US-CUBA
Radio, TV Marti Seen as
Bust
By Jim Lobe*
WASHINGTON (IPS) - Despite spending more
than half a billion dollars over the
last quarter century, U.S. government
broadcasts to Cuba have gained only a
tiny audience and have had virtually no
effect on the island's politics,
according to a new report by the Senate
Foreign Relations Committee.
"Radio and TV Marti have failed to make
any discernable inroads into Cuban
society or to influence the Cuban
Government," according to the report,
which was prepared by the Committee's
Democratic staff and released Monday.
The report found that less than two
percent of Cubans listen to Radio Marti,
while virtually no Cubans at all see TV
Marti's programming due not only to the
Castro government's jamming of their
signals, but also to widespread
perception that the news carried on both
media is not "objective".
The 15-page report called for both
stations to be moved from Miami to
Washington, D.C. where they should be
"subordinated" to the Voice of America (VOA)
whose "journalistic standards" for news
programming are more professional.
The report, which was released amid a
continuing debate in Congress over major
changes in the more than 50-year-old
U.S. trade embargo of Cuba, was strongly
denounced by hard-line anti-Castro
lawmakers who have long championed both
Radio and TV Marti and the Office of
Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) which oversees
their operations.
"(Senate Foreign Relations Committee
Chairman) John Kerry and his staff are
out to kill OCB," charged Rep. Lincoln
Diaz-Balart, a Cuban-born Florida
Republican, in an interview with the
Miami Herland. "They have always tried
to kill it and they continue to try to
kill it," he added.
But, citing the report's finding's, Sen.
Russ Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who
serves on the Committee, called on
President Barack Obama to eliminate all
funding for both operations.
"This programming is a relic of the Cold
War, falls short of journalistic
standards and is a prime example of
wasteful government spending at a time
when we should be reducing the deficit,"
he said in a letter to Obama.
The report was released as a brief
warming period in U.S.-Cuban relations
that followed Obama's inauguration last
year, including his lifting of curbs
imposed by President George W. Bush on
family-related travel and remittances by
Cuban Americans to their homeland,
appears to have largely stalled over the
past six months.
The two countries have resumed
long-suspended talks on immigration,
modestly expanded cultural and
scientific exchanges, and conducted a
remarkable cooperative initiative to
provide support for Cuban doctors in
Haiti after January's devastating
earthquake.
However, the death of a prominent
political prisoner while on a hunger
strike and the arrest and continued
detention in Cuba of a U.S. aid
contractor who was providing
communications equipment to Jewish
non-profit groups have tempered
enthusiasm for deeper engagement in an
already-cautious White House.
Congress is currently considering
legislation that, if passed, would make
it easier for U.S. farmers and livestock
producers to sell their goods to Cuba
and, more important, lift the
longstanding ban on travel by U.S.
citizens to Cuba.
The bill, the Trade Sanctions Reform and
Export Enhancement Act, currently has
about 190 co-sponsors in the 435-member
House of Representatives.
"It's in shouting distance of winning on
the floor," according to Geoff Thale, a
Cuba specialist at the Washington Office
on Latin America (WOLA), "but it's not
clear yet that the leadership will let
it go to the floor."
A similar bill has some 40 co-sponsors
in the Senate, but it could face serious
parliamentary challenges there, he said.
The administration is not lobbying
either for or against the legislation,
he noted.
The new report should be seen in the
context of "an across-the-board
challenge to the interests and
structures that have maintained our Cuba
policy for so long", according to Thale.
Radio Marti, an initiative of the
strongly anti-Castro Ronald Reagan
administration, was launched in 1983,
while TV Marti followed seven years
later. Altogether, the two OCB
initiatives, which have used
balloon-borne transmitters and planes
that broadcast from off the Florida
coast, and private South Florida
broadcasters, have cost the U.S.
Treasury more than 630 million dollars,
according to the Congressional Research
Service.
In 2009, the last year of the Bush
administration, the COB received nearly
35 million dollars from the Broadcasting
Board of Governors (BBG). That amount
was reduced to 32.5 million dollars this
year, and the Obama administration has
asked for 29.2 million dollars for
fiscal 2011, which begins Oct. 1.
Democrats in Congress, however, have
called for further cuts, and some, like
Feingold, have urged the complete
elimination of TV Marti.
They are joined by many long-time
observers of the broadcast operations.
"At a minimum, I think TV Marti should
be abolished," said Phil Peters, a Cuba
specialist at the Lexington Institute
who worked for the State Department
under President George H.W. Bush. "It's
a colossal waste of money, and it has no
audience."
"It was born at the beginning of the
Cold War, and now we're into the age of
the Internet and Twitter. I'm just not
convinced that radio and TV broadcasts
are the best use of money to foster
communications with Cuba," he said,
noting as well that the "media
environment within Cuba has changed".
Indeed, the report itself stressed that
the quality of domestic TV programming
in Cuba had improved recently and
included foreign entertainment
programmes, including popular U.S. TV
shows such as "The Sopranos" and "Grey's
Anatomy", and that CNN Espanol was now
being run on Cuban television.
"The idea that political broadcasts form
the U.S. government is going to break
through this is pretty far-fetched,"
Peters said.
The new report, which was based on
previous studies, including a similarly
critical 2009 report by the Congress's
General Accounting Office and interviews
with OCB staff, among others, found that
the OCB staff "failed to adhere to
generally accepted journalistic
standards" and sometimes broadcast
"unsubstantiated reports from Cuba as
legitimate news stories" and used
"offensive and incendiary language in
news broadcasts".
The report said "allegations of cronyism
and malfeasance" within OCB continued to
haunt operations there and "many
senior-level OCB officials were granted
their positions because of their
personal connections…"
Wayne Smith, the former head of the U.S.
Interests Section in Havana in the late
1970s until 1981 and a critic of Radio
Marti since its birth, said the Obama
administration should have "taken TV
Marti off the air within weeks" of his
inauguration and then moved Radio Marti
back to VOA.
He recalled a time before Radio Marti
when "we would go to conferences with
Cuban officials on the bus, and everyone
was listening to VOA. But once they took
VOA off the air, that was the end."
"Radio and TV Marti have been a fiasco
from the beginning, because it's
propaganda. VOA was very careful; they
had their point of view, but they were
careful to have sources and be balanced.
That's not true of the (OCB). They just
give their point of view, and their
point of view is that of right-wing
Cuban exiles."
*Jim Lobe's blog on U.S. foreign policy
can be read at http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/. |
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