It offers a perspective to Cubans* (and Cuban exiles) they don't get in Cuba. Some call it news. Some call it propaganda. Meh. It certainly isn't worse than what they are getting from the Castros.

*At least they would get the perspective if Cuba stopped jamming the transmissions.

As was mentioned earlier, Radio Martí DOES offer some news and information from a different viewpoint than what Cubans get from their government-sanctioned news sources. And, what with years of living with propaganda and having to sort truth from BS on their own, they’re probably better at sorting truth from chaff than the tens of millions of American voters who lined up to vote for Donald Trump.

I also note an air of condescension permeating these anti-Martí broadcasts—the Euro/American leftists trying to sell the notion that Latins aren’t smart enough to listen to the radio and make up their own minds. I think they are smart enough, and we should leave the decision up to them, not First-World Sandalistas.

Reports that came out of Eastern Europe following the collapse of Communism found that the vast majority of Eastern Bloc peoples did indeed tune in to Radio Free Europe and Voice of America. There is no reason to believe that freedom loving Cubans aren't doing the same thing.

Radio Marti Broadcaster Pleads Guilty To False Claim
September 4, 1998|By JAY WEAVER Miami Bureau

MIAMI — A broadcaster for Radio Marti, the American-owned station that transmits to Cuba, pleaded guilty on Thursday to lying to the U.S. government about personal moving costs.

Luis Flores, 48, admitted submitting $2,000 in false claims for living expenses when Radio Marti relocated from Washington, D.C., to Miami in October 1966.

The claim was made for temporary housing in southwest Miami-Dade County that Flores did not rent or occupy.

The charge was brought by the Inspector General of the U.S. State Department. It was unclear whether the charge grew out of a broader investigation of the radio station's controversial move, assistant U.S. Attorney John Schlesinger said.

More:
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1998-09-04/news/9809030748_1_cuba-broadcasting-radio-marti-tv-marti

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Relocation Of Radio, Tv Marti To Miami A Blatant Political Ploy
October 21, 1996

Radio and TV Marti, the federal government's wasteful exercise in post-Cold War propaganda and shameless political payoff to the Cuban exile community, is moving into its brand-new South Florida facilities.

Five members of the state's congressional delegation and a number of other local dignitaries showed up Oct. 8 to welcome the vanguard of the broadcasting operation, which is being relocated to Miami after 11 years as an arm of the United States Information Agency in Washington.

. . .

Last year, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting came under scrutiny when a USIA auditor charged that Jorge Mas Canosa, head of the Cuban American National Foundation and chief advisor to the broadcasters, was exerting undue influence on Radio and TV Marti.

Congress' surprising response was to authorize relocating the OCB to South Florida, where it undoubtedly will come even more under the control of the CANF and Mas Canosa's strident anti-Castro agenda.

Some congressmen assumed they were merely authorizing the relocation of the OCB headquarters and reacted angrily when they learned the entire 225-employee operation was being moved at a cost of $7.4 million. Rep. David Skaggs, D-Colo., and Lee Hamilton, D-Ind., last month called for an investigation of the move by the General Accounting Office, an investigatory agency of Congress. In the past, Skaggs has led the annual fight to cut off financing for TV Marti.

Unfortunately, he has been unable to convince a majority of his colleagues to end this costly boondoggle, but that shouldn't deter him from trying to get to the bottom of its latest bait-and-switch gambit.

More:
http://articles.sun-sentinel.com/1996-10-21/news/9610180184_1_tv-marti-cuba-broadcasting-radio-marti

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Radio and TV Marti Should be Prime Targets for Budget Cutters
Sunday, April 10, 2011
By Zo Amerigian, Council on Hemispheric Affairs | News Analysis

As a possible federal government shutdown looms ever closer, representatives of Congress are scrambling to pass a budget while addressing the staggering U.S. debt. House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) has proponed a goal of USD 40 billion in government spending cuts, and members of Congress are searching for a painless way to slash expenditures. While House Republicans showed no difficulties in placing National Public Radio (NPR) on the chopping block in mid-March, they have overlooked conservative pet projects that are far more costly, of lower quality, and ineffective. Two such projects are the anti-Castro broadcasts Radio and TV Martí, both funded by the U.S. government and aired in Cuba. Both are expensive and fruitless remnants of Cold War-era propaganda battles. Their termination would go largely unnoticed by Cubans and be applauded by most U.S. taxpayers, who presently shell out roughly USD 30 million every year to fund the broadcasts.

In light of the federal government’s current money woes, renewed attention has been given to Radio and TV Martí in recent weeks. Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) introduced the Broadcast Savings Act (2011) in early March, and Rep. Betty McCollum (D-MN) introduced the Stop Wasting Taxpayer Money on Cuba Broadcasting Act (2011) on April 1, both aimed at shutting down Radio and TV Martí. This legislation could offer Republican ideologues a unique opportunity to cut the budget at minimum cost to the welfare of U.S. taxpayers, but there is no certainty that the political will required to pass these bills currently exists. John Nichols, a retired Penn State University professor and expert on Cuban communications, estimates that passage of this legislation is “highly unlikely.” Although we are in a budget crisis, he says, the broadcasts are “symbolic of an irrational U.S. policy toward Cuba.” After two decades, the Radio and TV Martí broadcasts have become a forgotten issue, and their cessation may not occur until a larger change in U.S.-Cuba policy is made.

. . .

Examples of this bias are not difficult to find. A front-page news story (3/21/2011) on the Radio/TV Martí website shows a Cuban opinion poll riddled with loaded, non-objective survey questions. One question asks, “Do you think that the [Communist system] can be perfect?” Another question states, “The [Communist Party’s sixth congress] only analyzes the guidelines of economic and social policy. Do you think this is sufficient to eliminate the problems of our society?”11 These leading and non-neutral questions represent a lack of professionalism in the poll, and even more so in the news entity posting them as a front-page story. An even more blatant example of non-objectivity was the airing of a paid political advertisement on TV Martí in 2006, which is prohibited by the IBB.12 Not only have Radio and TV Martí violated the Voice of America Charter, but they broadcast biased news in an obvious attempt to spread misperceptions throughout the Cuban population.

The GAO report also included other signs of unsatisfactory journalistic standards in the OCB transmissions, including “offensive and incendiary language in the broadcasts” and “a lack of timeliness in news and current affairs reporting.”13 At USD 30 million in federal funding a year, basic standards, such as non-offensive language, should not be a point of contention in OCB broadcasts. The U.S. population is being cheated out of millions of dollars every year for the sake of a self-serving right-wing agenda that has not produced reliable results. Much like the overall U.S. policy regarding Cuba, Radio and TV Martí have had decades to induce change on the island and have failed to do so. If Republicans and like-minded Democrats truly want to cut wasteful spending, the OCB broadcasts should be the first casualties of the ongoing budget war.

More:
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/392:radio-and-tv-marti-should-be-prime-targetsfor-budget-cutters

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Scurrilous
Feingold Calls For Phasing Out TV, Radio Marti Broadcasts To Cuba

. . .


Here's how Cuban "exile" Republican Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart handed Democratic Congressman, David Skaggs, from Colorado his ass when Skaggs, acting to curtail stupid excesses in the budget, attempted to get TV Marti, which is so much nonsense, axed:
Dealing from principle --- ex-Representative Skaggs

However, in 1993, former Representative David Skaggs (D-CO), in an attempt to trim unnecessary budgetary spending targeted for the Martis, was able to convince his House brethren to block funding for the two operations --- a measure which did not meet the same success in the Senate, where it was inevitably defeated. Skaggs paid a high price for his bold move, and came under withering fire from anti-Havana hardliners. Marti’s congressional supporters, led by none other than treasury plunderer Representative Lincoln Diaz-Balart responded with a stark warning that revenge would be exacted on those who might threaten the continuation of the Marti operation, making an example of Skaggs by attempting to slash federal funding for projects in his home district. However, Skaggs refused to give up the fight, and he continued his campaign against the project, in particular its television component, until he retired in 1998. Skaggs admitted, "You know that if you kick the Cuba issue, you're going to have a bad day.” As a result of his personal experience, the Miami New Times reported in a November 12, 1998 article that Skaggs bitterly expressed outrage at the “corruption of United States policy that is inherent in our Cuba policy,” explaining, “by corruption I mean the untoward influence of a relatively small segment of the population in Florida and the money that small segment of the population brings to bear, and how it distorts the policy choices this government makes.”

Not only does the overwhelming influence of the Miami anti-Castro power brokers impede any attempt to reduce funding for the programs, but their political firepower also has diluted efforts which should have been made to reform these broadcasting agencies. According to Lawrence Grossman, former president of NBC News, he, along with several other journalists and academics, were asked by former CBS News president David Burke, who in the mid-1990s had the job of overseeing Radio and TV Marti, to report on the project’s accuracy, professionalism and sense of fairness. The group then proceeded to pose the theoretical question, what would happen “if {they} concluded that the influential chairman of the President’s Advisory Broadcasting Board for Cuban Broadcasting, Jorge Mas Canosa, should resign?” The response they received was “no way” --- there was an upcoming election and Congressional candidates heavily dependent on the Cuban-exile vote would be unwilling to risk provoking the hostility of such a powerful group. As a result, Grossman and his colleagues declined the offer, and the potentially revealing document was never executed. Grossman concluded, “{TV Marti} is a folly imposed on us by politically powerful Cuban exile groups that neither party wants to offend.”

https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x4367581

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Radio and TV Martí: Washington Guns after Castro at Any Cost
March 29, 2006 COHA

The following is an executive summary of a report on Radio and TV Martí. For the complete document, please scroll down.

In the face of a sweeping debt and budgetary crisis currently afflicting the U.S. economy, the passage of the FY 2006 budget witnessed a brutal bloodletting of vital domestic programs from education and child welfare to Medicaid. At the same time, Congress, at the White House’s passionate urging, allocated an additional $10 million to purchase a specially equipped aircraft to transmit the broadcasts of the long-standing anti-Castro media project, Radio and TV Martí. This figure comes on top of the $27 million the media operations already receive annually. Since its founding, the Martí concept has been a “bridge to nowhere.” Nevertheless, almost half a billion dollars have been thrown away in the project.

As in the past, this year’s funds were routinely granted despite what have proven to be fatal weaknesses in the daily operations of Radio and TV Martí, namely no audience, no legitimacy, no professionalism – with the whole enterprise representing a colossal waste of taxpayer funds. The Martí operation’s most hard-hitting critics, including highly regarded neutral specialists, have not been able to persuade Congress to shut it down. In their evaluations, these critics allege that the whole venture is little better than a glaring boondoggle, which mainly serves as a propaganda machine spewing its tendentious product to a miniscule audience. It must be seen as little more than a custom made product to service the radical rightwing fringe of the Miami Cuban community, and a act as job-bank for unemployed ideologues within its fold.

As mentioned above, over the past 20 years, the highly criticized Martí operations have absorbed close to $500 million of public funds. This huge figure has generated a number of spirited attempts in Congress to cut – if not completely eliminate – Martí’s funding. But such initiatives have been stifled by thunderous recriminations and even open threats from Miami’s lethal politicians, led by Miami and Dade county’s rabidly rightwing Congressional delegation composed of the Diaz-Balart brothers and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. The South Florida exile community has been able to purchase such pervasive influence as a result of years of working a brilliant strategy based on significant, but still relatively modest, financial largesse to both Republican and Democratic politicians. By means of this alchemistic process, hundreds of thousands of dollars in private campaign contributions to the White House and members of Congress are converted into hundreds of millions of dollars in public funds for programs enacted by Congress that are used to bankroll anti-Castro groups and which are aimed at destroying the Castro regime.

Thus, the continued funding of such a certifiably questionable project as the Martís in many ways reveals the long reach of Miami’s Cuban community into the U.S. legislative agenda. The political process has already witnessed its uncanny ability to convert carefully targeted campaign contributions into raw ideological, ineffectual hard-line projects aimed at deconstructing a Cuban society that is perpetually in Miami’s cross-hairs.

More:
http://www.coha.org/radio-and-tv-marti-washington-guns-after-castro-at-any-cost/

ETC., ETC.

As any sane person has discovered, Democrats have been entirely against indulging this right-wing pork-barrel project, operated, engineered, controlled, staffed by Cuban "exiles" and their progeny. For years, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen's and Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart's fathers were featured on the US taxpayer-funded enterprise, doing their very own show, beaming right back into Cuba, the country which had rebelled against their entirely racist and corrupt right-wing government in the first place before the Revolution. Abhorrent.

Who wouldn't want to bring those principles of Democracy to Cuba? That you wouldn't embrace such principles is what is truly abhorrent.

Why do you opposed democracy in Cuba?

Are you an actual Democrat?

Tell us again how you never insult people.