Vintage Cuban Radio

About the collection

Universidad del Aire (University on the Air) was an educational radio program that began airing on Radio CMQ in Havana, Cuba in 1948 during the presidency of Carlos Prío Socarras and later during the US-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista up through 1963, the initial years of the Cuban Revolution led by Fidel Castro. This didactic radio show featured lectures by prominent Cuban intellectuals and cultural figures (i.e. Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillen, José Lezama Lima, Jorge Mañach) on a wide variety of themes from art, history, politics and music. The program was recorded live by the radio station on lacquer discs and accompanied by a published cuaderno (notebook) on the discussed topics. The topics discussed and live audience question and answer sessions recorded on Universidad del Aire provide unique insight into the social and political tensions in pre and post-revolutionary Cuba.

The only known recordings of Universidad del Aire are held by the Institute of Cuban History (IHC) based in Havana, Cuba. The Universidad del Aire recordings are extremely fragile and were digitized from lacquer discs in 2017-2018 through a collaboration between UCLA Library and the IHC as part of the International Digital Ephemera Project. (Read more about the preservation and digitization process here.) These recordings have never been accessible to researchers and offer new opportunities for scholarship.

View / listen to the Universidad del Aire collection

About the project

We want to create tables of contents and full-text transcriptions for the Universidad del Aire radio recordings to enable deep engagement with the audio material as well as promote re-use of the collection for computationally driven research and teaching. We are asking volunteers to identify speaker's voices, ads, and music which will help us create a table of contents for the program (no Spanish required for this task). Volunteers can also transcribe segments in Spanish. Creating full-text transcriptions will also open up the collection to a wider audience, such as researchers with reading knowledge of Spanish but not strong aural comprehension. Creating full-text transcripts will also enable us to identify if there are segments that should be prioritized for translation into English.

Who will use the collection

The collection would be of interest to researchers working in the disciplines of Latin American Studies, Caribbean Studies, Spanish & Portuguese, history, anthropology, music, literature, and sound studies. Based on preliminary listens of the collection, some potential research areas could be connections between African diaspora intellectuals, Afrocuban history and relations, censorship in Cuba, Cuban poetry and literature, Cuban rumba music, Latin American solidarity and regional identity. The collection would also be of interest to radio and sound historians and Spanish language learners.