N E W S

Havana.  March 16, 2007

WHILE the United States is accumulating debts and experts are predicting a perilous deterioration of the budget crisis, the fiasco of Radio and TV Martí – that cannot even be seen – has now cost the taxpayer more than $500 million.

Since its creation in 1985, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) – the mother-ship of Radio and TV Martí – has constituted a mechanism for corruption to which various politicians are fairly closely linked, as a Congress commission should be able to verify when it investigates, at the initiative of representatives Bill Delahunt and Jeff Flake, this branch of Voice of America.

However, the commission need only observe, by analyzing the history of this CIA creature, that throughout its 22-year existence, its only result has been to offer sinecures and funding to Batista fanatics linked to the Bush clan, who tolerate, plan or sponsor the use of terror against Cuba.

A report published exactly one year ago by the Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), a respected Washington-based think-tank, showed how several attempts to reduce the lavish OCB budgets clashed with “massive recriminations and even open threats from the deadly politicians of Miami” led by the Diaz-Balart brothers and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

Thos tantrums on the part of the trio of politicians could perhaps be explained by a “brilliant strategy” based on the contributions they receive, COHA noted.

It went on to say that through an alchemic process, hundreds of thousands of dollars in private campaign contributions to the White House and Congress members are transformed into hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds for programs passed by Congress used to finance anti-Castro groups.

When the corrupt Salvador Lew resigned from his post as OCB director after countless criticisms, his godfather George W. Bush chose current director Pedro Roig to replace him, a man just as corrupt as his predecessor.

With exemplary calm, Lew explained away his departure by saying he had health problems, without making the slightest reference to a report by the Inspector General that showed the indiscriminate contracting of a number of his buddies, all of them characterized by their links with the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship.

It has since been learned that among the most distinguished beneficiaries of the dozens of “juicy tidbits” distributed by Lew, we find:

• Olga Connor, columnist at El Nuevo Herald, who “charged” for two cultural programs, each one hour long, the “modest” sum of $45,770.

• Armando Pérez Roura, notorious member of the Alpha 66 and Cuban Unity groups.

• The late Rafael Díaz-Balart, former deputy minister of Governance during the bloody dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and the father of the afore-mentioned Congressmen.

• Nancy Pérez-Crespo, eminent Miami ringleader who shares the mike with her friend Ninoska (Lucrecia) Pérez-Castellón, daughter and wife of Batista terrorists, and director of the terrorist Cuban Liberty Council.

In order to secure the post – with a salary of $132,000 per annum – Pedro Roig did not have much to offer except his friendly links with Jorge Mas Canosa, founder of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) and Radio Martí that George Bush Sr. sponsored when he was a high-ranking member and subsequently director of the CIA.

At the beginning of the 1960s in Fort Benning, Roig and Mas were trained for dirty warfare in secret installations as part of the CIA’s Operation 40, with international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, and Félix “The Cat” Rodríguez Mendigutía, the CIA officer who was to order Che’s murder.

Born in Santiago de Cuba, just like Mas Canosa, Roig arrived in Florida as a child in 1960 and joined the Batista plots that abounded at that time among the émigré ranks.

A survey carried out at the request of the U.S. government showed some months ago that audience figures in Cuba for the radio station are at an all-time low. With respect to TV Martí, Salvador Lew himself acknowledged years ago that it is virtually “off the air.”

However, the last straw was recently revealed by The Chicago Tribune: years after he bade his farewell due to corruption, Lew is still on the list of members of the OCB leadership… just like one Charles Tyroler, an intelligence official from the Reagan administration who died in 1995.

For his part, Luis Zúñiga Rey, executive member of the CLC and personal friend of George W. Bush, annually receives $100,00 as a member of this very same phantom body.

The Chicago daily recalled how Pedro Roig has contracted his wife’s nephew as head of personnel and is paying a former client of his as scriptwriter for a comedy show. Something Roig did not deny.

The most ridiculous act of the year, in 2006, was the purchase of an EC-130 military plane worth $10 million, whose only function was to confirm the dogma of TV Martí’s invisibility. It is not known where this expensive piece of equipment is at this time.

In the course of the year, it was also discovered how the OCB paid a significant number of journalists who, locally, are the ones who write most about Cuba. Among these individuals we find Pablo Alfonso, who gobbled up $175,000 just like that, and the pseudo-intellectual and fugitive terrorist Carlos Alberto Montaner, who does not deny living off subsidies from the U.S. intelligence apparatus.

The first ridiculous act of 2007 is without doubt the conferring of $182,500 and $195,000, respectively, to Radio Mambí, WAQI-AM (710), and Azteca América, WPMF-TV 38, for the broadcast of programs on the two moribund stations. Both enterprises, of course, are linked to members of the local mafia.

Simultaneously, “El Chema” Miranda – who was Program Director at TV Martí until last November – confessed in a criminal court in Miami to having received $112,000 in bribes from a production company that he himself had contracted.

To top it all, Fabio Leite, director of the Radiocommunications Office at the International Telecommunications Union, announced that illegal radio and television broadcasts from the United States to Cuba are unacceptable.

It has been predicted that Radio and TV Martí and its network of buddies will receive $37 million this year, unless the Delahunt-Flake Commission manages to destroy this mafia refuge in Congress.