Leaders Show Fear of Media's Power

August 14th, 2006 | The Miami Herald
by Frank Calzon

Having dithered for years about the cost, efficacy, means and impact of uncensored broadcasting to Cuba via TV and Radio Martí, the Bush administration finally took the steps needed to overcome jamming and successfully broadcast directly into Cuba.
What was the reaction of Gen. Raúl Castro, now in control of the island as his brother Fidel recuperates in an undisclosed location? He ordered enforcement of a long-ignored ban on satellite-dish TV antennas.

After all, the BBC, Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty fed the aspirations for freedom in Central Europe throughout the Cold War. Raúl and Cuba's generals will have none of that manna filling the airways and falling into living rooms in Havana or Santiago. What's more, Cuba has considerable international support for its fears and loud denunciations of ''subversive, counterrevolutionary'' television and radio programming -- from the North Korean, Chinese, Burmese and Belarusian governments, none of which want their people exposed to the danger of uncensored broadcasting.

Where is CNN founder Ted Turner when America really needs him? It was Turner who wooed Fidel Castro and won approval for CNN to open a news bureau in Cuba. In the two decades of its operations, the only Cubans getting a peek at its broadcasts are those making beds and cleaning rooms in hotels reserved for international tourists, but that's another story.

Total control
Since opening its Havana news bureau, CNN has become a subsidiary of Time Warner. But if Turner is not available, who will persuade Raúl that homemade, or assembled, satellite dishes pulling in Mexican soap operas really pose no great danger to a Cuban government that claims the overwhelming support of its people?
The Castro brothers control Cuba's newspaper, magazines and every TV and radio station. For years the Castro regime has been jamming competing broadcasts from the United States. Now that the United States has employed the technology necessary to overcome the jamming and a growing number of Cubans have built (and concealed) satellite dishes, Raúl and his generals are outraged.

By all accounts they're ready for a search-and-destroy operation that quite possibly will send those tuning in off to prison.
Of course, if the Castro brothers weren't so fixated on what the U.S. beams at Cuba, they might recognize that -- if satellite dishes were legal and readily available -- Cubans might choose to watch Al Jazeera, TeleSur and similarly progressive international networks that from time to time remind their viewers about the achievements and advantages of living under Stalinist-style regimes. Indeed, that is the trouble with freedom: It's so, well, free.

To be sure, the Castro brothers understand better than most Americans the power of broadcast media. In the late 1950s when Castro revolutionaries were hiding in the Sierra Maestra, Fidel Castro's Radio Rebelde was extremely influential in generating opposition to the Batista dictatorship in Cuba as well as abroad. Fidel Castro describes U.S. broadcasts aimed at Cuba as ''electronic warfare,'' and despite great shortages of virtually every staple and luxury of life in Cuba, government helicopters used to jam U.S. broadcasts have never lacked fuel or spare parts.

North Korean model
During the long Cold War, West Germans and East Germans received TV broadcasts from across the Berlin Wall. Hungarians watched Austrian TV. Lithuanians and others watched TV from across the Gulf of Finland. What irony that while Cuba's ''maximum leader'' remains in a hospital, his brother and the other generals in charge -- at least temporarily -- worry less about an American invasion than the ''destabilizing, subversive'' broadcasts of Mexican soap operas and American TV news.

For the world outside Cuba, there is still no evidence that Raúl Castro, Fidel's chosen successor, has it in him to introduce any democratic or economic reforms -- even if Fidel dies and he takes complete control.

The Cuban government appears far more comfortable with a North Korean model of successive repression. That is not irony; it's Western Hemisphere tragedy.

Frank Calzon is Executive Director of the Center for a Free Cuba, a non-profit organization based in Washington, D.C., that promotes human rights and democracy for Cuba.