(Screenshot DDC Website)
Utilizing an interactive map titled “The media power of Castroism,“ Diario de Cuba (DDC) illustrates just how far reaching the Cuban government’s “media apparatus” is in order to “convey their propaganda to the Cuban people and the ‘authorized version’ of reality” which includes “550 press media, most with digital editions, for which some 2,175 pro-government journalists work full time.”
DDC goes on to describe how the “regime’s control over the media is codified in Article 53 of the Constitution, which states that ‘the press, radio, television, cinema and other mass media are state or social property and can not be an object, in any case, of private property.”
The same article, according to DDC “shields the government from the possibility of dissent in the media, and conditions the freedom of speech and press to ‘the goals of the socialist society.'”
The Communist Party of Cuba, as mentioned in the map’s prologue, tightly controls programming, themes, and the editorial line of the media at the national, provincial and municipal levels “through its Ideological Department.”
DDC also brings up the fact that the regime “limits the possibility that Cubans receive alternative information through foreign media and independent press.” This is achieved by blocking “sites contrary to their interests and monitoring publications by official government bloggers and organizations with a non-governmental facade.”
The maps are broken down into sections including radio, television, and print media.
To view the maps and read more (Spanish), please click here.