Ailing Castro's Cuba signals crackdown on pirate TV

Ailing Castro's Cuba signals crackdown on pirate TV
By Anthony Boadle Wed Aug 9, 12:47 PM ET

HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba's communist government has signaled a crackdown
on black-market satellite dishes used by citizens to get news and views
from its arch enemy, the United States, nine days after ailing leader
Fidel Castro temporarily relinquished power to his brother.

The Communist Party newspaper Granma warned that the dishes, which many
Cubans use to watch Spanish-language TV programs from the exile bastion
of Miami, could be used by the U.S. government to broadcast subversive
information.

"They are fertile ground for those who want to carry out the Bush
administration's plan to destroy the Cuban revolution," said the
newspaper, the official voice of the government. Similar articles in
Granma usually signal that action can be expected.

The article decried an "avalanche" of capitalist advertising in the
commercial programs.

Since Castro provisionally relinquished power to his brother Raul on
July 31 after undergoing stomach surgery, Cubans have been anxious for
information.

U.S.-funded TV and Radio Marti, run out of Miami, have pumped up their
output of anti-Castro programming, but few Cubans are believed to have
access to the stations because of successful jamming by the Cuban
government.

By contrast, there may be as many as 10,000 illegal TV satellite dishes
in Cuba, each one linked to perhaps hundreds of televisions by cables
that their owners snake over rooftops and between buildings, charging
other users $10 a month.

Many who get black-market U.S. television watched with astonishment as
exiles in Miami danced in the streets when they heard on July 31 that
Fidel Castro had undergone surgery and handed over power to his brother.

Castro's Cuba is widely viewed in Miami as an authoritarian prison where
dissent and economic freedom are brutally quashed. Castro's supporters
view him as a champion of social justice and national pride for standing
up to the United States for more than four decades.

STILL UNSEEN

Cuban officials say Castro, who will be 80 on Sunday, is recovering and
should be back in charge within weeks. But neither he nor his brother
have been seen.

Daniel Ortega, former leftist president of Nicaragua, said he had not
been able to see his long-time ally since arriving in Havana on
Saturday. The reason was not immediately clear.

"He is in a period of recovery and he is getting ready to take
government decisions," Ortega told a Nicaraguan radio station on Tuesday
night.

Sources close to Ortega's Sandinista party, which Cuba backed in a civil
war against U.S.-backed Contra rebels in the 1980s, said he might meet
Raul Castro later on Wednesday.

While Cuban coastal communities have been told to scan the skies for a
U.S. invasion that Washington has assured Cubans it will not stage,
Cuban authorities continued to organize neighborhood rallies in support
of the Castro brothers.

The half-million-member Communist Youth Union and other student
organizations wished Castro a rapid recovery in a letter published by
the newspaper Juventud Rebelde.

French actor Gerard Depardieu added his name to a list of 400
international personalities, including leftist commentator Noam Chomsky
and South Africa's Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who signed a statement
against U.S. interference, Granma said.

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