The Argentine journalist Carolina «Carola» Amoroso, from TN and Canal 13, entered Cuba with a tourist visa to covertly film the documentary 'Cuba, the Island that is Dimming', bypassing the Cuban regime's controls on foreign media.
The preview of the documentary was presented this Sunday at the International Book Fair in Buenos Aires, where Amoroso explained to the audience the reasons behind the clandestine strategy: "The bureaucracy, waiting for a visa, and the risk that we would then have supervised coverage, did not seem appropriate to us in this case."
The decision to enter as a tourist was deliberate and had the support of Ricardo Ravanelli, news director of Artear, the group that owns TN and Canal 13. "Entering Cuba was a goal we had with the channel and that our news director has had for some time; we understood that it was urgent to access the island," the journalist explained.
The material records the everyday reality of Cubans without filters or government oversight. In one of the scenes of the preview, Amoroso turns on the flashlight of his cell phone because it is "the only way" to have light in a neighborhood of Havana without electricity.
The documentary's narration describes Cuba as "a country in the midst of its greatest economic and social crisis in decades," with "daily blackouts, accumulated trash, shortages, and collapsing buildings."
Amoroso returned from the island deeply affected by what she had documented. "I came back very impressed by that beautiful town, beyond, obviously, with a lot of pain for what they are going through at this moment," she stated during the presentation.
The Cuban regime demands official accreditation from foreign journalists, which in practice means supervised and censored coverage. This restriction makes independent journalism practically impossible for international media on the island, and it was precisely this situation that motivated Amoroso's strategy.
Cuba is facing its worst energy crisis in decades since 2024, with power outages lasting up to twenty hours a day, a collapse of the national electric system, and severe shortages of food and medicine.
The full documentary will air on TN, during the Telenoche news program on Canal 13, and on Aura, the new streaming platform of the group.
Amoroso has a background in high-risk journalistic coverage: in 2022, he reported on the Russian invasion of Ukraine and produced the documentary Darién, the jungle of hell, focusing on migration in the Darién jungle, a work that earned him the Fopea Award for In-Depth Journalism.
The journalist emphasized that the work transcends the medium for which she works: "It is for the people who are leading these causes and who often feel alone or are crying out their pain in silence or in the desert. Venezuela and Cuba are not alone."
Regarding the chosen title, Amoroso wanted to convey a clear message: "Cuba, the island that is fading away," but the hope of its people does not fade, and that's what I want to emphasize with the title.
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