Radio and TV Martí are roundly criticized by Senate panel
By Jean-Guy Allard
Radio and TV Martí lie when they broadcast information without basis, admits a report by the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The panel recommends that both stations be removed permanently from Miami and relocated in Washington, so they may be integrated “fully” into the propaganda apparatus of Voice of America.
In addition to deceiving their public, which denies them all credibility, both stations use an “offensive and incendiary language” that disqualifies them.
After 18 years, Radio and TV Martí “have failed to make any discernible inroads into Cuban society or to influence the Cuban Government,” the committee confesses, as it acknowledges the real objective in all its operations of meddling, carried out under the pretext of “advancing democracy” and “defending human rights.”
The report, issued last week, recommends merging the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) with Voice of America, the U.S. government’s official propaganda radio.
The commission, headed by Senator John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), found that “problems with adherence to traditional journalistic standards, minuscule audience size, Cuban Government jamming, and allegations of cronyism have dogged the program since its creation.”
Oddly, the committee says that “competition from domestic Cuban radio and television stations” is an important obstacle to attracting a Cuban audience from abroad.
The report says that “about 30 percent of respondents in recent polls said they watched CNN en Español, which […] appears to undercut the need for an alternative news source such as TV Martí.”
The committee recommends that both stations be urgently removed from Miami, stressing the need to hire, in the most balanced way possible, personnel that will provide a depoliticized and professional “product.”
The Kerry report refers to Alberto Mascaró, a cousin-in-law of Pedro Roig, director general of Radio and TV Martí, who was hired – thanks to his relative – as director of Voice of America’s Latin American service.
The document reports in detail how, “in February 2007, the former director of TV Marti programming, along with a relative of [an unidentified] member of Congress, pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to receiving nearly $112,000 in kickbacks over a three-year period from a vendor receiving OCB contracts. The former OCB employee […] was sentenced to 27 months in prison and fined $5,000 after being found guilty of taking as much as 50 percent of all monies paid by TV Marti for the production of television programming by vendor Perfect Image.”
The Congressional report does not mention that Roig – a former director of the Inter-American Military Academy of Miami – was trained by the CIA in Fort Benning, along with international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, as a hired killer in Operation 40, which led to the failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs.
Incredibly, the two stations of anti-Cuban propaganda have about 170 employees and a budget of $34.8 million in 2009. That corrupt mechanism of job distribution for the “partners” has filched $500,000 from taxpayers in recent decades.
“Radio and TV Marti have been more about employing embargo proponents, paralyzing US-Cuban relations and perpetuating an anachronistic Cold War standoff than they have been about furthering American interests or triggering change in Cuba,” said Steve Clemons, chief of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, reflecting a widespread opinion among Americans.
Jean-Guy Allard is a Canadian journalist who writes for Granma. From 1971 to 2000, he was an editor and reporter for Le Journal de Montreal and Le Journal de Québec.
