Consolidate the communication system of the Ministry of Culture

In 2017, the Ministry of Culture approved the updating of the Communication Strategy, in line with the programmatic document "Priorities of Cultural Institutions", which compels to articulate the work in terms of the execution of the cultural policy in the defense of the national identity and the ethical and moral values it promotes.

The analysis carried out during the period shows an increase in the promotion and generation of contents and audiovisual production. Similarly, progress has been made in most institutions of the cultural system in working with the media and social media. The Ministry of Culture generates a greater amount of informative and communicational contents that exceed 50 newspapers, which have a wide reach within the specialized press in the country and circulate among other organizations and related entities.

At present, there is greater promotion of the cultural contents disseminated by the Cuban Institute of Radio and Television (ICRT) and the public media system, which is supported by the ICRT-MINCULT Agreement. A working mechanism was created by which cultural institutions define their information priorities one month in advance, in relation to the actions they develop, and send them to the media on a weekly basis. In total, since September 2017, more than 2,200 priorities have been delivered to the system of own media and the national press, and a sustained growth has been attained in the news transmission and cultural materials to achieve a total of more than 2,300 per year, which is a significant result in the promotion of cultural content in the population's main consumption platform.

At the same time, new media and spaces were developed and founded, such as the program Noticiero Cultural on Cuban TV, from the extension of its daily broadcasts, from Monday through Friday, in 2016, and there are currently more than 1,400 informative broadcasts, while the La Jiribilla digital magazine was repositioned and its target audience was redirected towards the 25-34-year-old sector.

In addition, in July 2017, CREART took over the publication of the El Periodico Cubarte digital newspaper, within the Cubarte Portal, the Ministry's main broadcasting medium. It also took over the CubaNow digital magazine in 2018, which for 15 years had been dedicated to film, radio and television by ICAIC and was also transferred to CREART.

The Ministry of Culture's website was established and designed as part of the 2014-2016 strategy. Measurements taken since September 2017 show that the website has received around 403,100 visits and 18,146 visitors, and it received an average of 2,000 visits and 500 visitors per day in 2018.

In this four-year period, the Ministry of Culture quadrupled its presence on social media. An example of this is that in 2016, it opened its official account on Facebook and registered 2,424 followers at the end of the year. The 24-35 age group represented a third of the audience, and Cuba, the United States and Mexico were, in that order, the countries from which most visits were received. In the first half of 2020, the followers exceeded 18,600.

It is among the first four pages of the Central State Administration Agencies, with a preferential audience between 24 and 35 years, and it maintains the highest number of visitors from Cuba, followed by Mexico and the United States.

On the other hand, the official Twitter account of the Ministry of Culture, @CubaCultura, is set up in the first half of 2017, and closed that year with 1,219 tweets posted and 272 followers. In the same period in 2018, it tripled the number of tweets sent, and by the end of the first semester of 2020, it already has more than 8,200 posted tweets and a similar number of followers (8,300).

In short, more than 30 of the agency's Facebook pages have between one thousand and ten thousand followers, while another 30 Twitter accounts are above the one thousand mark. These include La Jiribilla, the Cubarte Portal, the Ministry of Culture, as well as other entities and CSOs that count on CREART's support to disseminate their content, including the Casa de Las Americas, the Network in Defense of Humanity, the Hermanos Saiz Association, and the National Association of Writers and Artists of Cuba.

Own-produced audiovisuals have increased, more than 2 thousand audiovisual capsules and videos of the institutional system of culture were included in the main schedule of the broadcasting of Cuban radio and television, and there has been a bigger use of the visual identity of the Ministry of Culture.

Since the end of 2019, a special program has been developed for the production of video clips of Cuban artists in different musical genres. At the end of this report, there were eighty materials in production and shooting and more than 50 completed. These materials have been broadcast on the YouTube channel of the Cuban Ministry of Culture, which has increased its viewers and followers. In March 2018, it had 108 subscribers, currently registering more than 2,100, and it reports a growth trend by incorporating its own new audiovisual production.