Cuba was the first Latin American country to begin television testing in December 1946 when station CM-21P conducted an experimental multi-point live broadcast.
[8] In the 1940s, Cuba's two largest radio stations, CMQ (which had begun testing in 1946) and RHC-Cadena Azul, announced they would soon start broadcasting television.
Since building TV stations and broadcast networks from scratch was extremely expensive and complex, it took longer than expected.
Gaspar Pumarejo, owner of Union Radio, built the new station in the Havana home and garage of a family named Mestre.
[8] After honoring the journalist, Cuba's President Carlos Prío Socarrás was shown mugging it up for the camera and playing the role of cameraman.
[8] One of the first shows broadcast on Union TV was live coverage of Cuban League baseball games beginning with the 1950-51 season.
This was the first of many memorable seasons that would tie television to the Cuban baseball scene and would establish the game as Cuba's national pastime.
They believed the medium's primary purpose in Cuba would be to enhance the "high culture" education of the Cuban citizen.
In late 1957, Circuito Nacional Cubano, a station purported to be secretly owned by Batista, broadcast a fictional program called El Dictador De Valle Azul.
[citation needed] On March 19, 1958, Gaspar Pumarejo once more made history at the inauguration of TELECOLOR S.A., on Channel 12, transmitting up to 16 hours a day of color programming.
Following the Cuban Revolution's conclusion in 1959, the Fidel Castro-led 26th of July Movement government began the process of forming a national television network, at the cost of the private operators.
In 1968 the CIRT launched a new station, Tele Rebelde, with regional programming for the then Oriente province with studios in Santiago de Cuba.
In 1975, Channel 2 Havana and Tele Rebelde became the first stations to be broadcast using the US NTSC color system since 1958, thereby finishing what Gaspar Pumarejo had done before.
The regional repeater channels system was born in 1967 as an effort to bring Channel 6's national programming (and later on Tele Rebelde productions) to provincial viewers, with the provincial repeaters also providing regional opt-outs and occasionally national programming produced for the two networks.
In 1986, beating the Warsaw Pact, Nicaragua and the socialist republics of East Asia, Cubavision International, then simply Cubavision, was launched to bring Channel 6 and Tele Rebelde programming to millions of satellite (and later on cable) viewers in the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, the rest of the Caribbean and mainland Central America.
[12] While the Special Period dealt an immense blow to Cuban television production, 1993 saw the birth of the country's first community TV channel, Televisión Serrana.
In 2002, Canal Educativo, the country's first educational and family TV station in the vein of PBS in the United States, was launched.
In the most recent case, in 2020 Cuban television comedian Andy Vázquez, part of Cuban television's most popular show, Vivir del cuento,[18] was fired, and subsequently "had to escape" (in reality flying legally to Miami from Cuba[19]) as a result of an unapproved humorous skit recorded by Vázquez as a private video using his tv character to criticize the government.