"Cuba in Focus" served as the newsletter of the Center for Cuban Studies, the New York-based organization founded in 1972 to promote understanding of revolutionary Cuba and challenge U.S. embargo policies. This issue focuses on Barbara Walters's groundbreaking June 1977 ABC interview with Fidel Castro—the first extensive U.S. network television interview with the Cuban leader. The cover features a color photograph of Walters and Castro together, with Walters in sunglasses and a red shirt beside the bearded comandante in his characteristic military fatigues and cap, set against a turquoise sky. The straightforward photojournalistic aesthetic emphasizes the historic nature of this media encounter during a brief period of potential détente.
With an introduction by filmmaker and activist Saul Landau, this issue critiques ABC's editorial choices, arguing the network omitted crucial content that would have challenged American Cold War narratives about Cuba. The newsletter includes a "Picture History of the Revolution" using documentary photographs to counter mainstream media representations. Published at a moment when the Carter administration briefly explored normalization, the Center for Cuban Studies used this analysis to demonstrate how U.S. media manufactured consent for embargo policies by selectively editing Castro's perspectives. Landau, director of the Transnational Institute and filmmaker of numerous Cuba documentaries including "Fidel," positioned the Center as providing Americans access to information systematically excluded from mainstream discourse, exemplifying how solidarity organizations created alternative media infrastructures to circumvent Cold War information control.