Broadcasting ideas most Cubans can't see

Mark Potter Correspondent • E-mail

MIAMI, FLORIDA - Along a busy highway near the Miami International Airport, a stark yellow building sits behind a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. An American flag flies from the roof, and a sign warns that this is U.S. property, no trespassing.

Inside the building, rapid-fire Spanish fills the hallways. Busy reporters and producers work at desks spread across a large newsroom. In radio and television studios down the hall, anchors sit before microphones and cameras to broadcast live on-air, getting out the latest word to whomever might be listening in Cuba.

This is the headquarters for Radio Marti and TV Marti, which are U.S. government-operated stations that beam Spanish-language news, opinions, Major League Baseball, satire and messages of freedom and democracy to the Cuban population. Included are taped appearances from President Bush and Secretary of State Rice, and a comedy show featuring a bumbling Fidel Castro look-alike.

"The mission is to be a window to the outside world to the people of Cuba, people who live in a closed, repressed society, where the state controls all the media," said Alberto Mascaro, the chief of staff for the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, which overseas Radio and TV Marti.

"We are giving a service to people who don't have the freedom and democracy that we all enjoy," he said.

Critics, though, argue that relatively few Cubans listen to Radio Marti, and even fewer can actually see TV Marti, despite the nearly $600 million the U.S. government has spent on the two operations since the mid-1980's.

"It's just not a good bargain for the taxpayers, it's not doing us much good, " said U.S. representative Jeff Flake, a Republican from Arizona. "The trouble is it just doesn't reach the Cuban people."

Difficult signals to find in Cuba
Throughout Havana, and much of the rest of Cuba, TV antennas of all shapes and sizes, and in varying degrees of repair, fill the sky. But, most Cubans can only watch programs strictly controlled by the Cuban government.

While an illegal cottage industry has sprung up to receive and quietly distribute pirated DIRECTV satellite programs from the United States, it's done at the risk of arrest and imprisonment during police crackdowns.

The Cuban government has also installed sophisticated electronic jamming equipment to override unwanted radio and TV signals.

For those reasons, TV Marti is difficult to find in most areas of Cuba, especially around Havana where the jamming efforts are concentrated. In an apartment there, the Garcia family gathered around an old television set and tried to find the U.S. station by switching to the channels, but outside the Cuban government broadcasts could only find snowy images on the screen.

"It's a very weak signal," said John Nichols, a professor of communications at Penn State University, and a long-time critic of Radio and TV Marti. "All Castro has to do is sneeze on it, and it's badly disrupted."

Arnaldo Coro, a Cuban professor at Havana's Jose Marti International Journalism Institute, claimed the Radio Marti signal has also fallen victim to "physics" and "Cuban ingenuity."

"Cuban engineers have been able to develop the way of using the same radio frequency channels in such a way as to absolutely block the presence of the foreign station from coming into the Cuban territory," he said.

Is the signal getting stronger?
To combat the Cuban signal-jamming efforts, TV Marti now uses aircraft fitted with special electronic broadcasting equipment to fly north of the Cuban coast and beam its signal to the island. This is believed to be much more effective than the previous method of using an aerostat balloon tethered in the Florida Keys.

TV Marti also contracts with a Miami-area TV station to run its evening newscasts so they can be included in the DIRECTV satellite package, in the hope that at least some inventive Cubans can see the U.S. government programming that way.

Standing before a map of Cuba, Mascaro, the chief of staff, pointed to areas in northern Cuba outside Havana where, he insisted, the TV broadcast signal can be seen. "I think now with these new broadcast platforms that we have--the planes and so forth--I think that audience got substantially larger," he said.

"We have phone calls, e-mails, we even have pictures of people watching TV Marti, it's pretty amazing," he said.

A report to Congress, however, based on a June 2005 telephone survey in Cuba suggested a much bleaker picture. It showed respondents in fewer than one-percent of Cuban households reported seeing TV Marti during the past year.

Radio Marti fared a bit better, with nine-percent of respondents saying they had heard its broadcasts during the year. However, the report also said Radio Marti listenership had decreased over the past 15 years, especially after the Cuban government obtained "more effective shortwave jamming equipment from China."

At Penn State, Nichols argued the TV and Radio Marti broadcasts are not only expensive but harmful to the U.S. image abroad. "They're getting zero bang for their buck," he said. "It's counterproductive to U.S. foreign policy interests. It's embarrassing ourselves to the rest of the world, and we're in violation of international law by broadcasting it."

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