Broadcasting modernity: Cuban television, 1950-1953

Cinema Journal

Volumn 46, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 3-25

  Rivero, Yeidy M ^a  

^a INDIANA UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949751452     PISSN: 00097101     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/cj.2007.0028     Document Type: Review

References (66)

1. See Oscar Luis López, La radio en Cuba, 2nd ed. (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas, 1998)
2. Yeidy M. Rivero, Tuning Out Blackness: Race and Nation in the History of Puerto Rican Television (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)
3. Clemencia Rodríguez and Patricia Tellez, La telenovela en Colombia: mucho más que amor y lágrimas (Bogotá, Colombia: CINEP, 1989)
4. and Mirta Varela, La televisión criolla: Desde sus inicios hasta la llegada del hombre a la Luna, 1951-1969 (Buenos Aires, Argentina: Edhasa, 2005)
5. For an extensive historical analysis of U.S.-Cuba relations before 1959, see Louis A. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban: Identity, Nationality, and Culture, (New York: The Ecco Press, 1999)
6. By December 1950, approximately six thousand television sets had entered the Havana port. In May 1953 U.S. television manufacturers' numbers indicated that there were "just over one-hundred thousand television sets" in Cuba. Unofficially there were apparently many more thanks to smugglers. H. Espinet Borges, "Pantalla Televisora," Carteles, December 24, 1950
7. and Alfred R. Zipser, Jr., "TV-Set Smuggling Outlawed in Cuba," New York Times, May 29, 1953
8. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, "On Alternative Modernities," in Alter/Native Modernities, ed. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), 16
9. Charles Taylor, "Two Theories of Modernity," in Alter/Native Modernities, 153-74
10. Pérez, On Becoming Cuban, 348
11. Ana López, "'A Train of Shadows': Early Cinema and Modernity in Latin America," in Through the Kaleidoscope: The Experience of Modernity in Latin America, ed. Vivian Schelling (London: Verso, 2000), 149
12. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinctions: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984)
13. Alberto Giró, "Toscanini inicia una nueva era en la televisión," Diario de la Marina, November 13, 1949
14. Alberto Giró, "La televisión y los niños," Diario de la Marina, January 15, 1950
15. H. Espinet Borges, "Pantalla televisora de aquí y de allá," Carteles, November 5, 1950
16. and "La NBC ofrecerá la primera ópera por televisión el domingo día 17," Diario de la Marina, December 12, 1950
17. Giró, "Educación audiovisual"; and Borges, "Pantalla televisora de aquí y de allá."
18. Alberto Giró, "'Test Pattern' en el aire," Diaro de la Marina, September 13, 1950
19. and Alberto Giró, "Estudio 15," Diario de la Marina, September 7, 1951
20. "La tensión estaba en el canal," Bohemia, February 4, 1951
21. H. Espinet Borges, "¿Con artistas cubanos, por qué no?" Carteles, April 29, 1951
22. See Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: The History of Sexuality, Vol. Two, trans. Bobert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1986)
23. and Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaires (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004)
24. In the 1940s the rumba performed in the upper-class casino-cabaret shows went through various transformations to restructure the traditional noncommercial rumba's sexual musical and dance expressions. Robin D. Moore, Nationalizing Blackness: Afrocubanismo and Artistic Revolution in Havana, 1920-1940 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), 169, 185, 187
25. Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault's History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 97. While Ann Laura Stoler's reinterpretation of Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality centers on Europe and its colonies, her analysis of bourgeois sexuality and racialized sexuality pertains to Cuban modernity
26. Michael Hanchard, "Black Cinderella? Race and the Public Sphere in Brazil," Public Culture 7 (1994): 172
27. Vera M. Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets: Race and the Erotics of Cuban Nationalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993)
28. For an analysis of race and the incorporation of black cultural elements as part of the Cuban nation, see Alejandro De la Fuente, A Nation For All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)
29. De la Fuente, A Nation for All, 12
30. Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets, 7; Jossianna Arroyo, Travestismos culturales: literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brazil (Pittsburgh, PA: Nuevo Srglo, 2003)
31. Arroyo, Tranestismos culturales, 7
32. Hanchard, "Black Cinderella." Also see Peter Wade, Music, Race, and Nation: Música Tropical in Colombia (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2000), 3-7
33. Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire
34. As several scholars and music critics note, variety shows became important venues for Afro Cuban musicians and musical styles. See Moore, Nationalizing Blackness; and Ned Sublette, Cuba and Its Music: From the First Drums to the Mambo (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2004)
35. "Revelaciones de un 'survey,'" Bohemia, April 6, 1952; and "Los mejores programas de TV," Carteles, August 9, 1953
36. For information on carnival's eroticism, see Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets; and Arroyo, Travestismos culturales
37. My interpretation of variety shows and audiences has been highly influenced by Peter Wade's theorization of race, sexuality, gender, and music in Colombia. See Wade, Music, Race, and Nation
38. During Cuban television's early years, some stations had multiple owners. For instance, Gaspar Pumarejo sold Unión Radio-TV to movie producer Manuel Alonso in August 1951. One year later, Alonso sold the company to Angel Cambo, president of Radiotelevisión El Mundo, which, in 1953, also established CMBA-TV, channel 2. The two other stations that began operation in Havana in 1953 were CMBF-TV, channel 7, and TV Caribe S.A., channel 11
39. "Big TV Strides Seen in Latin America," New York Times, October 6, 1951
40. Jesús Martín Barbero, Communication, Culture and Hegemony: From the Media to Mediations, trans. Elizabeth Fox and Robert A. White (London: Sage, 1993), 150-51
41. Michael B. Salwen, Radio and Television in Cuba: The Pre-Castro Years (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1994), 37
42. Manuel Fernández Paradela, "La Comisión De Etica Radial," Carteles, April 8, 1947
43. "Actuación y nuevos objetivos de la 'Comisión de Etica Radial' y el comisionado Dr. Tarajano," Diario de la Marina, January 7, 1951
44. "Momentos terribles en la vida de un productor," Bohemia, June 22, 1952. Also see "Un propósito y dos noticias, Bohemia," June 26, 1952
45. and "Planes en cartelera," Bohemia, July 6, 1952
46. Salwen, Radio and Television in Cuba, 93-107
47. Rodolfo Rodríguez Zaldivar, "La censura previa: prensa, cine, radio y televisión unidos contra la impopular medida," Bohemia, May 17, 1953
48. "La TV sobre el tapete," Bohemia, May 3, 1953
49. While the CRE had suspended male performers because of their use of "inappropriate language and gestures," none of the regulations and suspensions were related to men being presented as sensual/sexual objects. See "Dos suspensions."
50. Kutzinski, Sugar's Secrets, 11
51. Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991). As Alejandro De la Fuente writes, Fulgencio Batista's non-whiteness was a contested issue for the U.S. government and the Cuban elite. See De la Fuente, A Nation For All, 208, 253
52. Laura Podalsky, "Guajiras, mulatas y puros cubanos: identidades nacionales en el cine pre-revolucionario," Archivos de la filmoteca 31 (1999): 156-71
53. Kinescope is "a film made of a live television broadcast." Cary O'Dell, "Kinescope," in Encyclopedia of Television, ed. Horace Newcomb (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 2004), 1263-64
54. "La TV sobre el tapete."
55. Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (Caracas, Venezuela: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1978). As Jossianna Arroyo notes, Ortiz's theory of transculturation contains the contradictions of the mestizaje racial-cultural ideology. However, this theoretical understanding of Cubanness represented an attempt to break with Western ideals of modernity. Arroyo, Travestismos culturales, 254
56. "La carta de la semana," Bohemia, December 2, 1952
57. Here I am making a direct reference to Fernando Ortiz's Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y la azúcar in which the author establishes a distinction between the non-Western and communal elements of the tobacco production and the Western, capitalist, and imperialistic processes that defined the sugar economy. Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano. For an analysis of Contrapunteo, see Arroyo, Travestismos culturales
58. A special thanks to Lillian Guerra and Vivian Martínez Tabares for their insightful comments about Pinar del Río
59. For an analysis of the population distribution throughout Cuban rural and urban areas, see Dominga González Suárez, "La discriminación racial en el canrpo cubano," AfroCuban Anthology Journal (Fall 2004): 1-12
60. and "Análisis desde la lejanía," Bohemia, December 7, 1952
61. Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (London: Wesleyan University Press, 1992), 128
62. "Memoria para refrescar la memoria," Bohemia, April 17, 1955
63. Robin D. Moore, Music and Revolution: Cultural Change in Socialist Cuba (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 198-201
64. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 44
65. Because of the limited issues of Gente available, I could not incorporate Emma Pérez's reviews during 1952-1953
66. See Mayra Cue Sierra, "1960: El sabotaje a CMQ y la respuesta colectiva," Cubarte, December 1, 2005