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The Case for TV Marti
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16167 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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6 / 1989 |
1,934 Words |
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Peter Jones
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Cuba's most popular radio station is a U.S. government-owned station based in Washington and Miami known as Radio Marti. Named after Jose Marti, the hero of Cuba's independence struggle against Spain, Radio Marti went on the air in Spanish on May 20, 1985. It was created by act of Congress to provide the people of Cuba with an objective and alternative source of news, primarily about their own country, but also about the world outside.
Whereas the Voice of America's objective is to present information about the United States to the world, Radio Marti's mission is more limited. Since Fidel Castro took power 30 years ago, the press, radio, and television have been devoted exclusively to selling the Communist Party line. "Marti" tries to fill in the yawning gaps in information about Cuba and the outside world left by the island's controlled media and attempts to correct the resulting distortions of reality.
A survey by Hill and Knowlton taken in 1987, two years after Radio Marti went on the air, indicates that more than 70 percent of Cuba's adult population listened to Radio Marti more than to any other station; 86 percent of the sample said they tuned in at least occasionally. Radio Marti's own audience research group believes that since then listenership has increased. In 1988, as many as 8 out of 10 Cubans may have listened daily.
Ricardo Bofill, a prominent Cuban dissident now in exile in Florida, says: "It seems to me there will come a time, with respect to the problems existing in Cuba today, when we will have to talk about the time before and after Radio Marti went on the air. At long last, there is the ability to respond to the monologue Fidel Castro has been holding with the Cuban people."
How is it possible for a radio headquartered in Washington to become Cuba's most popular station? Radio Marti's primary asset is the hunger of the Cuban population for reliable news and propaganda-free entertainment. News is Marti's most popular program.
When Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev visited Cuba in early April, he found that average Cubans knew a good deal about glasnost and perestroika. They had heard about it from Radio Marti, despite the Cuban Communist Party's concerted effort to stifle debate on the new, more human face of communism in the USSR and Eastern Europe. As he made plain before, during, and after Gorbachev's visit, Castro does not believe in glasnost and perestroika for Cuba. A planned demonstration in favor of Gorbachev's policies, timed to coincide with his visit, was quashed by Cuban police, who preemptively arrested its organizers. By reporting these developments, Marti makes it very difficult for Castro to avoid the subject of liberalizing his own regime.
Marti has 58 correspondents across the United States and around the world--but not in Cuba, where the station is referred to as "the enemy" by the government. For news about what is going on inside Cuba, the station depends on a talented research department. The researchers monitor Cuban publications and radio, interview newly arrived exiles, and rely on information from the million-strong Cuban community in the United States. Cubans first heard of the extent of their country's involvement in the Angolan civil war from Radio Marti. And the increasing incidence of AIDS on the island was first reported by Marti. The regime had attempted to cover
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