I watch more Cuban television in Miami than I did when I lived in Havana. This sounds odd until you think about the mechanics of how Cuban television actually reaches the diaspora audience in the streaming era, at which point the pattern makes sense and turns out to be a reasonably common one among the Cuban-Americans of my generation.
I want to write about what watching Cuban television from the diaspora is actually like, what the streaming infrastructure has done for and to the relationship between island television and diaspora audiences, and what the current state of the medium looks like from where I sit. The political dimensions of Cuban television are real but are not my principal interest here. My interest is in what people are actually watching, how the watching is happening, and what the watching is producing.
How I came to watch more from Miami
When I lived in Havana, I watched Cuban television occasionally and unsystematically. The television was on in households I visited. I caught the major series and the news broadcasts in the way that someone living in the country catches them, by absorption rather than by deliberate selection. I did not, during those years, sit down and watch a specific Cuban show with the intention of following it.
The pattern reversed after 2018. I moved back to Miami. The Cuban television I had absorbed by living on the island stopped being part of my daily background. The diaspora has its own televisual environment in Miami — Spanish-language network television, the Cuban-American specific programming on local stations, the various streaming services — and the island's national television was not part of it.
What changed, sometime in 2020, was that my cousin in Havana started sending me hard drives. He would visit a friend who pirated and curated television from across Cuban national output. The friend would copy the curated material onto a hard drive. The hard drive would travel, via various routes, to Miami, and would land in my mailbox three or four times a year with a few hundred gigabytes of Cuban programming on it.
I started watching what was on the drives. I watched a telenovela that ran for fourteen episodes in 2021. I watched a documentary series on the history of Cuban radio. I watched the comedy program that has been running for years and that my mother had stopped watching when she left in 1980 and that turned out, four decades later, to still be approximately the same show with most of the same writers. I watched things I would not have watched if I had lived in Havana, because in Havana the television had been ambient and now it required deliberate attention.
What the diaspora actually watches
The pattern I have observed in my Miami circle is that the diaspora consumption of Cuban television falls into several categories. There is the news consumption, which is mostly opportunistic — the diaspora watches Cuban news when something specific has happened that the diaspora wants to know the island coverage of. There is the cultural consumption, which is where the dramas and the documentaries fall, and which is more deliberate. There is the nostalgic consumption — the older programs that the diaspora watches because the programs remind them of the years they lived on the island.
The cultural consumption is the category I find most interesting. The Cuban telenovela, as a form, has continued to produce work over the past decade that is, in my view, of higher quality than the international perception would suggest. The production values are constrained. The writing is, in many cases, very good. The themes are often more grounded than the international Latin American telenovela formula. The dramas address the actual texture of Cuban daily life in ways that the international form does not.
The documentary work has been particularly good in recent years. There have been documentary series on Cuban music, on Cuban architecture, on the history of various provinces, on specific historical periods, that the diaspora has been seeking out and watching with sustained attention. The documentaries are doing the work of cultural transmission that the diaspora cannot do for itself. The diaspora is consuming them, in part, as a way of maintaining cultural literacy across the geographic distance.
How the material actually moves
The infrastructure of how Cuban television reaches the diaspora is worth understanding because it tells you something about how cultural circulation actually works at the edge of the digital era. The official streaming services have very limited Cuban content. The Cuban national broadcaster has its own streaming platform that the diaspora can access in principle but that has, in practice, limited functionality from outside the country.
The actual circulation is informal. The hard drives I mentioned are one mechanism. The peer-to-peer file sharing that has developed within the diaspora is another. The semi-formal aggregator websites that some of my friends use are a third. The relationship between the island's television and the diaspora's consumption of it is mediated by an infrastructure that is largely informal, partly extralegal in the various jurisdictions involved, and effectively invisible to the institutional broadcasters on both sides.
The informality has produced some interesting effects. The diaspora consumes Cuban television in a curated rather than ambient way, because the access is selective rather than total. The shows that travel through the informal infrastructure are the shows that someone in the network has decided are worth distributing. The curation introduces a filter that the island audience does not face. The diaspora is watching, in effect, a version of Cuban television that has been pre-selected by other diaspora members.
What the curation reveals
What gets curated is, I think, revealing of what the diaspora actually wants from the island's television. The political programming travels less than the cultural programming. The news programming travels selectively. The documentary work travels widely. The dramatic series that engage substantively with Cuban daily life travel widely. The dramatic series that are heavily ideological in their framing travel less.
The pattern is not, I think, principally political. The pattern reflects what the diaspora is hungry for, which is the cultural substance of the island's experience that the diaspora's distance has separated it from. The diaspora has its own political content available to it through many channels. The diaspora has limited access to the cultural texture of contemporary Cuban life. The curation prioritizes what the diaspora cannot get elsewhere.
What the island producers know
I have, over the years, had conversations with several people who work in Cuban television production. They are, generally, aware of the diaspora audience. They do not, in most cases, make programming specifically for that audience, because the formal economic structure of Cuban television does not provide direct income from the diaspora audience and the production budget is determined by the island infrastructure. But they are aware that some of their work is being watched outside the country, and they think about this, and the awareness affects, in small ways, what they make.
The producers I have spoken to have said that the diaspora audience is, in some respects, a more attentive audience than the island audience. The diaspora viewers are watching deliberately. They have selected the program specifically. They are paying attention in ways that the ambient island audience often is not. The feedback that the producers receive from diaspora viewers — through whatever informal channels reach them — tends to be substantive and engaged.
This produces an interesting dynamic. The island producers are making work for an island audience that watches the work in an ambient mode, but the work is also being received by a diaspora audience that watches it more deliberately. The two reception contexts are different enough that the work has, in effect, two audiences with different relationships to it. The producers I have spoken to think about this and find it both flattering and slightly disconcerting.
What the streaming era has not done
The streaming era has not, despite its promises, produced a unified international platform for Cuban television in the way that the streaming era has produced unified platforms for the television of other countries. Cuban television is not on Netflix in any meaningful way. It is not on the major international streaming services in any meaningful way. The infrastructural barriers — the institutional, legal, and economic complications of getting Cuban television onto international platforms — have not been overcome.
The diaspora consumption I have described is happening despite this rather than because of it. The informal infrastructure is filling the gap that the formal infrastructure has not filled. The work that is reaching the diaspora is reaching it through channels that are, in their own way, sophisticated and effective, but that are not the channels that the broader streaming era has produced for other national televisions.
I do not know whether the formal infrastructure will catch up. There have been moves in the direction of formal international availability for some Cuban content. The trajectory has been uneven. The diaspora consumption pattern I have described will probably continue regardless of what the formal infrastructure does, because the informal infrastructure has become established enough that it would continue even if formal availability improved.
What I plan to watch this year
My cousin sent me a hard drive in February. It has approximately three hundred and fifty gigabytes of programming on it. I have watched maybe a third of what is on it. The rest is queued up for the next several months. There is a documentary series on Cuban son that I am about a third of the way through. There is a drama from late last year that I have started and that I expect to finish in the next two weeks. There is a multi-part documentary on the history of Havana neighborhoods that I am saving for the summer.
I will watch what is on the drive. My cousin will send another drive in the autumn. The cycle will continue, in the form it has taken, for as long as the cousin keeps sending and I keep watching. The relationship between me and Cuban television, mediated by the cousin and by the friend who curates for the cousin and by the drives that travel through whatever routes the drives travel through, is the form that my consumption of the medium has settled into. It is not the form anyone designed. It is the form that the circumstances have produced. I find it, in its way, satisfying, and I think the work the diaspora is doing through this kind of consumption is one of the under-recognized cultural practices of the contemporary diaspora.
