Yesterday we did the interview.
Max kindly transcribed it and shared it with me so I could share it with you here!
Interview of Ted A. Henken
Conducted by Max Rhoads
April 22, 2025
Max Rhoads: Before we start, would you mind introducing yourself?
Ted Henken: My name is Ted Henken. I’m a professor of Sociology and Latin American Studies at
Baruch College here in New York City, part of CUNY, and my specialty is Cuba. I’ve written a number of books about Cuba and done a lot of research about and in Cuba.
MR: Thank you. My first question is can you briefly describe the state of journalism in Cuba, giving a rough overview.
TH: The easiest way to think about journalism in Cuba is that it is basically divided into two parts.
There is what you might call “official journalism,” that is controlled by the Cuban Communist Party, and essentially, that is propaganda that makes the party look good and tends to celebrate the system and the Revolution, and attack or show bad news about the rest of the world, especially the United States.
Then there is a form of journalism that is the other half of the coin, which has different names. You could call it “alternative,” you could call it “non-state” or “non-official,” or you could call it “independent” because it’s independent of the government and the party. I call it independent journalism, although people have different names for it.
And that journalism has existed for about 35-40 years, since the late 1980s or early 1990s, and today, it is maybe especially relevant, powerful, and important because of the access to the Internet that the world and Cuba has.
MR: How much influence would you say the Cuban government has on its country’s journalism?
TH: Well, you can extrapolate from the first answer I gave that the government tries to control the state sector, or the official journalism sector. First, because it has lots of influence and control over education. And then, almost all the media outlets, whether they’re newspapers or television stations or radio stations or magazines, are published and funded - and the people who work on them are paid - by the government. So, the government has a huge amount of control. That’s why I call it the “official media.”
Of course, because any system that tries to absolutely control something will inevitably fail, and in the act of trying to control it, will alienate and push people to rebel, or to leave, or to quit, or to try to do something renegade. And so, it has very little control over independent journalism, that’s why we call it “independent journalism.”
But there’s kind of a battle going on because independent journalism exists, but for a long time, it was hard for Cubans to read, or hear, or get access to what they produced. But that has changed. Every year, more people have access because there’s more general access via the Internet. But the Cuban government also tries to control that by harassing, repressing, jailing, and exiling independent journalists. So, it doesn’t control that, but it certainly tries to repress it.
MR: In the paper you recently co-published with Sara García Santamaría, “Diasporic Epistemologies in Cuban Independent Journalism” (Digital Journalism, February 15, 2024), you wrote that most of the independent journalists weren’t completely against the Cuban Communist Party, but simply wished to express themselves freely. Could you say more about that, and do you have examples of the criticisms some of these journalists had?
TH: The first thing I would say is that for various reasons that are quite complex, Cuban journalists try not to run afoul of the government. Partly because they don’t want to end up in jail or in exile. But also, in part, because, to a certain degree, they want to be neutral, or objective. That’s kind of an ideal in journalism.
But also, they were raised, socialized, or even "brainwashed" to believe in the system, and in the Revolution. And so, it’s a complex mixture of self-preservation, opportunism, and belief.
But in my experience, what happens then is that, once a journalist tries to establish some form of independence, even if the journalist avoids becoming anti-regime or a political dissident, the government sees almost any expression of independence as itself dissidence.
And therefore, what happens is, when these journalists take a little step into the independent world, the government punishes them, threatens them, and they become more alienated, and they become less inclined to want to work with the government at all.
And so, some of them just shut up and stop being journalists, but others become radicalized, and maybe more against the government. They may believe in some, or a lot of the ideals of socialism, but they also believe in journalistic independence, and in the truth, or in the facts, and the professional journalistic mission and ethos.
But they realize - usually very gradually and through trial and error - that there is no coexistence. If they are committed professionals, then they’re going to sin against the Revolution, and if they are committed revolutionaries, they’re going to sin against journalism, so it’s really hard for them to be both.
If they do real journalism, it will be interpreted as anti-government, because it won’t be controlled by the government. And so, it becomes almost like a snowball effect, where they become more and more alienated from the system, even if they started out from the idea that they were just going to do straight journalism or “
periodismo y punto,” as the leading young independent journalist Carlos Manuel Álvarez told me was his original intention when he and some friends co-founded the digital magazine
El Estornudo almost a decade ago, and not anti-regime, or political or dissident journalism.
But one of the things that happens, especially to journalists is that - when we talk about classic liberal freedoms, one of those things is freedom of expression or freedom of speech… and when journalists try to practice those freedoms and are repressed, then by the very fact of them being journalists, they become activists for freedom of expression. Even if they don’t want to become activists per se. In the very fact of being journalists, they become activists, if only in the narrow sense of advocating for, and defending, and practicing independence and free thought and free expression (in the context of a dictatorship).
MR: I’m aware there’s been a lot of laws that have been passed in the last few years limiting not only what journalists can say on the Internet, but also what Cubans as a whole have access to. So, have there been any new developments since you published that article last year, and if you published another paper on this topic, what would you want to include?
TH: That paper is a snapshot from around the 2021-2023 period, but it does capture a kind of arc, and that arc is the development of independent digital journalism, and at the same time, the tragic exile of most independent journalists, and that’s why the paper focuses on the “digital diaspora.”
As we say in the paper, many of the people who we focus on lived in Cuba when we started writing the paper, but by the time the paper came out, they were
almost all gone. So that tells you
what’s happening.
There are two things I would say that are new, or interesting, or different, that aren’t in that paper, maybe, or aren’t emphasized in that paper.
(1) One is that this is a song that has been on repeat for 60 years. Meaning that, because the Cuban government controls history, and disposes of history it doesn’t want people to know about, every generation has to relearn the lessons that were learned by the previous generation.
Because the people who went through that - the last generation - they’re in jail, they’re dead, or they’re in exile, and you don’t have access to their stories. So, you have to learn the hard way what they learned 10, 20, or 30 years before. And that is that, in trying to create a “revolutionary journalism,” the Cuban government created a propaganda arm of the Party that just told it what it wanted to hear, and didn’t do journalism.
And then people who tried to do actual journalism “within the revolution” were often thrown under the bus, into prison, and/or driven into exile, and then that would happen again and again and again.
So, the things that have happened to this new generation of digital journalists, even though the context is new because it’s the digital world where you can do this kind of stuff because of the Cloud and because of access to the Internet, and things aren’t just published in paper anymore, they’re digital, online… But you still have the same series of steps that the government will take against people in progression:
First, they try to socialize them and control them through their mind and through their job.
Then, if they step out of line, warn them.
Then, if they keep stepping out of line, raid their house, threaten them with jail, threaten their family, claim that they are paid by the CIA or they are working for other anti-Cuban interests.
And then put them in jail and send them into exile or both. And this cycle repeats itself.
It’s kind of like The Book of Ecclesiastes from the Bible: “There’s nothing new under the sun.”
(2) The other thing that I would say is that, yes, in the past five years, the government has kind of woken up and tried to arm itself legally to have the laws in the books to punish speech it doesn’t like that is on the Internet. And so, there are five or six recent laws, or policies, or things that have been passed that simply give it more legal cover to do what it has always done, but now on the Internet.
So, we could highlight some of those… and there are a number of them. But maybe it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to get into the details, because they’re all basically the same thing, which is:
Be careful of what you write on the Internet because there’s a sword of Damocles over your head, and at any moment, you could be harassed or formally charged and sent to prison, so stop doing it or leave the country.
MR: I know you said this has been an ongoing battle for the last 60 years, however, would you say this repressive climate started with Castro, or were there stepping stones to it? Was there a set path to it?
TH: Well, Cuba has never been totally free, open, and democratic either in government or journalism. What I mean is that there have always been problems or obstacles or censorship or control of the media.
It was basically a corrupt system, but at the same time, it was a system that was extremely rich in the number of newspapers and magazines, and the rich diversity of ferment and thought and debate within the various newspapers. There was a Communist newspaper, there was a right-wing newspaper, there were all these different things.
Now of course, at different times, depending on what was happening politically or militarily, they might be shut down, or clandestine, or other things… I’m writing a book about all of this. I have
a whole chapter that tells the story of what the media was like under the previous dictator, Fulgencio Batista. But I would say that generally, there was censorship that was mainly through the carrot, but sometimes through the stick.
Whereas under Castro, it’s really an environment of a different kind, because it is an attempt to monopolize totally the official story and demonize anything that’s outside of that through the closing down or the taking over of all media, so that there is no private media or independent media, there’s just a government truth and a “revolutionary” media.
So, it’s a radical shift because it goes from a free system that is corrupt and has lots of censorship to a system of state propaganda. That’s what I would say is the main difference.
There are stories that you could tell, and that are told, about various currents within the Revolution that tried to have a modicum of independence, a modicum of criticism, that are noteworthy and important. But they’re all existing within a media landscape where there’s a will to almost absolutely control communication and information and it was achieved for almost 40 years (1959-1995) but has broken down significantly over the past 30 (1995-2025).
MR: And that brings me to my last question: where do you see Cuban journalism in five years? Do you think it’s going to get any better, or do you think the government is going to respond with increasing repression?
TH: Well, I don’t think that we can expect anything on the part of the government that would make things better. There’s no chance of that, or almost no chance of that.
In it, I discuss how there has been a true BOOM in the number, diversity, and professionalism of all these independent digital media outlets that are Cuban, that are now mostly run from outside of Cuba, but most of which were founded within Cuba. Now, given that their founders have been living in exile, many of the newsrooms are multi-located, meaning that there are people who live in Miami, Madrid, and Mexico City, and wherever else, and they all work together, in the same virtual newsroom.
The other thing that’s really important about all of these organizations is that they have an increasing and now majority readership in Cuba. Before, when they started out, most of the people who read them were outside of Cuba. Now, between 60% and 80%, maybe even 90% of their viewers or readers are in Cuba.
Turing to “the worst of times,” there are two or three things that I would say about that:
One is, of course, that repression and exile have continued. The government has continued to repress, so almost none of these outlets - although most of them were founded in Cuba - still have the main people who run them in Cuba anymore. So that’s the first thing: repression and exile are now the rule and not the exception.
And then there are two other things that are interesting and fascinating, and maybe very sad, but important.
(1) One is that we live in the “post-truth Trump era.” Of course, it’s not all Trump’s fault, but I’ll label it with his name. What I mean is that one of the great and terrible things about the Internet is that anybody can say whatever they want. But journalism isn’t about anybody saying what they want. Journalism is about somebody who is a trained professional with a set of ethics and a systematized way of working that tries to get to the truth in a responsible way, not to get clicks and likes and followers.
The democratization of the media because of the ubiquity of the Internet and the potential of turning everybody not just into a consumer but also a producer, is on the one hand great, but on the other hand terrible.
There was a book that came out almost 20 years ago in 2007 that warned about this problem. It was called “
The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet Is Killing Our Culture” by Andrew Keen. The idea of the book is that the democratization or “amateurization” of the media is - which was thought to be a benefit for journalism – has turned out to be a major even mortal threat to it.
Yes, in places like Cuba, people who aren’t part of the system can tell the truth when the system is lying. But in places like the United States, or anywhere else in the world, anybody with whatever agenda, with some or even almost no knowledge of the Internet and some money, can spread lies, disinformation, misinformation, innuendo, and you’ll have an audience, and maybe that will be a significant audience where you sow doubt and confusion.
That’s a big problem. And it’ll just continue to be a problem for Cuba, because it’s a problem for everybody.
And some of these very heroic independent Cuban journalists, they’re part of an ecosystem that has YouTubers, and influencers and those YouTubers and those influencers, and that ecosystem has that whole irresponsible celebrity tendency that the whole world has that pays more attention to flash than fact. And so that’s problematic.
(2) The other problem that’s also ironic in this case that Cuban journalism is facing is based on the fact that a good part of independent Cuban journalism has always found support abroad. Meaning that either the United States government, or some entity that’s funded by the United States government, or some entity in a third country, whether that’s Holland or the Czech Republic or Norway, would be interested in supporting independent voices around the world, including in Cuba, and would help either train, or fund, or finance, or support in a lot of different ways independent journalists.
Now this was necessary, and is necessary for a lot of reasons, but it has two big problems.
(a) One is that the government of Cuba can then argue that these people aren’t independent, they’re working for someone else abroad. They’re mercenaries, essentially, is what the government says. They’re working for the money, “the Yankee dollar” or whatever. While that’s generally just manipulation and propaganda, that is an argument that sometimes convinces people.
(b) The other problem is that, if any of these independent, or non-state media platforms becomes too dependent on foreign support in their business model, if that foreign support disappears, they have to close down. So, because of Trump’s policy, that is being implemented through DOGE and Musk, to radically cut government spending and especially support for any kind of international aid, there’s been a tremendous hit to independent or non-state Cuban journalism.
I have a friend, the editor-in-chief of a leading independent news outlet - who describes it as a “mass extinction event,” like a meteor hitting independent Cuban journalism, because so many of the independent media outlets were partly dependent on support from the US government in one way or another, and have had to either close down or radically cut back on their work.
And so, I would say that, the amateurization of journalism because of the digital media world we live in on the one hand, and this issue of over-reliance on foreign support, are two things that will be issues going forward.
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