Mara Roque González

Mara is a pioneer of scientific and environmental journalism in Cuba — she is a biochemist by profession and not a journalist, this work comes naturally to her as a talent. Today she is general director and screenwriter of the Cuban TV program Antena.

Scientist by profession and artist by vocation, this Cuban woman
combines her great passions in a harmonious relationship. We owe to her television space the motivation to approach science in a more enjoyable way.

She remembers adolescence as a stage in which she was interested in everything and wanted to participate in whatever was possible. Mara started in the program Para Bailar at fourteen years old,
while in 9th grade and also studying her 6th year
of piano at the Manuel Saumell music school, so
you can imagine how many things she had to do at
once, and all of them well, because she always liked that if she was going to do something, do it well.

Her debut in audiovisual media was in the program Para Bailar, a television space with weekly frequency (Sundays at two in the afternoon) it was a participation program that featured young dancers: participants had to dance from a danzón, going through a folkloric sequence, until reaching the international dance of the moment. Rivalries came from demonstrating who danced the popular dances better. A cast of nine announcers, mostly students from the National School of Art who won over youth for their simplicity and talent formed the counterpart of the dancers, among them was Mara who came from the Pre-University Institute of Vedado. The presenters were: Salvador Blanco, Cary Ravelo, Lily Rentería, Mara Roque, Armandito León, Albertico Pujol, Rey Batista, Néstor Jiménez, Vicky Rodríguez and Carlos Otero. The program was broadcast from June 10, 1978 until March 26, 1983.

When she graduated as a biochemist from the University of Havana, Mara worked at the Center for Immunoassay and at Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital and confesses that she never imagined herself promoting science in such an important medium as television.

Currently, after working on Estación 500 and Hoy mismo, she hosts and directs the program Antena, dedicated to promoting and making known as many scientific projects and events as possible.

Science interested her since her student years. In 1991, while working at Hermanos Ameijeiras Hospital, the late Vicente González Castro, television director and advisor, came looking for her to return to that medium and think about starting a program that would promote science, taking advantage of the scientific knowledge from her training and the experience she had in different programs since she was 14 years old. She then started a science news program that was named Estación 500.

In 1992 a program called Hoy mismo was created, where she began from Monday to Friday with a ten-minute section dedicated to science. Later it was decided that instead of ten minutes on several days of the week, she would have Saturday with an hour and a half; it went on air in April 1993 and has continued to the present with the name Antena.

In Antena she has tried to create a space that includes reports, interviews, the promotion
of events and the work of Cuban scientific
institutions. We try to keep up with what is happening in
Cuban science and in the rest of the world, but we are not a news program, but an informative program.

In 2020 the XXIII edition of the Giraldo Caballero Scientific Journalism contest decided to award Mara with the annual prize for her Lifetime Achievement after 27 years of work on Antena.