Cuba slightly loosens controls on state media
HAVANA — Minutes after a plane carrying 113 people crashed on takeoff from Havana airport, Cuban state media filled with minute-by-minute updates, cellphone video from the accident and an interview from the scene with newly named President Miguel Diaz-Canel.
When Tropical Storm Alberto struck the island later in May, causing nearly a dozen deaths, state television broadcast unusually lengthy footage of meetings among ministers co-ordinating the response.
Cuba forbids independent print or broadcast media, and reports in the state-run press have long consisted mostly of transcriptions of official Communist Party declarations — triumphal reports on industrial production or lavish praise of the country’s leaders. That turgid style appears to be incrementally changing in the wake of Diaz-Canel becoming president in April.
Cuban journalists tell The Associated Press that the Political Bureau of the Communist Party, one of the country’s most powerful bodies, recently approved a document known as the “New Communication Policy” that is aimed at giving state media more ability to report news like their colleagues do in other countries.