Confronting Authoritarianism: Cuban Print Media and the Politics of the Press under the Batista Dictatorship, 1952–58

Fulgencio Batista’s coup in 1952 ushered in a new era in the relationship between journalists and the state. This work unpacks the complex web of relationships between journalists, their institutions, and the state, highlighting the different methods Batista employed to control the printed press, including preemptive measures such as sinecures (botellas) and bribes, government propaganda, censorship, intimidation, and repressive
methods such as newspaper closings, detentions, kidnappings, torture, and the use of social networks to ensure compliance and silence critical journalists. I argue that journalists and their institutions also navigated these methods in different ways, sometimes by employing creative methods of skirting censorship, such as using subversive messages or codes in their publications, protesting and appealing to transnational solidarity networks to bring international attention to the Cuban situation
through organizations such as the Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa (SIP) and using the publications of other countries to highlight Batista’s repression and transmit important news of strikes and other revolutionary tactics by using the publications of other countries that were then smuggled into Cuba.