This is an outstanding article which should be spread far
and wide. As the institutional, social, medical and other
needs of the people of the United States are being cut
back relentlessly to fund the war and occupation of Iraq,
as the people of New Orleans are unable to rebuild their
homes, Washington spends tends of millions of dollars on
what Francisco Aruca has so rightly called an "evil industry"
which virtually no one in Cuba either listens to or cares
about, a service with zero credibility. There really ought
to be hearings held by the incoming congress to discuss
the GAO report and how this massive boondoggle came
to be. Don't fail to read the entire report all the way. This
can help everyone to understand why the the opposition
to normalized relations comes from: There's a small but
exceptionally well-compensated group of exile rightists
whose lifestyle and livelihood obviously depend on it.
Walter Lippmann, CubaNews
http://www.walterlippmann.com
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CubaNews/
=====================================
Full text of GAO report on Radio/TV Marti:
http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d07147.pdf
=====================================
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0612140145dec14,1,6251140.story
TRIBUNE SPECIAL REPORT
U.S. broadcast efforts in Cuba worth the cost?
Radio and TV Marti receive major taxpayer support but have a shrinking audience
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December 14, 2006
MIAMI -- As Cuban President Fidel Castro battles serious illness and the nation he has ruled for more than four decades braces for change, the taxpayer-financed media outlets that the U.S. government counted on to communicate American values to Cuba find themselves invisible or ignored on the island.
After 20 years and more than $530 million, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting operates a radio station that by the U.S. government's own estimates has suffered a precipitous drop in listenership and a television station that may never have been seen by anyone in Cuba for more than a few minutes at a time.
Cubans who manage to tune in to Radio or TV Marti hear or see programming that is sprinkled with vulgarity, presents one-sided programming as news and omits stories critical of the Bush administration and Miami's Cuban exile community, all in apparent violation of federal broadcast standards, according to recent U.S. government quality-control reviews of OCB offerings.
Meanwhile, a nine-member advisory board set up to guide government broadcasting to Cuba has not met during the six years of the Bush presidency and the White House recently supplied a list of current board members that included a man who has been dead for 11 years.
Despite these shortcomings, the Bush administration has dramatically increased funding for Radio and TV Marti as part of a broader, controversial effort to finance Cuba's internal dissident groups and provide other assistance to undermine the country's socialist system and promote multiparty democracy.
With Castro believed to be critically ill after missing his 80th birthday celebration this month, TV and Radio Marti as well as overall U.S. policy toward Cuba are likely to come under increasing scrutiny by a Democratic-controlled Congress and moderate Republicans opposed to the longtime U.S. economic embargo against the island. Already Democrats have announced plans to hold hearings early next year on the cost-effectiveness of a program that funnels aid to dissidents primarily through groups in South Florida.
With all media in Cuba still under tight government control as Castro's brother, Raul, rules the island, backers of the Martis say Cubans need alternative sources of information in order to push for political change.
In recent years, under both the Clinton and Bush administrations, OCB's annual budget has swelled by 50 percent to $37 million currently.
"We really are missing an opportunity now. This is a critical juncture in Cuba and we don't have a credible voice," said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a member of a bipartisan congressional study group that advocates ending the 4-decade-old embargo against Cuba. "The fact is, the content is so bad it wouldn't be useful to realize our goals of promoting democracy."
Radio and TV Marti managers counter that they have substantially improved the quality of programming in recent years.
Some paradoxically point to the lack of an audience as proof of success. The programming is effective because the Cuban government is jamming broadcasts, said Kenneth Tomlinson, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, along with Voice of America and the government's other non-military international broadcasters.
"They have been rationing electricity in Cuba and it's still so important to block Marti broadcasts that they will devote this incredible amount of energy. That to me demonstrates that the Martis must represent a grave, grave threat to Fidel Castro," Tomlinson said in a recent interview.
But Flake and other critics say OCB's lack of audience is the fruit of neglect by federal officials, who, despite abundant documentation of years of bungling by OCB, are loathe to step in for fear of antagonizing Florida's 830,000 Cuban-Americans, about 450,000 of them voters.
The importance of the Cuban vote was illustrated in the 2000 election, when George W. Bush won the presidency by eking out a 537-vote margin in Florida, where he received the Cuban vote by a ratio of about 4-to-1.
The Martis have benefited from a staunch defense against congressional would-be budget-cutters by Florida's influential congressional delegation, in particular Cuban-American Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart, both of whose fathers appeared regularly on Radio Marti.
Unlike every other government-funded international broadcaster such as Voice of America or Radio Free Europe, OCB doesn't have an administrative office in Washington.
Over the vigorous objections of congressional skeptics who warned that watchdogs would lose control of the stations and they would become sources of patronage for the exile community, Radio and TV Marti were allowed to move from Washington to Miami in 1996.
In the 10 years since, OCB has had four directors.
The current director, Pedro Roig, a Miami attorney, has overseen some unusual employment arrangements, including hiring his wife's nephew as his chief of staff and contracting with a former legal client to write a comedy show mocking Castro.
This year, Congress gave OCB a new, annual infusion of $10 million to pay for an airplane to broadcast TV Marti's signal into Cuba--even though airborne transmission was specifically rejected as wasteful and impractical by the stations' advisory board shortly before it lapsed into inactivity, according to a former board member.
The Martis also are largely immune from having to produce measurable results like growing audiences or meeting quality standards.
Congress established Radio and TV Marti "to promote the cause of freedom in Cuba," a goal that should be achieved "as a derivative of the broadcast of programs (including news and information) which are objective, accurate, balanced, and which present a variety of views," according to the OCB Editorial Guidelines.
Asked how the stations' effectiveness is measured, a spokesman for the Martis said, "The evidence will come when freedom and democracy come to Cuba."
Shrinking audience
Cuba long has been a tempting target to U.S. government broadcasters, who believe the island audience is thirsting for alternatives to state-run media and extremely limited Internet access.
These proponents of the stations have been frustrated in part by vigorous jamming efforts by the Cuban government, which insists the Marti broadcasts violate international law and are part of an ongoing plot to overthrow the Castro regime.
TV Marti's signal has been readily blocked over the years. But Radio Marti's shortwave signal penetrates into Cuba and can sometimes be heard in Havana and elsewhere on the island, though sound quality at times is distorted by static, high-pitched squeals and thumping noises.
Despite getting the Radio Marti broadcasts into Cuba, albeit imperfectly, the U.S. government's own figures show that the station's listenership has plunged in recent years.
In 1998, Radio Marti reported an estimated weekly audience of just under 9 percent of Cuba's adult population, or about 775,000 of the island's estimated 8.6 million people age 15 or older.
In 2005, Tomlinson told Congress that just 1.2 percent of the Cuban market, or barely more than 100,000 people, listened weekly to the U.S.-run radio station, based on a survey conducted by telephone from abroad of randomly chosen Cuban households with phones.
Tomlinson also reported that only one out of 1,000 Cubans reported seeing TV Marti within the previous week and eight out of 1,000 reported seeing it in the previous year. An August 2006 report by the Congressional Research Service stated that TV Marti "has not had an audience because of Cuban jamming efforts."
Tomlinson said numbers may be low because those surveyed may fear reprisals if they admit to an interest in the U.S. broadcasting.
But in interviews on the island in 2005, the Tribune found another reason for Cubans' professed disinterest in the Martis: Many preferred sports and entertainment over programs rehashing the standoff between their country and the U.S.
To the extent Cubans do want information, they're likely to be wary of Radio Marti, said Philip Peters, vice president of the libertarian Lexington Institute of Arlington, Va., and a longtime critic of U.S. Cuban policy.
"The problem is that the Cuban audience can smell spin a mile away," and it doesn't trust Radio Marti to deliver news straightforwardly, Peters said, citing a lengthy string of journalistic blunders.
In 1999, for example, the State Department inspector general, citing a review by a panel of independent journalists, faulted Radio Marti for "a lack of balance, fairness and objectivity ... intermingling news and opinion, and using poor judgment in stories."
In May 2002, Radio Marti waited a full day before broadcasting a historic speech on the need for Cuba to move toward democracy delivered at the University of Havana by former President Jimmy Carter, a Democrat still loathed by many Cuban-Americans in Miami for allowing a limited diplomatic opening to Cuba during his administration.
Two years earlier, the station waited four hours before reporting that Cuban castaway Elian Gonzalez had been seized by federal agents from his great uncle's house in Miami, ending a standoff that transfixed much of this country and Cuba.
The delay meant that even Havana's government-run Radio Rebelde beat Radio Marti on the story.
Radio Marti's director at the time, Roberto Rodriguez-Tejera, said his station was waiting for an official statement from then-Atty. Gen. Janet Reno to clarify "a very confusing time."
"You should ask why it took her so long to make a statement," Rodriguez-Tejera said.
Rodriguez-Tejera said he objected to the way federal agents barged in and seized the 6-year-old boy, but doesn't believe it affected his decision to hold the story. "I wanted to think that it didn't because I think of myself as a professional journalist," Rodriguez-Tejera said.
Peters and other critics say the delay in coverage was inexcusable on a story that CNN and other outlets broadcast across the world. "When you blow a major news story, you lose your audience," said Peters.
Critical internal reviews
Recent internal reviews of both Marti stations identified violations of basic rules of journalism and government broadcast guidelines, as well as reluctance to air news "that could be perceived as adverse to the current presidential administration, the U.S. government or the exile community."
In May, for example, Radio and TV Marti ignored the announcement that Alberto Mora, a prominent Cuban-American Republican, would receive the prestigious John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award.
Mora, who resigned as general counsel of the Navy this year, received the award for a quiet campaign inside the Bush administration against policies that might allow mistreatment of detainees in the war on terror held at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba.
Mora's award was "particularly important and relevant to Cubans" and "should have been covered by the Martis," the review said.
Even entertainment programming is slanted, according to the review, which singled out a Radio Marti talk and music show purporting to explore a Miami-area controversy over a children's book, "Vamos a Cuba," which many Cuban-Americans and exiles denounced as painting an overly rosy picture of life in Cuba.
The host began the show with a call for banning the book: "Laden with lies about how Cubans live today, it should be withdrawn from the 33 Miami-Dade libraries that have it" because the school board voted to remove it, the host said. "This book must be gone from the library."
The episode illustrates the Martis' tone-deafness to their mission and underscores how much they are creatures of local political passions rather than instruments of American foreign policy, said John Nichols, a communications professor at Penn State University and a longtime researcher of U.S. broadcasting to Cuba.
"It is astonishingly ironic that a Radio Marti analyst advocated banning `Vamos a Cuba' in broadcasts to Cuba, where books are banned, and used protecting democracy as the justification. Incredible," said Nichols.
The U.S. government reviewer of the stations' broadcasts content, Ivette Martinez, declined to discuss her findings with the Tribune.
OCB Chief of Staff Alberto Mascaro said the criticisms are overblown.
"I can take any news organization and pick it apart," Mascaro said. "I believe these are minor compared to what we've done well."
Mascaro also said he was baffled that Martinez focused on the stations' concern with how they are perceived among exiles in Florida.
"Our audience is in Cuba," Mascaro said. "We're not beholden to the exile community by any stretch."
The internal review also criticized "frequent vulgarity" and "poking fun at the Afro-Cuban religion" in "La Oficina del Jefe" (The Office of the Boss), a thinly veiled spoof mocking Castro and his inner circle airing on Radio and TV Marti.
"Avoid vulgarity and obscene gestures at all times. Avoid frequent references to customs and practices of a particular ethnic group," the review stated.
The show is written by Alberto Gonzalez, a contractor hired by Mascaro's boss, Roig, the OCB's director. Gonzalez has been paid at least $75,000 by taxpayers for his work since 2004, according to federal records.
Mascaro took issue with Martinez's criticism of the show and said that Gonzalez was a well-respected entertainment writer in South Florida. "He is one of the best there is out there," Mascaro said.
The business relationship between Gonzalez and Roig has extended beyond Radio and TV Marti. Gonzalez's pursuits have included publication of La Politica Comica, a newspaper that satirizes South Florida politicians. According to Florida Department of State records, incorporation papers for the newspaper were filed by Roig in 2001.
Roig's business relationship with Gonzalez had nothing to do with the decision to hire him, said Mascaro, himself the nephew of Roig's wife. Roig declined to speak to a reporter, and Gonzalez could not be reached for comment.
Roig, 66, has run the Office of Cuba Broadcasting since April 2003. A historian as well as an attorney, the Cuban-born Roig served in the 2506 Brigade, the exile force in the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961.
Mascaro, 37, a private businessman before Roig hired him as his top assistant, said his relation to Roig's wife had nothing to do with getting the job and that it was disclosed before his hiring. "He knew me professionally," Mascaro said. "I'm sure he wanted someone he was comfortable with. We handle a lot of confidential issues here."
Roig, who is paid $138,000 annually, and Mascaro, who earns $111,000, are among 18 OCB employees with six-figure salaries out of about 150 employees, according to payroll records.
Besides the regular payroll, OCB also spends about $2 million per year on contractors, many of whom work other jobs in Miami-area media outlets. Payments range from nominal sums to tens of thousands of dollars annually.
But in addition to buying talent, passing out contracts also mutes community discussion of frequent criticism of OCB by outsiders, such as government watchdogs or members of Congress, said Joe Garcia, a former executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation, a leading anti-Castro exile lobbying group.
"If you're a Cuban-American journalist, there are no other markets to be in. It's a very limited market and they're a big employer in it. That's why people don't criticize it," said Garcia, now senior vice president of the New Democratic Network, a group of centrist Democrats.
Garcia said he strongly supports government broadcasting to Cuba, but believes that Radio and TV Marti have been mismanaged under Republican and Democratic administrations.
Move to Miami
Some observers trace an increase in journalistic lapses to Congress' 1996 decision to allow the Office of Cuba Broadcasting to move to Miami from Washington, out of immediate reach of bureaucratic overseers.
The move came at the behest of the late Jorge Mas Canosa, the legendary founder of the Cuban American National Foundation and the prime mover behind the establishment of Radio and TV Marti. The OCB now operates out of the Jorge Mas Canosa Building in northwest Miami.
Congress authorized government-funded Cuban broadcasting in 1983, with Radio Marti going on the air in 1985 and TV Marti in 1990.
In justifying the move to Miami, Mas said that the stations needed to be closer to their target audiences. But even ardent opponents of the Castro regime, such as Daniel Fisk, now a top White House adviser, questioned the wisdom of relocating.
"Moving the facilities to Miami sacrificed its effectiveness, making it simply another Miami radio station," Fisk wrote in The Washington Quarterly in 2001. "Radio Marti should be relocated and every effort should be made to end its image as a mouthpiece of the Miami Cuban-American community."
Fisk's views "were his own at the time, while working outside government. ... He now serves in this administration" and "his views reflect the president's," said a spokeswoman for the National Security Council, where Fisk is senior director for Western Hemisphere affairs.
In addition to its well-documented difficulties with fairness, the OCB has run afoul of government watchdogs for the way it has handled its budget.
In 2003, the State Department inspector general criticized the office for shoddy contracting practices, including a lack of quality control over programming as well as "violations of government procurement requirements and actions that created the appearance of favoritism."
Extensive contracting began under the Clinton administration after Mas' death in 1997 as a way for Democrats to reward friends, according to Christopher Coursen, a member of the Advisory Board for Cuba Broadcasting from 1991 until 2004. "They didn't trust the people in OCB because, for the most part, they were Jorge's supporters," Coursen said.
But large-scale contracting has continued under Republican control and has made it harder to enforce government broadcast standards, said Coursen, a Republican and a staunch supporter of the need for government-funded, Cuba-focused programming.
"The outsiders are coming in and giving their personal views," Coursen said. "There is no internal oversight within the agency. There's no oversight by the BBG [Broadcasting Board of Governors] or by the administration."
Problems with oversight
Some of that oversight is supposed to come from the nine-member President's Advisory Board for Cuba Broadcasting, but it hasn't met since 1998, according to Coursen.
According to a list provided by the White House, the board currently has seven members, including Charles Tyroler.
Tyroler, an intelligence official in the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, died in 1995.
Also on the White House list is Salvador Lew, who preceded Roig as head of OCB. Lew said he's not on the advisory board and is under the impression that it has been disbanded.
Robert McKinney, who was appointed by President Bush to the board in late 2003, said he's never been contacted about when it might meet.
"In my opinion, they don't want this board to operate," said McKinney, a former chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. McKinney said he was recruited to the board by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), a longtime friend.
White House spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore said she could not explain how Tyroler and Lew came to be included on a list of current members.
But Lawrimore said the inaccurate list did not indicate a lack of interest in how Radio and TV Marti are being run.
"I just know that the president supports [broadcasting to Cuba]," Lawrimore said.
OCB's direct bosses, the seven members of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, are struggling with scandals in other parts of the government's media realm, including a recent State Department inspector general report that Tomlinson, BBG's chairman, had misused his office by, among other things, putting a friend on the government payroll and using public resources "in support of his horse racing operation."
The Justice Department declined to pursue a criminal investigation, but a civil inquiry is underway into Tomlinson's hiring of his friend. Tomlinson disputed the allegations, saying they are "trivial and politically inspired."
In mid-November, he was nominated by Bush for another term at the helm of BBG.
The State Department inspector general also is looking into allegations of cronyism and contract-steering at Al-Hurra, the U.S. government's Arab-language satellite channel, according to a November 2005 story in the Financial Times. A State Department spokesman Wednesday declined to comment.
Under a system of supervision in which individual government broadcast outlets are parceled out for oversight by committees of individual BBG members, Al-Hurra falls under a committee headed by Joaquin Blaya, a Spanish-language media executive from Miami, whose committee portfolio also includes supervision of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting. Blaya declined to comment.
TV Marti tries to take off
More than one-third of the tax money spent on Cuban broadcasting--$213 million--has gone to TV Marti, despite scant evidence that after 16 years it has any audience at all, because the Cuban government blocks its signal.
TV Marti also transmits via satellite and illegal receiving dishes are not uncommon, particularly in Havana. But authorities periodically crack down on possession of them, leaving antenna broadcasting as the best way to reach a Cuban mass audience.
For years, TV Marti transmitted only between 3:30 a.m. and 6 a.m. daily to avoid interfering with domestic Cuban programming on a frequency assigned to Cuba by international telecommunications agreement. For much of that time, TV Marti beamed its signal from a balloon-borne transmitter riding at 10,000 feet above the Florida Keys.
While Tomlinson insists that the Cuban government jams TV Marti "because they fear it," Nichols, of Penn State, said the U.S. is in violation of international conventions because it broadcasts on frequencies reserved for Cuba.
"Let the lawyers argue about that," Tomlinson said.
In an attempt to circumvent jamming, a State Department committee in May 2004 urged funding for a plane to broadcast TV Marti's signal. The report didn't offer any evidence that aircraft broadcasting would be any more effective than broadcasting from a fixed, land-based transmitter.
Eight years before, OCB's advisory board evaluated using a plane as a broadcast platform, but concluded that it wouldn't work, said former board member Coursen.
"It was something we specifically rejected based on outside engineering and inside engineering. ... The use of an airplane to broadcast TV Marti to Cuba was not cost-effective and would not be functional," said Coursen.
Airborne transmission offers only marginally better chances of getting a signal through, according to Jennifer Bernhard, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
"It's better than putting it on a platform, but it's still going to be affected by the jammer. It's not going to necessarily provide anything more reliably," said Bernhard, who specializes in antenna technology.
But beginning in August 2004, an Air Force C-130 outfitted with electronic warfare gear and based in Harrisburg, Pa., made a once-per-week 2,000-mile round trip to transmit four hours of TV signal from U.S. airspace into Cuba. Mascaro said the military flights do not come out of OCB's budget and he does not know how much they cost.
In 2006, Congress boosted OCB's funding so that the agency could pay for more airborne broadcasting, and in August, a leased private plane, dubbed Air Marti, began transmitting TV and Radio Marti's signals six days a week in prime time. The weekly Air Force flight also continues, Mascaro said.
"We have a few hundred reports, maybe 200 to 300 reports" of Cubans calling the U.S. to say that the signal is getting through, Mascaro said. "It's anecdotal. I wouldn't say it's scientific."
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