Miami exhibit highlights how Cuba helped create the blueprint for the telenovela

By Sarah Moreno, Miami Herald

MIAMI — Before the Cuban Revolution scattered a generation of writers, producers and performers to new creative hubs across Latin America, the island was busy building the blueprint for what would become the modern telenovela.

“The Telenovela Archives: Serialized Fiction in Cuba Before the Revolution,” an exhibit on display at the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection, revisits that formative era through photographs and artifacts from the island’s broadcasting heyday in the 1940s to the ‘60s.

Cuba’s role as an early pioneer of radionovelas and telenovelas — Spanish language soap operas — created a Hollywood-style star system of its own. Large-format photos and original materials from those prolific decades show a country that became a magnet for c