Cuban radio and television before Fidel Castro's revolution were rich with domestically produced soap operas, live sporting events, lavish song-and-dance programs, and raucous political commentators. Cuba's 156 radio stations and 27 television stations sought the best talent from around the world. They paid large sums for exclusive rights to broadcast baseball games and boxing matches. All of these endeavors were overshadowed by Castro's revolution.

Since 1985, Radio Marti, a Radio Free Europe-type station, has broadcast American news and propaganda in Cuba. Its sister station, TV Marti, debuted in 1990. Respected operations at the start, Radio and TV Marti fell under the influence of the Cuban American National Foundation--a group of hard-line Cuban exiles--who intensified the anti-Castro rhetoric the stations sent to the island and promoted its leaders as the heirs to a post-Castro Cuba. Though the initial goal of the two stations was to increase pro-American sentiment among the island nation's citizens, the stations have succeeded only in driving the two nations further apart. This history of American propaganda broadcasting in Cuba describes how Castro used radio to obtain power; explores the impact of Radio and TV Marti on U.S.-Cuba relations, including the phenomenon of Cuban rafters; and chronicles the domestic political struggles to keep the stations on the air.

This ever more accessible island will soon be the hottest Caribbean destination for North American travelers, according to the authors, who cover all sites and events to suit all budgets. of color photos. 43 maps.

The birth and development of commercial television in Cuba in the 1950s occurred alongside political and social turmoil. In this period of dramatic swings encompassing democracy, a coup, a dictatorship, and a revolution, television functioned as a beacon and promoter of Cuba’s identity as a modern nation. In Broadcasting Modernity, television historian Yeidy M. Rivero shows how television owners, regulatory entities, critics, and the state produced Cuban modernity for television. The Cuban television industry enabled different institutions to convey the nation's progress, democracy, economic abundance, high culture, education, morality, and decency. After nationalizing Cuban television, the state used it to advance Fidel Castro's project of creating a modern socialist country. As Cuba changed, television changed with it. Rivero not only demonstrates television's importance to Cuban cultural identity formation, she explains how the medium functions in society during times of radical political and social transformation.

The Republic of Cuba consists of the island of Cuba (the largest and second-most populous island of the Greater Antilles), Isla de la Juventud and several adjacent small islands. Cuba is located in the northern Caribbean at the confluence of the Caribbean Sea, the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean. Cuba is south of the eastern United States and The Bahamas, west of the Turks and Caicos Islands and Haiti and east of Mexico. The Cayman Islands and Jamaica are to the south. The national flower is Hedychium Coronarium Koenig, most known as "mariposa" (butterfly) and the national bird is "Tocororo" or "Cuban Trogon" from the family of Trogonidae. Cuba is the most populous nation in the Caribbean. Its people, culture and customs draw from several sources including the aboriginal Taíno and Ciboney peoples, the period of Spanish colonialism, the introduction of African slaves, and its proximity to the United States. Cuba's once-ambitious foreign policy has been scaled back and redirected as a result of economic hardship and the end of the Cold War. Cuba aims to find new sources of trade, aid, and foreign investment and to promote opposition to U.S. policy, especially the trade embargo and the 1996 Libertad Act. Cuba has relations with over 160 countries and has civilian assistance workers -- principally physicians and nurses -- in over 20 nations. Since the end of Soviet backing, Cuba appears to have largely abandoned monetary support for guerrilla movements that typified its involvement in regional politics in Latin America and Africa, though it maintains relations with several guerrilla and terrorist groups and provides refuge for some of their members in Cuba. Cuba's support for Latin guerrilla movements, its Marxist-Leninist government, and its alignment with the USSR led to its isolation in the hemisphere. Cuba is a member of the Organisation of American States (OAS), although its present government has been excluded from participation since 1962 for incompatibility with the principles of the inter-American system. Cuba hosted the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) summit in September 2006 and will hold the NAM presidency until 2009. In the context of the NAM and its ordinary diplomacy, Cuba has developed friendly relations with Iran, North Korea and other rogue states.

Change looms in Havana, Cuba's capital, a city electric with uncertainty yet cloaked in cliché, 90 miles from U.S. shores and off-limits to most Americans. Journalist Julia Cooke, who lived there at intervals over a period of five years, discovered a dynamic scene: baby-faced anarchists with Mohawks gelled with laundry soap, whiskey-drinking children of the elite, Santería trainees, pregnant prostitutes, university graduates planning to leave for the first country that will give them a visa. This last generation of Cubans raised under Fidel Castro animate life in a waning era of political stagnation as the rest of the world beckons: waiting out storms at rummy hurricane parties and attending raucous drag cabarets, planning ascendant music careers and black-market business ventures, trying to reconcile the undefined future with the urgent today. Eye-opening and politically prescient, The Other Side of Paradise offers a deep new understanding of a place that has so confounded and intrigued us.