4 channels
Cuban television runs on a state model, and that shapes everything about how it looks and feels. There's no commercial advertising in the usual sense, no ratings war between private networks, and no prime-time bidding for audiences. Instead, the schedule is planned around national priorities: news, education, culture and music, with a general-interest channel carrying the bulk of entertainment. The result is a lineup that can feel formal and instructional by North American standards, but also surprisingly coherent. Cultural programming gets real airtime, not a graveyard slot. Music genres that would be niche elsewhere, from son to timba to nueva trova, show up in regular rotation. Educational blocks are woven into daytime rather than pushed to the margins, a legacy of the country's literacy campaigns. News reading is measured and official, closer to a public-service bulletin than the confrontational panel shows common in the wider region. Dubbing dominates: imported films and series arrive in Spanish, and subtitling is rare outside film-festival contexts. That's a regional norm, but Cuba's version is especially thorough because there's no parallel market of imported channels to dilute it. Sport matters, particularly baseball, which functions as the national obsession and draws the biggest live audiences of the year, domestic league games mostly, with international tournaments treated as major events. If you want to understand Cuban TV, watch the evening news and the cultural slot that follows it. That pairing tells you more about the country's broadcasting priorities than any imported drama could.