For Jordania Yero, Cuban television provides essential distraction from the austerity of the bleak 1960s housing estate where she lives with her family in Santiago, Cuba’s second city. Yero, a 31-year-old information technician, typically watches between three and four hours a day, avidly following everything from cartoons and documentaries to dancing competitions and game shows. Above all, though, she is a fan of the gritty home-grown and imported soap operas shown by Cuba’s state-controlled TV networks.

Latin American popular drama may have a reputation for romanticism acted out badly in a middle-class world way beyond the reach of most viewers. But that kind of content finds no place on Cuba’s five state-run channels. Instead Cubans such as Yero are offered tough, down-to-earth and surprisingly honest shows that deal with everyday issues.

The stage for these performances is more likely to be a crumbling Havana apartment than the idealised world favoured by Mexican or Colombian producers. “I like them because you learn so much about how life is lived. How people develop little tricks to get by,” says Yero.

Like many Cubans, she is also a big fan of hugely popular Brazilian soap operas such as Passionate Women, a current favourite. These may have more idealised settings than their Cuban equivalents but have also tended to trace more realistic themes, such as migration, gender violence, alcoholism and prostitution. “Brazil is everybody’s great hope. Everybody in Cuba is interested,” she says.

And increasingly Cuban directors are pursuing more adventurous themes. One current favourite, Powder in the Wind, follows the relationships of a man diagnosed with HIV. Lesbianism is a theme of The Other Side of the Moon. On the surface that might seem to indicate that a broader liberalisation of Cuban society is gathering pace in the wake of the hospitalisation two years ago (and subsequent retirement) of Fidel Castro, the country’s legendary leader.

Sexuality, after all, was the subject 18 months ago of the most successful protest in Cuba since the 1959 revolution, when intellectuals and artists lobbied on the internet to force from the airwaves Luis Pavón Tamayo. As cultural supremo in the early 1970s, Pavón Tamayo had been notorious for enforcing rigid censorship rules and forcing dozens of gay people into obscurity or exile. His brief appearance as a guest on a cultural programme on TV had alarmed his now rehabilitated victims.

There have been some other signs of greater openness, too. This year, for example, Cuba launched a fifth terrestrial television station, Multivisión, which surprisingly has broadcast imported critically acclaimed US dramas, such as Grey’s Anatomy and The Sopranos, programming that seems to go down well with Yero and her neighbours. But anyone under the illusion that Cuba is about to experience its own kind of glasnost should take a look at news programming. There the grip of the Communist party officials responsible for ideological orientation is as firm as ever. Take Round Table, a prime-time news discussion show broadcast for 1½ hours every day, which won something of a reputation for innovation when first shown at the beginning of this decade.

Each evening guests – usually local journalists or academics – discuss themes of the day. There are small, relatively parochial topics on some nights: Cuba’s new allotment gardening culture, for example. And there are big ones: the immigration crisis in the capitalist world or, ahead of this month’s Olympic Games, the “robbery” of Cuban athletes by the US or Spain. But the discussions are invar­iably narrow.

No one would dare to suggest that socialist Cuba has its own emigration problem, in the form of 20,000 Cubans who wait patiently for US visas each year or risk their lives aboard rickety rafts to cross the Florida Straits illeg­ally. Mention the material frustrations and ambitions that lie behind the regular defections of Cuba’s successful athletes, musicians and dancers, and you would stand to find yourself in trouble.

The show’s anchors always have a handy quotation from a recent speech by Raúl Castro or one of “Comrade Fidel Castro’s” recent newspaper columns to reinforce the official message. And just in case anyone doesn’t quite pick it up, the official line comes out loud and clear on Cubavisión’s main evening news – shown at 8pm. The show is almost a parody of the worst kind of Soviet-era official speak.

Other than news about Hugo Chávez, the Cuban party’s current hero, and his Latin American acolytes, or US atrocities at Guantánamo, news from the rest of the world is invariably filtered out, leaving the most minuscule activities of the Castros or workaday preparations for party events to receive pride of place. The opening of a press room for international journalists for a recent annual commemoration of the beginning of the Cuban revolution featured prominently on the news list one day last month, for example. And although Fidel Castro may pretend that he has retired from public life, the official media dedicate plenty of time to his latest utterances on any subject.

“The Reflections of Comrade Fidel: The Two Koreas, Part Two,” boomed the news reader, a moustachioed man in his 50s, the other day, before woodenly reciting extracts.

Some of her neighbours occasionally vent their frustration, but Yero takes it calmly in her stride. Her main objection is that Round Table is shown so early, and on three channels simultaneously. “People criticise a lot the fact that it is broadcast at 6.30, just when the kids get back from school,” she says. “These are not programmes for children.”

This article is part of a series on TV around the world. For earlier pieces, visit www.ft.com/arts/tv