The Cuban Press and the Crisis of 1990

With the fall of the socialist bloc, a deep economic crisis arose in Cuba, in response to which the Cuban media assumed a specific position. This article uses discursive analysis of nine socially-oriented opinion pieces published in the newspapers Granma (national circulation), September 5 (Cienfuegos province) and Sierra Maestra (Santiago de Cuba province) in order to shed light on the ways in which the press of those years interpreted the situation. It argues that the papers took up a partial perspective and emphasized only a few out of the wide range of difficulties that the Cuban people experienced in 1993, widely considered to be the most difficult year of the so-called Special Period. This article compares the values defended by the three newspapers, one of them a national forum and the others from their respective territories, yet all three official organs of the Communist Party of Cuba.