VOICES
TV Marti Has No Viewers — It's Time to Shut it Down
In January, Columbia Journalism School professor Richard C. Wald and I, and our wives, traveled through much of Cuba. I asked people we encountered there what they think of TV Marti, the U.S. government’s television station that’s supposed to beam an uncensored view of the news to Cubans. I raised the question in Vinales in the west, in Havana (TV Marti’s main target), Cienfuegos, Camaguey, Trinidad, and Santiago de Cuba in the east. And I found nobody who’s ever seen it.
My unscientific research echoed the findings of a far more reliable study, conducted in August 2001 for the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees Radio and TV Marti. It asked one thousand Cubans if they had watched TV Marti in the past week. Nine hundred ninety-seven said no. In the year 2000, no one reported watching the station’s UHF broadcasts. An earlier study found that nine out of ten Cubans had never even heard of TV Marti.
Congress established TV Marti in 1989, while the cold war was still raging. With ingenuity and at great expense, its transmitter was mounted on a balloon tethered 10,000 feet above Cudjoe Key, Florida. Because the Cuban press is a tool of the state, TV Marti, named after the great Cuban independence hero Jose Marti, seemed at the time to be a worthwhile U.S. investment. Alas, it has turned out to be the world’s most spectacularly unsuccessful station, with the worst cost-per-thousand viewership of all time. TV Marti goes on the air at 3:30 a.m. and signs off at 8:00 a.m. every day. It operates when nobody watches because international broadcast rules require that the U.S. not interfere with Cuban broadcast transmissions. To ensure that not even Cuban insomniacs tune in, the Cuban government jams TV Marti so that no picture shows up on the screen.
The Cuban people, like people in poor countries everywhere, are great television fans. They have a choice of two government channels (three in Havana), filled with sports, novellas, documentaries, educational programs, government-controlled news, and long speeches by Fidel Castro. CNN is available only in tourist hotel rooms, which most Cuban citizens are prohibited from entering. Cuba is changing fast, however. The Cubans we talked to yearn for a wider choice of TV programming, which is bound to come in the new digital age. Individually owned satellite dishes are forbidden, but we could see them dotting the landscape, apparently in violation of the law. Internet access in Cuban homes is severely limited, but is becoming more widely available in offices and institutions.
American taxpayers pay heavily for this TV station with no audience. As Senator Max Baucus of Montana said in the Senate in October 2000, “For nine and a half million dollars in the coming fiscal year, $139 million over the last decade, another hundred million dollars over the next decade, we ask Cubans to get up in the middle of the night to watch snow on a blank screen. This makes no sense at all.”
The senator is right. It is a folly imposed on us by politically powerful Cuban exile groups that neither party wants to offend. About seven years ago, former CBS News president David Burke, who then had the job of overseeing Radio and TV Marti and was concerned about their reputation for news bias, asked ex-Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee, Columbia Journalism School dean Joan Konner, a professor at a Florida university, and me to study Radio and TV Marti’s programming and report on their accuracy and fairness. Since neither Bradlee, Konner, nor I spoke Spanish we couldn’t figure out why we were chosen. What would happen, we asked, if we concluded that the influential chairman of the President’s Advisory Board for Cuba Broadcasting, Jorge Mas Canosa, should resign? He was founder and leader of the Cuban American National Foundation, the hard-line exile organization, and it seemed unlikely that Cubans would believe that any news organization under his direction was impartial or trustworthy. The answer we got was, “No way.” An election year was coming. Florida is a key state and nobody would risk the enmity of the Cuban exile community. The three of us went home and Bradlee and I sent Burke letters saying thanks but no thanks. Our study never got under way.
Now that the federal budget is awash in deficits, it’s time
to stop wasting money on TV Marti. Instead, we might try paying
Miami radio stations to broadcast honest news to Cuba, as President
Kennedy and his FCC Chairman Newton N. Minow arranged to do during
the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. Or maybe we should offer Fidel
the TV Marti money if he’ll allow his citizens free access
to CNN, Voice of America, or any other news service they choose.
In the digital age, even the most benighted dictator must realize
that he cannot insulate a whole people from the expanding flow
of worldwide news.
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