Castr-ated: the Bush administration's aversion to dealing with Cuba is reducing our influence on the island--just when there's a chance to encourage change.

AuthorKurlantzick, Joshua

The Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB) sits on the side of a highway just outside Miami International Airport. OCB coordinates Radio and TV Marti, which are designed to offer accurate, objective news to ordinary Cubans, as an alternative to the relentless propaganda of the state-controlled media outlets. The office is supposed to be one of the key tools in the Bush administration's effort to lay the groundwork for a democratic Cuba. But in its corruption and mismanagement, it has come to resemble the Coalition Provisional Authority that helped doom our efforts in Iraq.

OCB's director, Pedro Roig--a veteran of the Bay of Pigs invasion, and a prominent member of the local Cuban community--had no media experience when he took the job in 2003. According to newspaper reports, Roig has hired his wife's nephew as his chief of staff, and has hired a friend who's a convicted felon for another position. And in February, Jose Miranda, a former program director at TV Marti, pled guilty to accepting more than $100,000 in bribes from a vendor doing business with the channel.

The problems didn't start with Roig's tenure. A 2003 internal inspector general's report slammed the office's leaders for failing to follow standard contracting procedures, employing inappropriate hiring practices, and overpaying contractors. The report also found that OCB "lacked programming quality control structures," noting that the office's director at the time, Salvador Lew, had dismissed the internal committee designed to review new programs.

Nor is OCB required to show that Cubans are actually watching or listening--and it appears that few are. The Castro government blocks TV Marti, and much of the programming is glaringly unsophisticated: crude caricatures of the Havana leadership, for instance, or rambling monologues by Miami exiles. (The inspector general found that "OCB was not using research or internal review mechanisms to guide its programming decisions.") One independent study found that only 9,000 Cubans--or .08 percent of the total population--tune in to the channels.

OCB has never been a model of efficiency, but at least during the 1990s it operated with some federal oversight. A high-level presidential advisory board convened regularly throughout the Clinton years. But according to the inspector general's report, the board has not met since Bush took office. And the Chicago Tribune recently reported that one person listed as a current member, Charles Tyroler, actually died in 1995.

Under Bush, OCB has developed into an assembly line of pork that rewards the most virulently anti-Castro activists, and helps keep Miami's Cubans in the president's camp, while doing little to increase U.S. influence in Cuba. "It's a political patronage organization," says one Cuban American leader. "People [in Miami] won't attack Cuba policy because they are on the government dole."

Still, none of these glaring problems have prevented OCB's growth since Bush became president. In 2006, the administration and the GOP-led Congress poured some $37 million into the office, a $10 million increase from the previous year. (The new Democratic Congress recently announced its intention to hold hearings investigating mismanagement and corruption at OCB.)

The office's ineffectiveness is symptomatic of the broader failure of the Bush administration's Cuba policy. Since 200l, the United States has applied its ideological obsession with confrontation to the government in Havana, discarding the Clinton administration's approach of cautious engagement and returning instead to a "regime change" policy championed by Florida's hardest-line anti-Castro Cuban Americans. Even worse, despite the stirring rhetoric, the policy has often appeared more focused on maintaining Cuban American political support in Florida than on bringing genuine change to Cuba. "All this talk about getting tougher on Cuba, but then all the money spent is just political pork in Miami," says the same Cuban American leader.

In other words, the Bush approach has been determined by a mixture of neoconservative doctrine and the cold calculations of domestic politics. The result has been an ineffective policy that has reduced America's ability to influence events on an island just ninety miles off the coast of Florida--and at the crucial moment when a weakening Fidel is attempting to hand off power to his brother Raul. That loss of influence has damaged American interests in Cuba-perhaps compromising national security--and has undercut the United States' ability to help the Cuban people create a more open, democratic country. Says the Cuban American leader: "The chance for...

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