The Cuban Government published last Tuesday, August 17th, in the Gaceta Oficial  the ‘Decreto Ley 35’, which establishes a set of regulations for the telecommunications, information and communication technologies and the use of the radioelectric spectrum on the island. In the document, and for the first time, the bases for developing a pay TV offer in Cuba are detailed.

Without giving further details on the deployment of that technology, the document reports that, in order to deliver the offer, it must ‘meet the current installation and operation conditions’, including here the admissions granted by the State, as the owner of the radioelectric space.  The Decree also reports that pay TV distribution will be in charge of the entities allowed to provide the offer, who must guarantee the ‘creation of technical conditions to access TV networks’.

In relation to the content broadcast on cable TV channels, the regulations establish that they must guarantee ‘neutrality, transparency, non-discrimination, equal access, symmetry and reciprocity’.

The Decreto Ley 35 opens the doors for a new pay offer TV for the residential market, in one of the Spanish-speaking countries in which that market has not been explored yet, since the offer of pay TV is restricted to the island’s hotels. However, in 2020, the Cuban Government published the report ‘Cuba y su desafio economico y social’, where it highlights a series of measures to be applied due to the economic crisis caused by the Coronavirus in various areas, including the telecommunications market. One of them reports the need to make the pertinent analyzes to ‘evaluate the possibility of offering the cable TV service in places where the available infrastructure allows it’.