Martí-Noticias cheats U.S. law
MIAMI – The director of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, Carlos García-Pérez, is responsible for the multimedia operation that originates from Martí Noticias, involving radio, television, the Internet, mobile communications and social networks.
His strategy, now directed at Cuban-Americans in Florida, evades the law passed by the U.S. Congress that forbids the broadcast of programs funded by Congress to U.S. territory.
Every day, from the Hispasat satellite, through Directv, the Internet, and even the local MegaTeve channel, Martí Noticias violates the spirit of U.S. law, bombarding the émigré community with political propaganda, inculcating an ideology that does not reach the island directly but by rebound, through informal means.
García-Pérez, who was very active in the dissemination of the proxy web Psiphon, and more recently of the “Connect Cuba” project, should know that Psiphon, with its open code and GPL license, is no less than a program created by Citizen Lab (University of Toronto) thanks to the generous donations of software and technical support from Palantir Technologies, a mysterious company founded in 2004 with an initial investment of $2 million provided directly by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Palantir Technologies’ principal client is the U.S. government. It is an enterprise closer to the political society than to civilian society, so it would be naive to expect technical assistance from them to block in the Miami area the broadcasts of TV Martí, in accordance with the spirit of U.S. laws.
The psychological war against our community will continue down the path of illegality, benefiting the political factions that are most disassociated from our civilian society.
García-Pérez and his team know a lot more than we do about this covert plan. We are exposed to an illegal maneuver, unable to defend ourselves to any extent, because of the scant transparency of information about those pirate broadcasts.
Apparently, the agenda of Martí Noticias is to use the community as a springboard to carry its propaganda into Cuba through the human contacts on both shores, violating laws that define the activity of a federal medium regulated by the Federal Communications Commission.
TV Martí, with a history of technical failures, with unstable balloons, psy-war planes and ridiculous movements from VHF to UHF, has never been seen in Cuba, even though it costs millions of dollars a year – all of them out of our pockets.
Distance and the curvature of the earth does not allow the TV Martí signal to reach Cuba by air. When it does, it can easily be blocked, since it violates international law.
This led the Martí Noticias folks to think of sending a signal via satellite, but those in Cuba who illegally capture the signals of Hispasat or Directv don’t want to watch the boring and mediocre federal television. In the end, it seems they’ve decided to shoot at us all the propaganda they produce with the money from our own pockets.
If Cubans on the island tomorrow used the Psiphon proxy promoted by García-Pérez at TV Martí to navigate unfettered through the Internet, they would find not only sites of child pornography, terrorism and hatred for other systems, but also pages and pages of anti-Cuban propaganda funded with taxpayer money.
Thus, public opinion would be caught in a vicious circle where the disintegration and manipulation of the news would appear as uncensored information, but in effect it would be a mind-numbing package that would drown the love for pure reason that the true Cuban civilian society must observe.
