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The birth and development of commercial television in Cuba in the 1950s occurred alongside political and social turmoil. In this period of dramatic swings encompassing democracy, a coup, a dictatorship, and a revolution, television functioned as a beacon and promoter of Cuba's identity as a modern nation. In Broadcasting Modernity, television historian Yeidy M. Rivero shows how television owners, regulatory entities, critics, and the state produced Cuban modernity for television. The Cuban television industry enabled different institutions to convey the nation's progress, democracy, economic abundance, high culture, education, morality, and decency. After nationalizing Cuban television, the state used it to advance Fidel Castro's project of creating a modern socialist country. As Cuba changed, television changed with it. Rivero not only demonstrates television's importance to Cuban cultural identity formation, she explains how the medium functions in society during times of radical political and social transformation.
List of contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Broadcasting Modernity, Spectacles, and Television 1
1. Prelude to the Spectacles: Constituting a Modern Broadcasting System through the Law, 1923–1950 23
2. Spectacles of Progress: Technology, Expansion, and the Law 45
3. Spectacles of Decency: Morality as a Matter of the Industry and the State 75
4. Spectacles of Democracy and a Prelude to the Spectacles of Revolution 102
5. Spectacles of Revolution: A Rebirth of Cubanness 129
6. From Broadcasting Modernity to Constructing Modernity 163
Epilogue 176
Notes 181
Bibliography 221
Index 233
About the author
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.
Summary
In this major contribution to Latin American media studies, Yeidy M. Rivero shows how commercial Cuban television, which only existed from 1950-1960, was instrumental in the creation and representation of Cuba's identity as a modern and Western nation-state.
