Saturday Night Television in Cuba

By Mike Fuller

Havana, Oct 27 (Prensa Latina) Typical Saturday night Cuban television programming could include a historical film on the horrors of colonialism, dialogues of the Brazilian middle class or an obscure suspense movie, with no commercials in between.
I snuggled into my favorite chair this weekend to watch Zapata, Dream of a Hero, by Alfonso Arau, the biography of Emiliano Zapata, who fought in the Mexican Revolution against the sadistic Spanish colonialists.
The film showed how those early capitalists preferred to grow sugar to corn on the land they stole from the indigenous, and one could understand why over 100 years later Subcomandante Marcos and the Zapatista Army of National Liberation found inspiration in him.
As that trussed hero was being fed feet first into a raging oven by the Spanish Generalisimo, a technique that could make even acontemporary torturer cringe, my son changed the channel to the Brazilian drama series.
Most members of my Cuban family claim to be noveleros, and are addicted to the current Mujeres Apasionadas telenovela of glamorous women, beaches and men with checkerboard stomachs at the volleyball net.
This particular series portrays serious themes like violence against women or alcoholism, and Cuban academics have praised it for providing a forum for social issues but criticized it for being superficial.
When the novela ended my family was reunited and managed to sit through the feature film Ripley Underground, a murder and art forgery thriller directed by Canadian-born Roger Spottiswoode, which was not very popular with us.
Spottiswoode was quoted on the Internet Movie Data Base website as saying that "The movies I want to make are not people's priority. Nobody would touch them. They cost a lot of money, and studios no longer finance development, so if I didn't pay for them myself they wouldn't happen."
His distancing from the profit motive may have had to do with the film's prime time slot designation from a culture industry whose Minister Abel Prieto has pronounced against "canned TV programs fromthe United States."
In the last few weeks Cuba has aired cinema dealing with European hatred of those who cross its borders and anxiety in the United States inspired by its deteriorating relationship with the Islamic world.
Revolution, frivolity and oblique drama from abroad were broadcast last weekend during peak viewing hours, in a sometimes overlapping display of mixed origin media.
Hybrid programming is not uncommon in postcolonial nations but it is often commercially oriented, and can include overt copying, morphing or plagiarism of international material into the local context formarket success, as Divya McMillin says in International Media Studies (2007).
Cuban mediators in this genre seem to respect original content and formats, and even subtitle films instead of dubbing, as if arranging the representations on a platter for interpretation.
It is the prerogative of any nation to regulate the flows of global media that enter it, but it seems like the Saturday evening splash here is relatively balanced and like all other time slots is absolutely free of commercial advertising.
Better scheduling, more professionalism, interaction and relevance were addressed in recent self-critiques of the industry, but one who has tasted market-based entertainment media may appreciate this flavor of Cuban television.