U.S. broadcast efforts in Cuba worth the cost?

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

By Andrew Zajac, Tribune national correspondent. Tribune foreign
correspondent Gary Marx contributed to this report from Havana

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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