to define the Cuban media system patterns of change and continuity during the presidency of Raúl Castro’s political reform and examine how the cultural and structural dimensions operate within the Cuban media system. The significant contribution is the description of these patterns of change and continuity in the context of economic and political reform. Additionally, this work indicates the multilevel and multidimensional relationships among cultural and structural factors by explaining the movements, setbacks, and resistance to change. To do so, Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) dimensions of analysis for media systems were revised and used to explain the patterns using data collected from in-depth interviews with communication and political science experts in Cuba and a content analysis of primary and secondary documents (such as legislation, political speeches, academic productions, among others). Path dependence and hegemony hypotheses were employed to understand media change through this multidimensional approach.

Literature Review

Media systems are not static (Hallin and Mancini 2017), and, in terms of democratization and social development, they are simultaneously independent and dependent variables. Their systemic transformations are the result of changes coming from multiple cultural (cognitive, conceptual) and structural (political, economic, institutional, etc.) factors (Jakubowicz and Sükösd 2008). Changes in media can occur due to different combinations of the media system’s characteristics and its interrelations with the environment. Recent studies shed light on some aspects of these changes but continue to be insufficient (Hallin and Mancini 2017) due to the diversity of patterns variation, perspectives, and dimensions of analysis. The interpretation paths to explain these variations range from sociology and political economy to the emphasis on cultural issues (Balčytienė 2015), focusing on different objects: individuals, structures, institutional practices, social processes, technologies, and global trends (Jakubowicz 2007).

Scholars have addressed the processes of change in media systems, with an emphasis on the “democratic transition” of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe, and in countries with recent military dictatorships or authoritarian—and post-authoritarian—regimes of various nature in Mediterranean Europe, Asia, Latin America, and Africa (Downey and Mihelj 2012; Jakubowicz 2007; Mihelj and Huxtable 2018; Sparks 2005; Voltmer 2013a).

Hallin and Mancini (2004) argued changes in political and economic structures generated a process of convergence of media systems toward a liberal media system. Taking a step back, Hallin and Mancini (2017) recognized the potential convergence toward what they called a polarized pluralistic model. Voltmer (2012, 2013a), meanwhile, acknowledged that cultural and temporal frameworks are forces that promote a disconcerting diversity on the different media systems and democratic societies.

A non-normative point of view of this problem was provided by Jakubowicz (2007) based on the concept of systemic social transformation. Another approach is the notion of hybridization, which has been used to understand the interactions between the logic of old and new media, based on simultaneous concentrations and differences in power (Chadwick 2013). However, the theories usually used in Western literature are not always sufficient to explain the media in communist countries (Hallin 2016). For example, analytical frameworks that presuppose an inherently antagonistic and hostile relationship among the Party-State and society, the market, the internet, the media, watchdog journalism, and the public have not captured the growing complexity and dynamics of contemporary China society (Zhang 2011), or Vietnam (Cain 2014; Hương 2012).

In these types of Western-centric theoretical frameworks, there is a tendency to consider reform processes in countries with political systems like Cuba as models of “progress without change” (Voltmer 2013a), thus indicating there has not been a “radical” transformation in terms of the relationship among politics, the State, and the media. However, other analytical approaches have maintained that multifaceted, complex, and unique changes have occurred in these countries resulting in new and strong relationships among media, politics, and the market (Hương 2012; Zhao 2012).

It is worth noting the political rupture of the communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe was preceded by reformist programs and gradual changes of their societies and institutions (Coyne and Leeson 2009), as well as by processes of erosion and maintenance of the order in which media, journalists, and audiences were protagonists (Roudakova 2012). However, in China and Vietnam, economic reforms, media liberalization, and digitalization—undoubted forces of change in media and politics—have enabled the resilience of the political systems. An explanation of this process can be found in Repnikova’s (2017) comparison of the Soviet and Chinese media opening policies. She explained that “at each stage of policy implementation—from the scope assigned to these openings, to the nature of top-down endorsement, to the modes of regulating critical voices—the Chinese case featured more constraint and ambiguity, combined with more active patrolling of the boundaries of the permissible” (Repnikova 2017: 147).

Although this is an interesting perspective, the Cuban case has different characteristics than those in China and Vietnam. In Cuba, there has not been a liberalization in media policy, the economic reform has followed zigzagging processes (with advances and setbacks), digitization is materializing online and offline, and media operation takes place in a context of international political conflict—given the set of unilateral coercive measures of the United States against the country.

One possible way to address these issues would be through the path dependence hypothesis, which argues that the previous regimes’ characteristics, policies, and norms have a lasting influence, shaping the new institutions’ design and activity (Oates 2012; Voltmer 2013a). Furthermore, it is concomitant with institutionalist theory and with the perspective of interdependence between institutional and cultural change (Balčytienė 2015; Voltmer 2013a).

Analyzing the type of regime and the level of state control over media offers compelling explanations about the nature of a country’s media systems (Oates 2012) and their use by political actors and audiences (Sun et al. 2001; Voltmer 2005). But the question of what makes a historical legacy in a set of countries less significant than other comparable cases requires a more causal explanation (Humphreys 2012). Thus, it is plausible there is a complex relationship among multiple legacies and factors such as property, concentration, journalistic traditions, economic conditions (Kostadinova 2015), critical junctures (Peruško 2016), national political styles (Humphreys 2012), colonial past, duration of previous regimes (Voltmer 2005), and types of nationalism (Jakubowicz and Sükösd 2008), among others.

For example, in China and Vietnam, the collective action by multiple actors (citizens, journalists, businesspeople, politicians) and the creative renegotiation processes among them have generated expansion dynamics not foreseen by the States (Akhavan-Majid 2004; Wells-Dang 2010). Furthermore, while there is no systemic conflict between the media and these States, institutions are sites of conflicts among multiple social interests (Sparks 2010), and the Chinese Communist Party faces challenges in terms of regulation, autonomy, and credibility to continue exercising effective control over their symbolic environment (Sparks 2010; Zhang 2011).

The mutual transformation, interaction, and negotiation between the Party-State and other social forces in China, especially the media organizations (Zhang 2011), have been reconsidered from Gramsci’s (1975) hegemony perspective. This approach has also been applied to Cuba to understand media’s role in constructing revolutionary hegemony (Castro 2014). This approach emphasizes social space as conflict and power struggle, and it is great for understanding the resilience of the Party-State and the resistances of other social forces and ideologies, which are integral parts of social production and reproduction (Acanda 2002). The Gramscian conception establishes the system itself contains the logic of its rupture, and that hegemony operates both in negotiation and in the change of social relations (Zhang 2011). Therefore, the subversion of domination and counter-hegemony is a critical issue that concerns the state and the economy, and the culture of Cuba. Hegemony is disputed in the ideas, dispositions, and practices assumed daily, and its production field is the civil society (Acanda 2002).

The cultural dimension in research on media systems has focused on journalistic cultures. However, culture also extends to the symbolic nature of the media, consumption, convergence processes, forces of change, media integration, and politics (Rantanen 2013), and the coupling of formal and informal procedures. The media are mutually constituted by human agency and structure (Roudakova 2012), which is usually observed directly and indirectly in the variables of analysis of this type of study: pluralism, participation, autonomy, concentration, ownership, financing, legislation, self-regulation, values, beliefs, representations, and consumption habits, among others (Balčytienė 2009; Humphreys 2012; Mellado and Lagos 2013; Meyen 2018; Mihelj and Downey 2012, 2015; Örnebring 2009).

This paper argues that a contextualist epistemological (Powers and Vera-Zambrano 2018), plural, and open stance would complement the assumptions about change and continuity. This theoretical position emphasizes a multidimensional approach, integrating the path dependence and hegemony hypotheses, which allows for consideration of the interrelations of cultural dimensions and structural factors of media systems. To examine this approach, the following questions were developed:

RQ₁: What are the patterns of change and continuity in the Cuban media system during the political reform developed in the presidency of Raúl Castro?

RQ₂: How did cultural and structural dimensions operate in the Cuban media system during the political reform developed in the presidency of Raúl Castro?

Method

This study used a qualitative theoretical-methodological approach. Based on a critical review and (re)conceptualization of the classic dimensions of Hallin and Mancini (2004), the relationships among the following dimensions were used to explain the patterns of change and continuity in the Cuban media system: (a) State-media relationship, (b) political articulation of the media, (c) development of the media industry, and (d) professionalism of journalism (see Table 1). As part of this review, concepts previously used in the Cuban context were integrated with empirical evidence and, above all, recognition by the country’s academic community and the interviewees. For example, the concept of journalistic roles was applied as part of the Journalistic Role Performance project, the first comparative study in which Cuba participated (Mellado et al. 2017).

Table 1.

Constructs and Dimensions of Analysis.

RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN STATE AND MEDIA
1.1 Media policy projection Conceives the agreement of actors in its design, the social function defined for media, its conception as a public service, and the role of the PCC and its political leadership.
1.2 State participation in media Includes aspects such as ownership, financing, setting the agenda, government as a source of access to public affairs, professionalization of government’s communication, censorship, and surveillance.
1.3 Legal regulation Integrates different media regulation types: structural, infrastructural, content and advertising, and the contexts of deregulation.
1.4 Media tendency to legitimize the political system Refers to the relationship between the media agenda, the political agenda, and the public agenda, and the fulfillment of media’s democratic functions.
POLITICAL ARTICULATION OF THE MEDIA
2.1 Media’s political activity Observes the media’s editorial orientation, their position before political conflict, their recognition of the PCC, and the political leadership as legitimate interlocutors.
2.2 External diversity Includes the relationship with political groups, civil society, global actors, links with migratory flows, and media’s legal status.
DEVELOPMENT OF THE MEDIA INDUSTRY
3.1 Media scope Defines media platforms and scope, development indicators for telecommunications, and alternative-informal distribution networks.
3.2 Orientation toward audiences Indicates economic and social value for media production, access to ICTs, and media consumption.
JOURNALISM PROFESSIONALIZATION
4.1 Journalistic culture Indicates autonomy, ethical norms and standards, and professional roles.
4.2 Social organization of the profession Refers to associations and college education.

Sample

Twenty-one in-depth interviews were conducted with experts in communication and political science in Cuba. Additionally, a content analysis was performed on primary documents (ten governmental programs, twenty-one laws, ten political speeches, nineteen news articles, two study plans, thirty-three documents produced by communication professionals) and secondary documents (fifty-seven academic papers, sixty thesis and dissertations, and twenty-three in-depth interviews and two focus groups developed by previous research).

The twenty-one interviewees were selected based on their previous academic scholarship on Cuba in communication or political science. At the time of the interviews, eleven participants had a doctoral degree, six were doctoral students, and four had a master’s degree. Thirteen interviewees resided in Cuba, six were Cubans living abroad, and two were non-Cubans. The interviews were conducted between February 2017 and January 2019. Fifteen were performed face-to-face, and six were done online.

The primary documents selected for the analysis included laws, political speeches, and commentary related to the Cuban media system during the period studied. Secondary sources included doctoral and master’s thesis, academic papers, and books covering the topic under study. Secondary sources were identified using the database created by the Cuba Communication Project based at the Universidad de La Habana, which has a complete record of the area’s research from 1960 to 2016.

One way of understanding the Cuban media system is as a non-territorially bounded space, inclusive of borders, transnational, multiintentioned, and multiregulated, where all actors that produce and disseminate information about Cuba (with the capacity to interact with each other and to generate discourse, from inside or outside Cuba) were included. Hence, a media map (see Supplemental Information file) was built to help explain Cuban’s media structure and to distinguish each outlet’s political orientation and its relationships with political organizations (inside and outside of Cuba). This media map was created using the following sources: the media map prepared by Cubaposible in 2018, the Catalog of Serial Publications and Cuban Websites (2016–2017), the National Communication Directory (2015), and the SembraMedia Cuban digital media directory. Media were selected following these criteria: (1) journalists and communication professionals of Cuban origin worked on those outlets, (2) national events are systematically covered, and (3) their media agenda is linked to Cuban politics.

Analysis

The interviews were transcribed, and the information was processed with the support of NVivo 12. The coding of the in-depth interviews was carried out with the initial theoretical constructs in mind but left room for emerging elements and the (re)meaning of concepts, combining open, and axial coding (Corbin and Strauss 2015). The coding similarity allowed identifying the group of themes that tended to be mentioned together by the interviewees. A Jaccard’s coefficient > 0.7 means a high degree of similarity between the two codes (see Supplemental Information file). The codes aggrupation by dendrogram and circle graphs contributed to identifying the patterns of relations between codes and developing concept maps to represent them.

The codes grouped from the interviews were contrasted by analyzing qualitative content to the previous academic production about the Cuban media system. Primary documents were also reviewed, which allowed distinguishing facts, decisions, perceptions, opinions, and ideas of individual and institutional agents of journalism, communication, and politics in Cuba to come to the fore. Hence, “multiple simultaneous links” (Espina 2007: 37) concerning the study’s different sources and dimensions were identified. The analysis followed a recurrent strategy of reduction/structuring of the interviews and documents and induction/deduction of the data to produce empirical and theoretical generalizations (Mayring 2000; Meuser and Nagel 2009) and to trace multicausal relationships (Mihelj and Downey 2015).

To discuss the premises regarding the patterns of change and continuity in media systems, a complementary tool, a conceptual map, was conceived to construct matrices of structural-cultural relations from the reduction, (re)organization, and (re)interpretation of the dimensions and indicators (see Supplemental Information file). An iterative process tracing (Bril-Mascarenhas et al. 2017) was followed. It included the critical review of the academic literature, the construction of categories based on the previous contextual references of the case study, the analysis of the interviews, the transformation of the categories and dimensions, the establishment of multicausal relationships among dimensions, the contextualization of relationships through qualitative content analysis of academic production and the review of primary documents, the distinction of structural and cultural components in the multicausal relationships, the corroboration of these in the empirical data of interviews and documentary sources, and the theoretical regeneration by contrasting the case study data with hypotheses about change and continuity in media systems.

Findings

In order to explore the patterns of change and continuity in the Cuban media system during the political reform developed in the presidency of Raúl Castro, it is necessary to first describe the continuity features and the main changes in Cuban media, and then understand the relations between cultural and structural dimensions that could explain them. However, more than the changes and continuities in the media per se, this paper looks at patterns or interactions among components of the media system that explain their evolution over time.

The axis of the political relationship of the Cuban media is the international conflict between the United States and Cuba, historically developed on the domination versus sovereignty dichotomies (González 2017). In the last six decades, this relationship has also been based on the contradictions of liberalism versus socialism and authoritarianism versus participation. During the Raúl Castro presidency, the press activity and political relations were also shaped by his government’s reform named “updating the economic and social model.”

Even though the Cuban media system has kept most of the Soviet-model forms that characterized it since the last century (see Supplemental Information file), it is more complex and plural—and therefore less homogeneous—than typically assumed. Some external and internal changes have transformed its configuration: Fidel Castro’s retirement and death, generational transition in the country’s political leadership, a new constitution with significant transformations of the political system, advances and setbacks in the U.S. conflict with Cuba, the implementation of a new Cuban Migration Law (Consejo de Estado 2013), economic reform, State investment in telecommunications, the creation and expansion of informal content networks, development of blogosphere and digital media groups, and journalism professionalization (see Supplemental Information file for more details).

The media system is adopting the configuration of the (trans)national public sphere, and as such, it is in expansion, decentralization, and pluralization mode (Celecia 2018). Thus, at the structural level, the system must be conceived of in terms of relationships and fuzzy limits. Consequently, some distinctions among media are often made (e.g., state and non-state, partisan and independent, official and mercenary, state and alternative media). Here, the distinctions described are integrated into three sets: partisan-public-state, emerging, and opposition media. The partisan-public-state has been systematically studied since it constitutes the traditional structure (García 2013). The other two sets have become more relevant in recent years and have hardly been studied. The distinction between emerging media (e.g., OnCuba, Periodismo de Barrio, El Toque) and opposition media (e.g., Radio Martí, 14ymedio, Cubanet, CiberCuba) is fundamentally associated with an editorial profile, orientation toward internal plurality, and vocation of public service.

Hence, in the political antipodal of partisan and public-state media, without legal recognition within Cuba—acting from or outside the country through networks of reporters and informants—but mostly connected to global powers, the media linked to political opposition groups can be identified (Geoffray and Chaguaceda 2014). Similar to how Voltmer (2013b) has identified them for the Eastern European context, dissident media in Cuba are more than a citizen activism space but are political instruments. They reinforce the confrontational character and polarization of the Cuban public sphere, especially in the digital environment.

Another actor participating in this oppositional communication universe is the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (a federal entity of the United States government), which oversees Radio and TV Martí. However, it serves more as a symbolic reference due to its low professional quality and limited audience on the island (Schumacher-Matos et al. 2019). Among the actors in the media system, equally distinctive for their nature and legal status, are some of the accredited international news outlets in Havana. This would not be relevant if it were not for the connection of these outlets with the Cuban public, the political operation that supports them, and the learning and professional development laboratory of at least five of them: Inter Press Service, TeleSur, Progreso Semanal, OnCuba, and Russia Today.

However, in the last five years, a group of non-State initiatives in the digital environment (online and offline) has emerged, representing extraordinary economic, cultural, and political diversity. Previous research and results of the in-depth interviews for this study suggest that they all share some common characteristics:

They do not have legal status in the country (García 2017).

Several of the most important ones have been created with the participation of journalists who graduated from Cuban universities (Somohano 2019).

“They function as micro-media and have more flexible production routines and forms of financing” (interviewee, September 12, 2017) (For more information about the interviewees, see Supplemental Information file).

“They identify and publish agendas that differ from party-public-state media and dissident (opposition) media” (interviewee, January 9, 2019) and are “challenging the government in different ways” (interviewee, June 25, 2018).

This scenario has meant “the loss of the state-partisan monopoly in the production and distribution of communication” (interviewee, July 12, 2018), which to a large extent, especially concerning emerging media, has been favored by the type of regulation and bad practices of official state media (Somohano 2019).

The media system is comprised of 187 media outlets that produce daily news. There are 170 with official registration in Cuba (five international outlets) and seventeen with legal registration only in other countries, primarily the United States and Spain (see Supplemental Information file). In 2006–2018, most outlets acting as political opposition actors or emerging outlets were created. This media expansion, however, is not an entirely new process. Its antecedent, the Cuban blogosphere development, took place some years before and shared its characteristics (Díaz 2014; Henken 2011; Vicari 2015).

In sum, in the context of political and economic reform and global changes in information and communication technologies (ICTs), the Cuban media system shows a tendency toward deterritorialization, decentralization, and external diversity. This trend is expressed not only in the proliferation of digital media and its editorial plurality or its transnational organization but also in the forms of political polarization and vocation to public service that characterize them.

Some scholars have proposed different factors to explain Cuban media change in recent years (Arencibia 2017; Elizalde 2014; Gallego 2016; García 2013, 2017; González 2017). This paper incorporates most of the previous formulations but proposes a different orientation for analysis. The coding similarity applied to the in-depth interviews suggests three multidimensional patterns of change and continuity: (1) State participation in media and fulfillment of media’s democratic functions, (2) media policy projection and journalists’ professionalization—related to college education and immigration flows—, and (3) media industry development and its political articulation—connected to media consumption and access to ICTs. Each pattern explains how cultural and structural factors operate in an interrelated way in the Cuban media system and helps to identify hypotheses to understand the previous and future media paths (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Patterns of change and continuity.

State Participation in Media and Fulfillment of Media’s Democratic Functions

The link between State participation in media and fulfillment of media’s democratic functions is associated with the predominance of informal norms and censorship-surveillance practices in the participation-intervention of the Party-State in Cuban media, which restricts media’s credibility and function as democratic agents of society.

Socialism and democracy are intrinsically related concepts, regardless of their historical practice as state policy (Sparks 2005; Valdés 2009). From the benchmark of republicanism and radical Cuban nationalism (Guanche 2012), socialism contributes to media democratization. The in-depth interviews suggest that for this to occur, it is necessary to ensure sovereignty, public deliberation, media power socialization, education for freedom, citizen participation, transparency, the direct exercise of power and accountability, solidarity, social cooperation, among other ideals (interviewees, February 20, 21, March 9, April 6, September 12, 2017).

However, media policy in the Cuban Revolution has historically been based on concepts of public service (state-centralized), sovereignty, and national defense (PCC 2018; UPEC 2013), anchored in an instrumentalist conception. Besides, in an environment of legal deregulation, the predominance of informal norms and censorship-vigilance coexist with formal rules that have distorted the notions of public and autonomy.

The legal forms of participation-intervention of the State in media operations explain the essential characteristics of the central system. Among them, the property has a particular connotation since it has been modeled by the notion of public and monopolistic character of the media system, in a kind of statist hypertrophy of the idea of the socialization of power. The economic-financial structure of public-partisan-state media is also crucial, given the lack of autonomy to manage income, salaries, investments, and resources is as much of a deep-rooted problem as editorial autonomy (Terrero 2018). In the period under study, a crucial symbolic-structural transformation has been the constitutional recognition of the citizens’ right to public information and freedom of expression within the socialist system. However, rights to communication and access to the internet are not included in the new Constitution, even when recognized in political documents (PCC 2018; PCC and ANPP 2017). In general, these statements open the door to legislation on the subject. However, they do not eliminate the legal vacuum, limitations to these rights, and fragmentation of regulations regarding journalism and communication. This translates into a lack of legal security in these professional practices.

The ways of participation-intervention instituted through the “not written” cultural norms (Arencibia 2017; Franco 2016; García 2013) shape the corporate organization of the system, and thus, reinforcing the validity of the path dependence hypothesis. The overvaluation of the informal rules, the presence of multiple normative standards, and the “besieged square” syndrome resulting from decades of U.S. government aggressions against Cuba (Vidal 2015) promote a wide discretionary margin for decision making, the definition of media agendas (Gallego 2016), the opacity of public information (Vidal 2015), censorship, and surveillance (Facultad Comunicación y Letras UDP 2017; Muñiz and Fonseca 2017).

The relationship between the State and the media in Cuba differs according to the type of media. The in-depth interviews suggest this relationship “continues to be one of dependence-subordination-complicity concerning the public-partisan-state media” (interviewees, January 26, April 13, 2017); and it “stands in terms of control-ignorance-complicity and supervision around the emerging media” (interviewees, March 23, 2017; January 31, 2018) and hostility-antagonism-confrontation concerning the oppositional media (interviewees, November 7, 2017; January 21, March 20, June 25, 2018).

The functionality of the political system has been reinforced for several decades by the relationships described above. Contradictorily, as proposed by the hegemony approach, its nature has also restricted the capacity of the public-partisan-state media for social intermediation, legitimization, construction of its democracy (Espina 2009; García 2013), and the possibilities for the Cuban government to apply more sophisticated public policy instruments to regulate media (Gallego 2016; Garcés 2018).

The in-depth interviews suggest “party-state media have had a central function in the consensus—albeit transformed and with fractures—around the Cuban Revolution’s political project” (interviewee, March 29, 2017). However, “it evidences substantial dysfunctionalities: lack of strategic communication” (interviewee, January 9, 2019), insufficient autonomy to question the government and the PCC, as well as “represent the interests of public opinion—which diminishes credibility in the media” (interviewee, March 29, 2017). For these reasons, “they contribute to increase rather than avoid the erosion of socialist hegemony” (interviewee, February 21, 2017).

Media Policy Projection and Journalists’ Professionalization

The second pattern of change and continuity is the relationship between media policy and journalists’ professionalization due to the confluence of public service values and sociopolitical commitments with the perceived professional roles of journalists, as well as the media’s nationalistic and national defense functions limiting their autonomy.

The professional culture of Cuban journalists exhibits a strong vocation for public service, oriented to a civic role that complements, with different levels of contrast, the loyal-facilitator role (Estrada 1996; Oller et al. 2016; Pérez 2006; Veliz et al. 2019). Coincidentally, media policy and journalists’ professional organizations provide journalistic knowledge and practice guidelines based on the civic tradition of radical Cuban nationalism (García 2018), which proposes an intrinsic relationship among freedom, social justice, and sovereignty.

Nonetheless, there is a tension between the tenets of independence supported by the college education of recent media professionals and ideals promoted by professional organizations and the “dysfunctional” dynamics of partisan-state outlets and the quality of its journalism (García 2013; Somohano 2019). The in-depth interviews data suggest that, in turn, professional autonomy is limited by the Party-State intervention in editorial and economic terms, the prevalence of informal rules, and the inflection in professional decisions of variables such as national defense and the media’s political orientation (interviewees, February 17, 20, 27, March 9, 10, 2017, July 12, 2018). However, at autonomy’s conceptual level, a bold notion of journalism practice limits has been socialized, supporting ethical self-regulation to solve the media’s political instrumentalization (García 2013). Also, the journalists’ positioning regarding factual powers has been reconfigured, strengthening the citizen role in the party-state media, the watchdog role in the emerging media, and the adversarial role in the opposition media (Olivera et al. 2021; Somohano 2019; Veliz et al. 2019).

Moreover, the analysis of the in-depth interviews suggested a pattern of change associated with these system components, produced by the relationship between journalism culture and college education, with immigration flows.

Cuban journalists receive a quality journalism education; however, they face several difficulties in the public-partisan-official media: challenges in finding a space for self-professional development (Arencibia 2017; Somohano 2019), low-end wages, and lack of equipment (Díaz-Canel 2013). These impediments make their working conditions precarious and deepen the dissonance between the journalistic ideal built-in the academy and the professional reality, as another manifestation of the theoretical perspective of hegemony. Hence, multi-employment in the same or other sectors is common, as is labor, professional, and geographical migration.

The in-depth interviews suggested the migratory phenomenon should be considered an extension of the nation, where there are no “full ruptures, but successive transformations, always in a close relationship with Cuba” (interviewee, March 28, 2017). Also, such connections are being facilitated precisely by the “technological changes and communications linked to globalization” (Aja Díaz et al. 2017: 41). Thus, the transnational condition of the communicative practices of Cuban migrants leads to a non-territorially bounded approach to explaining the emergence of discourses and platforms of various actors in the media system.

Media Industry Development and its Political Articulation

The third pattern of change and continuity in Cuban media system transformations is the interrelation between media industry development and its political articulation. The transition to a new socio-technological system, which implies the development of the internet and digitization, has increased access to information, has diversified the consumption of symbolic goods, and has multiplied the development of networks and platforms for content production and distribution. These conditions have promoted different editorial orientations and articulations with political and civil society actors (inside and outside the country), highlighting a trend in journalism toward the expression of external diversity.

While the national media industry continues to be characterized by social and professional criteria over commercial ones, telecommunications and internet communications shifted from emphasizing the social-sectoral access to finance, thus accentuating the digital-cultural inequalities of society (Recio 2014).

In this context, nonetheless, internet access has increased (ONEI 2018), and informal networks of audiovisual content distribution have been created throughout the country (online/offline) (Rodríguez 2018). Then, in the sense of hegemony perspective, public-state investment in the media industry and telecommunications has precipitated the transition from traditional to digital journalism and has enabled the existence, in the socio-cultural and political spheres, of emerging and opposition media within and outside the island.

Nevertheless, one of the interviewees pointed out, “it has not been in news, but in entertainment where the most notable transformations in production, distribution, and, above all, consumption of symbolic goods, were recorded” (interviewee, January 9, 2019). The analysis from the in-depth interviews suggested a pattern of change between the diversification of media consumption and the heterogeneity of society with the development and access to ICTs.

While the ways of accessing information have multiplied, cultural consumption practices, characterized by the rupture and by the connection (Rodríguez 2018), have diversified, especially within younger populations (Moras et al. 2011). Although TV maintains its leadership role, consumption practices have inevitably been transformed, giving rise to more self-managed practices and a more self-building public agenda (Rodríguez 2018).

Crossing of Cultural and Structural Factors

The transformations in the dynamics of the media system have not been structurally defined by new rules or organizational relations regarding political power. Rather, they have been enabled by structural changes in politics and in specific sectors (economy, telecommunications, migration), impacting society. The lack of integration in this transformation weakens bonds, and social influences catalyzes tensions among components of the media system and could increase the probability of a scenario of dynamic cultural and structural rupture.

In this scenario, the cultural factors operate as forces of continuity (predominance of informal norms in the media and political organizations associated with partisan-public-state media), as path dependence hypothesis claims; but also, as forces of change (journalistic cultures in their interrelation with university education and migration; and media consumption). Therefore, they affect the dynamism of structural changes in the media system itself and its setbacks, resistance, limits, and capacity for resilience.

The patterns of change and continuity coexist at a cultural and structural level and share an explanatory background, based on identity attributes of the Cuban media system identified by the in-depth interviews: the preeminence of the public service conception (interviewees, January 26, February 10, 17, March 10, September 12, 2017, June 25, July 12, 2018), the functions of strengthening nationalism and preserving national defense as defined in the public policy sphere (interviewees, February 17, 20, 21, March 10, 23, 2017, June 25, 2018), and the political-editorial orientations nature of media (interviewees, March 23, 29, November 7, 2017, January 21, 2018, January 9, 2019).

Discussion and Conclusion

The patterns of change and continuity of Cuban media in the period studied highlight the relevance of crossing cultural and structural dimensions to study media systems and the contradictory nature of communication processes during periods of political reform. Structural dimensions, external and internal to the media system, explain the dynamics of change and continuity. Political, economic, and technological factors associated with generational transition, economic and political reform, investment in telecommunications and education, and the role of public service in media policy have provided the basis for change. Others, such as the direct and centralized political, partisan, and State intervention into the media, the subsidy as the primary form of financing, and the defensive-reactive nature to external aggressions, provide continuity. Additionally, U.S. political conflict with Cuba, media political orientation toward these powers (inside and outside the country), and Cuban nationalism act in both directions.

Regarding the cultural dimensions, two patterns of change focused on journalists (professional culture, training, and migration) and users (access and consumption of ICTs), and another pattern that defines continuity focused on corporate-institutional and political cultures were observed. Hence, this paper supports what others have said about underestimating the cultural dimension in this area of research (Couldry and Hepp 2012; Hardy 2012; Rantanen 2013; Roudakova 2012).

The three patterns of change and continuity identified constitute a multidimensional approach, including structural and cultural factors. The findings identify evidence for the explanatory potential of the path dependence hypothesis, which highlights the continuity of formal and informal norms and power asymmetries, and the hegemony/counter-hegemony notion, which focuses both on structural and cultural processes that reinforce media system dominant ideas, values, and practices, while simultaneously challenging them. Each approach applies to different objects and practices: institutional and political culture, professional culture, and consumer culture.

Consequently, it is possible to assert the system contains the logic of its rupture. The forms of state participation in the media limit the democratic development of socialism itself. Media policy, which promotes public service values, contributes to reinforcing an instrumental conception of professional autonomy; trapped in authoritarianism and national defense. The quality of public journalism education, new migration policies, and the State’s telecommunications investment have enabled the conditions for the growth of political diversity in the media system and disputation of information hegemony, consumption, and audiences’ preferences by alternative and opposition media.

Nonetheless, the dependence on past norms and representations is also noted in journalistic culture, as well as the defense of the values of the hegemonic system of relations between politics and the media (García 2017). Additionally, historical practices linked to types of global entertainment products are recorded in the media consumption culture (Moras et al. 2011). While, in the political-institutional culture, resistance to change coexists (Elizalde 2014) with the declarative intention of establishing a profound mutation in media and political relations (PCC 2018).

These trends confirm the idea that culture constitutes the context of change (and, as such, can promote or hinder it), but it is also the object of change (Jakubowicz 2007). Hence, this analysis cannot ignore the multiple actors involved in the transformations of the media system. Inside and outside the margins of the State, the socialist ideology or the consensus around the revolution, as well as of the Cuban territorial limits (Recio 2019), are heirs of the same political culture and have to act on the same political and communicative map.

Therefore, the analysis of the nature of the media’s links with different types of nationalist and political cultures, as well as the relationship between the expectations and the practice of actors regarding their function of strengthening/erosion/subversion of the media system, as pointed out by the hegemony perspective, provides insight on the transformations in the relationship between politics and media, and their diversity worldwide.

This paper’s findings should be understood within the framework of limitations that accompany characterizing a multidimensional, complex object of study, synthesizing many sources, and explaining the transformation of the relationships between media and politics in a context of deep State intervention. Future research could focus on the emerging spheres of the media system, the transformations that will occur due to the social communication policies approved toward the end of the period studied, and the current deepening of the social and economic crisis Cuba is experiencing as a consequence of COVID-19. Additionally, the role of Fidel’s leadership in structuring the Cuban media system and its relationship with the public should be explored. Similarly, looking in detail at the specific changes in the Cuban Media during Raúl Castro’s presidency, for example, the rise of non-official media, could be an avenue for research. Likewise, comparing the Cuban media system with the ones of other communist nations (such as China or Vietnam) or other small countries geographically and culturally close to great power countries could broaden the typification of media models worldwide and understand the culture in media systems’ changes.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612211047188 - Supplemental material for Cuban Media During the Presidency of Raúl Castro: A Multidimensional Approach to Understanding Patterns of Change and Continuity in Media Systems

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-hij-10.1177_19401612211047188 for Cuban Media During the Presidency of Raúl Castro: A Multidimensional Approach to Understanding Patterns of Change and Continuity in Media Systems by Dasniel Olivera Pérez and Mariana De Maio in The International Journal of Press/Politics

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Mariana De Maio

Supplemental Material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Dasniel Olivera Pérez, PhD, Universidad Iberoamericana, is a postdoctoral fellow at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. His research interests include media systems, journalism cultures, communication policies, education and research in journalism and communication, and media literacy.

Mariana De Maio, PhD, University of Florida, is an assistant professor in the Department of Journalism and Communication at Lehigh University. Her research interests include media influence on political attitudes and behavior, influences on journalistic practices, and portrayals of women and other minority groups in media.

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