ABSTRACT
Cuba's informative and vindictive uses of the Internet have led to the erosion of the state monopoly in the public sphere. Political power—concentrated under the State-Cuban Communist Party fusion—has developed new strategies to maintain its hegemony in the construction and dissemination of disinformation narratives. After the July 11, 2021, protests in Cuba, the state not only used repression, imprisonment, and legal measures to quell the social outbreak. This event also marked a shift in the official media's strategy to address oppositional issues. Shortly after, the Cuban Television Information System began broadcasting the programme Con Filo [With Edge/Sharp] as a counter-offensive strategy against the critical information that circulated on social networks. The objectives of this chapter are, first, to characterise the discursive strategies present at Con Filo when dealing with contentious action. Secondly, it analyses how these strategies reconfigure communicative processes within an increasingly heterogeneous informational environment that shakes the Soviet-inspired media model that prevailed in Cuba for decades. Based on a content analysis of 48 episodes of Con Filo, this work suggests that this programme adopts strategies of planned dissemination of disinformation in order to minimise and discredit the contentious actions of political activists in Cuba. We also conclude that this television programme changes the ways in which the political regime responds to contentious action, while the regime adds new and updated mechanisms to its arsenal of disinformation tools.
