Radio Martí and Cardinal Ortega

By Lorenzo Gonzalo

The Office of Cuba Broadcasting is an organ of the U.S. State Department, created for the purpose of sending radio programs to Cuba. As one might expect, the message in its programs aims to discredit everything the Cuban government does, at the same time that it justifies the actions that Washington takes against the island.

The main purpose of Radio Martí is to interfere with Cuba’s internal affairs under the cover of being a journalistic radio station. Although it is no secret that it is part of the State Department, the ordinary citizens – few of whom investigate in depth the nature of the news sources that mold their lives – think it’s just another broadcast medium.

Therein lies the poison of its news. With its presentations, Radio Martí puts on the table a poisoned lamb with which it aims to kill the minds of the good people who seek fair solutions to the Cuban situation, regarding the United States and its internal problems.
Recently, with total disregard for the truth and lacking all respect for journalistic ethics, the station took after Cuban Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino.

In an editorial that lacked elegance, especially for a medium of its kind that represents the State Department of the world’s most militarily and economically powerful nation, Radio Martí described the cardinal as a lackey.

Although the station hastened to say that it has its own opinions and that its statements do not adhere to Washington’s opinions, no analyst should doubt that the station must behave in line with the general guidelines of U.S. foreign policy and that any statement broadcast through its microphones is the responsibility of the United States.

For that reason, as soon as critical commentaries began to appear in newspapers like The Washington Post, the station hastened to remove from its Web pages the dirty and uninformative commentary.

Although Carlos García Pérez, director of the OCB, declared that it was not the opinion of the U.S. government and that its removal from the Web site was not due to the scandal it caused in newspapers like The Washington Post, the truth is that we all know that that opinion involves the government of the United States, which still hasn’t said a word about the statement from the radio station it owns.

The low ethics shown by Miami’s small but powerful groups of Cuban origin in their efforts to overthrow Cuba’s sociopolitical process have led them to behave and issue opinions that offend the very organizations that give them million-dollar sums every year to keep up their task of “combating the Castro dictatorship.”

We don’t know if that’s the case in this instance, but if the U.S. State Department does not comment regarding this, we’ll have to conclude that “silence implies consent.”
Without trying to make this comment sound like support for the government of Cuba, the reality is that, traditionally, Havana’s responses and acts in the handling of relations between the two countries have been much clearer, more elegant and a lot more aligned with international ethics than the behavior conducted by the North, a powerful but uncouth country that, as José Martí said, “despises us.”

At this stage of the Cuban political process, to call Cardinal Ortega a lackey is to unscrupulously confess that Washington does not want negotiated solutions to smooth the rough edges and misunderstandings with the government of Cuba and its sociopolitical process.

In fact, Ortega, with his patience and wisdom, has lifted high the name of the Cuban Catholic Church, attracting more people to its temples. With skill and elegance, he has contributed to reducing the tensions of a small group of Cubans who have had brushes and complaints with the Cuban authorities.

Among those efforts, we can point to the release from prison of people who, by mistake, ill will, confusion or delusions of grandeur, coordinated plans with the United States embassy in Cuba to destabilize the Cuban government.

The sin that the propaganda medium (run by the government of the United States) attributes to Cardinal Jaime Ortega Alamino is having described as delinquents a dozen or so people who occupied a church in Cuba shortly before the visit by Pope Benedict XVI.

Those who followed the events know that the people involved in that act had criminal background and others displayed mental disturbances. It is also known that the Church asked the authorities to remove the people from the place in a peaceful manner and treat them with the greatest respect, which indeed happened.

No charges were brought against any of them, something that surely would not happen in the United States if someone occupies a temple.

What this propaganda seeks and demonstrates is that the few groups of Cubans who interfere and make life difficult for their compatriots on the island only want confrontation, war and terror. That is why, among the things they say about Cardinal Ortega, they criticize his defense of reconciliation among Cubans.

If the U.S. government really wants things to change and wants to reach a stable relationship with Cuba, the first thing it must do is to stop this distasteful and mendacious propaganda that offends those of us who aspire to a world where the press is objective, not a den of upstarts and cheaters.

Besides, it should do so for moral reasons and because there are many of us Cubans who live inside and outside the island hoping for a world of peace that will allow us to built our future ourselves.

Lorenzo Gonzalo is deputy director of Radio Miami.