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06/17/09 - Committee on Foreign Affairs (Washington, DC) - TV Marti: An Idea
Whose Time Has Come and Gone

Statement of Philip Peters
Vice President, Lexington Institute

Before the Subcommittee on International Organizations,
Human Rights and Oversight

Committee on Foreign Affairs
U.S. House of Representatives

June 17, 2009


Mr. Chairman, members of the Subcommittee:

I appreciate the opportunity to join you today to discuss TV Marti in the
context of U.S. policy toward Cuba.

I support public diplomacy in the large sense of that term, encompassing
information and ideas that our government directs to foreign publics;
scholarship and visitor programs that give foreign nationals chances to
live, study, and work in America; and policies that allow free, unregulated
contact between Americans and people overseas. Vigorous public diplomacy is
an expression of American confidence, and it's an underrated, cost-effective
foreign policy tool that boosts our influence around the world.

TV Marti is a classic instrument of public diplomacy, an attempt to go
beyond the radio signals of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio
Liberty, and Radio Marti, and to bring television programming to our
neighbors in Cuba.

Last March 27, TV Marti marked 19 years on the air. It also marked 19 years
without a discernible audience in Cuba.

TV Marti has been broadcast from balloons floating in the air over Florida,
from satellites in outer space, and now from an airplane that flies figure
eights in U.S. airspace south of the Florida Keys.

Nineteen years of effort have not overcome Cuba's jamming. I don't think it's
possible to find a broadcast engineer who will explain how a television
signal that originates more than 50 miles from its audience, can ever
overcome jammers that are located amid the target audience. We cannot
repeal the laws of physics.

Among all the difficult decisions this Committee makes in its jurisdiction,
I would think this would be the easiest: to pull the plug on TV Marti. Lots
of good intentions and hard work cannot overcome the fact that this project
is, and has long been, an affront to the American taxpayer.

Some might argue that ending TV Marti would be a concession to the Cuban
government, a sign of retreat. By the same token, one could argue that a
pitcher who can't locate his curve ball is backing down by switching to
sliders and change-ups. Both arguments are absurd - TV Marti is a tactic,
not an end in itself, and it is certainly not a test of anyone's fortitude
with regard to communism in Cuba.

If anything, TV Marti itself manifests weakness - it's a communication
program that communicates with no one, and it wastes $10 million per year
that could be used in other ways actually to communicate with Cubans. Only
in government could such a program prosper for 19 years, into its fourth
Administration and its eleventh Congress.

"No se ve"

How do we know that TV Marti has no discernible audience?

There is evidence, but I urge you to start with your intuition.

First, have you ever heard of a TV station that has been on the air for 19
years, and where there is an active debate after 19 years as to whether its
signal reaches the audience? Every day people debate the quality of TV
stations, or their audience size, but we never debate whether a station
actually appears on your TV if you tune in. The United States government
has created the first TV station in history to achieve that distinction.

Second, has anyone ever heard an anecdote from Cuba about TV Marti
programming? I have heard none in 19 years, and have seen evidence of none.
That's not so in the case of Radio Marti. If one asks in Cuba, one does
find Cubans who have heard Radio Marti and have an opinion of it. Or we
recall that in 2002, for better or worse, Radio Marti broadcasts were said
to have provoked a famous incident at Mexico's embassy in Havana. There is
no similar story about TV Marti, and that should tell us something.

Now for evidence.

I cannot recall how many times I have asked Cubans in Cuba, all across Cuba,
about TV Marti and have received the same answer: "No se ve" ("It's not
seen"). For years, I have asked diplomats and clergy and journalists who
travel regularly around the island, and get the same answer. I recall a
conversation that a member of this Committee and I had with a dissident in
Cuba in 2004, where he asked about TV Marti and she called it "virtual TV
Marti." Other travelers to Cuba report the same results.

A report last March by the BBC's correspondent in Havana was typical: "I don't
know anyone in Cuba who has seen TV Marti," he wrote.

In August 2007, Cubanet reported on comments by a group of dissidents in a
videoconference; the report said they were in "consensus" that "work should
be done so that the [TV Marti] signal may fulfill its purpose." To me, that's
a slightly cryptic way of saying that the signal isn't seen.

Then last April, there was a more direct statement in a letter that the
dissident groups Todos Unidos, Unidad Liberal de la República de Cuba, and
Agenda para la Transición sent to President Obama. Those groups include
virtually all the dissidents with whom we are familiar. Their letter said
TV Marti's signal "simply does not reach Cuban homes."

In December 2003, the Broadcasting Board of Governors reported that its
surveys showed that TV Marti had a 0.3 percent audience share.

Last January, GAO reported that "the best available audience research,"
indicates that "Radio and TV Martí's audience size is small, with less than
2 percent of respondents to telephone surveys since 2003 reporting that they
had tuned in to Radio or TV Martí during the past week." By contrast, GAO
reported, "over 90 percent of telephone survey respondents said they watched
Cuba's national television broadcasts during the past week," and 60 to 70
percent report that they listen to three Cuban radio stations. Also: "OCB
[Office of Cuba Broadcasting] officials said that the quality of Cuban
television programming has recently improved and includes popular U.S.
programming (such as The Sopranos and Grey's Anatomy)."

And finally, I'll note that a 2007 report from the State Department
Inspector General disclosed that the U.S. Interests Section in Havana has
enlisted people at 15 sites throughout Cuba to monitor Radio and TV Marti.
These monitors' reports, the State Department says, provide a "bleak"
assessment of TV Marti - it "can rarely if ever be received."

What to do?

This reporting - from independent observers, from dissidents, from our own
government - leads to a clear conclusion that Congress stop funding a
program that has proven utterly ineffective for 19 years.

At that point, there are several options for the money you would save.

First would be to simply stop spending the money and to make a miniscule
contribution to attacking our national debt, which everyone's children and
grandchildren would appreciate.

Another option is to use the money to improve Radio Marti. That is a worthy
goal, but before spending the money there, I would urge skepticism on your
part. Radio Marti is changing to an all-news format, which may make its
operation less expensive. And it is not clear that improvements that Radio
Marti might need, such as newsroom management that is relentlessly committed
to balance and objectivity, require money to implement.

What I would urge is a fresh look by Congress and the Administration at our
public diplomacy goals with respect to Cuba, and at all the tools available
to achieve them.

I would urge you to begin that re-examination by recognizing that public
diplomacy is not a government monopoly. While our government has many good
public diplomacy programs, private Americans and American civil society are
also sources of American influence.

There is no more effective way to increase communication with the Cuban
people than to approve Chairman Delahunt's legislation to end all
restrictions on American travel to Cuba. This concept was at the heart of
the West's successful approach to the Soviet bloc when we supported the free
movement of people in the Helsinki accords; it was at the heart of President
Reagan's promotion of unrestricted exchanges with the Soviet Union. In the
first months after enactment, the flow of information and ideas on the part
of individual travelers and our nation's vibrant civil society -
universities, professional associations, humanitarian and religious groups,
cultural and sports organizations - would far outweigh the impact of two
decades of funds spent on TV Marti.

If TV Marti funds were to be redirected to programs related to Cuba, I would
urge you to look at the classic public diplomacy programs in the State
Department's Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. These are tested
programs with track records, and they have operated in many kinds of
political environments. They include a wide variety of exchange and visitor
programs in all fields, including programs that send American students and
academics abroad, and that bring foreign students here. If you estimate the
total expenditure on TV Marti at $10 million per year for 19 years, that
$190 million could have brought 7,600 Cuban students to America for one-year
study programs costing $25,000 apiece.

I would also urge you to look at the private sector. One example is the One
Laptop Per Child program, an educational program developed at MIT by
Professor Nicholas Negroponte. The program was driven by American ingenuity
and a desire to use the power of computing and network communication to
improve education around the world. The program developed its own laptop,
the XO, which costs about $200 and allows users to communicate with each
other through a wireless mesh network, so that all users in a local area are
interconnected. TV Marti's 19-year budget would have paid for 950,000 XO
laptops for Cuban children.

Those are three suggestions for increasing contact and communication with
the Cuban people. There are many more, and that is the goal that should be
kept in mind - the point of TV Marti, after all, was not to create a
television station - it was to increase communication with the Cuban people.

Other means of communication can easily succeed where TV Marti has failed.
Some may involve government spending, but at a time when communications are
increasingly being driven by citizens, not government or media
institutions - witness the wave of communication coming from audio, video,
and text via cell phones in the streets of Tehran in recent days - it is
more likely that the Congress can do far more to increase communication with
Cuba by taking away restrictions on American liberties than by taking our
tax dollars to spend on government programs.

"Civilized people everywhere have a stake in keeping contacts,
communication, and creativity as broad, deep, and free as possible,"
President Reagan said in 1984 at a conference promoting exchanges with the
Soviet Union. He had no illusions about the Soviet government: "The Soviet
insistence on sealing their people off and on filtering and controlling
contacts and the flow of information remains the central problem." But his
prescription was clear, and we would do well to follow it today with regard
to Cuba: "The way governments can best promote contacts among people is by
not standing in the way."