Trump fulfills Fidel Castro’s lifelong dream by silencing Radio Televisión Martí

It’s the summer of 2023, and a U.S. Coast Guard HC-144 Ocean Century aircraft takes off from the Opa-locka Air Force Base, northwest of Miami, on a day of clear skies and calm seas. For five hours, the crew will patrol the coast of southern Florida and, taking care not to violate national airspace, will reach a point about 20 miles north of Cuba. It is being called the largest exodus of all time, which by that point had reached nearly one million Cubans in two years. Although the U.S. government has scrapped laws that protected them, they continue to navigate the nearly 90 miles between Havana and Miami on homemade rafts.

At some point during the journey, the aircraft crew spotted a boat crammed with 23 people. Journalist Ricardo Quintana of Radio Televisión Martí, invited by the Coast Guard, captured the discovery on camera: a speck of life in the middle of so much sea. “I watched the plane’s monitors with a lump in my throat,” recalls Quintana, 65. “The image has been immortally etched in my memory, like a silent shadow that never fades.” It’s one of the journalist’s treasured coverages, one of many in 26 years of work at a media outlet that, along with Voice of America, Radio Asia, and Radio Free Europe, has suspended its activities for the first time in 40 years as part of the crusade launched by the Donald Trump administration against the Agency for Global Media (USAGM), which together employed around 3,500 workers and distributes news to some 427 million people in nearly 50 languages.

Quintana refuses to believe that this is a dismantling of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB), which oversees the work of Radio Televisión Martí. The journalist, who has garnered six Emmy Awards for his work, believes that if the Cuban regime still exists, there’s no reason for Radio TV Martí not to. “The genesis is still in force in a totalitarian system that censors, restricts access to information, and punishes those who try to broadcast news independently,” says Quintana, who recently retired. “If the closure is carried out, it would be a goal for Havana, which, from the beginning, has described the broadcasts as ‘counterrevolutionary and illegal’ and has called for it to be shut down.”

What will happen next with Radio TV Martí remains to be seen. But with this measure, Trump has fulfilled a lifelong dream of Fidel Castro: silencing a media outlet opposed to his government that broadcast from Miami and, since its creation on October 20, 1985, had managed to break the media siege he had imposed on Cuba. The Republican’s order has meant that, for the first time in almost four decades, Radio Martí will not reach Cuban homes, nor will its website publish the denunciation of a political prisoner on the island, nor testimony about an episode of repression against dissidents by the government of Miguel Díaz-Canel.

This isn’t the first blow to Radio TV Martí, but it is the most significant. In the final year of Trump’s first presidency, the outlet saw its budget cut from about $29 million to $12.9 million and laid off more than 100 employees. Until mid-month, it operated with more than $25 million annually and 68 employees. But on March 14, the president signed an executive order suspending several media outlets that received federal funding, claiming they were no longer useful to him, promoted the agenda of the radical left, and significantly harmed state coffers.

Kari Lake, Trump's appointee as senior advisor to USAGM, which had a budget of $886 million in 2024, asserted that it was an agency tainted by "waste, fraud, and abuse" and accused it of having committed massive national security violations. "This agency is beyond saving," she said.

Some of its employees, who are now on administrative leave, told EL PAÍS that the suspension had taken them by surprise. First, the lease for the Jorge Mas Canosa building in Miami, where Radio TV Martí is headquartered, was canceled as part of Elon Musk’s efforts to monitor every cent, and which he considered wasteful. This decision saved his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) $5.32 million. Then came the layoffs of some staff, some contractors (40%), and other federal employees, who received an email informing them of their dismissal. One of them was Abel Fernández, who served as digital director of the Martí Noticias website and was a federal employee until March 6. He says he didn’t expect such a decision because Martí's management was “very satisfied with the work I was doing.”

The news was also unexpected for the audience, and even for some Republican members of Congress such as Mario Díaz-Balart, María Elvira Salazar, and Carlos Jiménez, who have promised to fight for the repeal of the measure.

Havana’s war against the “enemy’s radio station”

Radio Martí was created in 1985 with the approval of the Cuba Broadcasting Act, promoted by Jorge Mas Canosa, president of the Cuban American Foundation. It enjoyed broad bipartisan support and the backing of then-President Ronald Reagan, who asserted that the initiative had a clear objective: “To break Fidel Castro’s monopoly on news and information within Cuba.” According to Reagan, for the first time in 25 years of “communist domination,” the Cuban people could begin to “hear the truth.”

For Castro’s regime, it was always a thorn in their side. First, because it appropriated the name of José Martí, arguably the most important icon of the Cuban revolution. The late broadcaster Moisés López, who voiced the first broadcast to Cuba, recalled that, on that day, Mas Canosa handed him the microphone and said: “Here, so you can remove the arrow from your heart.” From the outset, and in the absence of other media outside the Havana monopoly, the station served as a link between Cuba and its exiles, and vice versa.

Wilfredo Cancio Isla, a Cuban journalist who directed Noticias de Radio TV Martí between 2017 and 2018, says that in the 1990s, the station enjoyed considerably high audience ratings. “The appeal wasn’t just due to the news content, but also to the entertainment segments in music, comedy, and radio soap operas, featuring leading figures who were censored in Cuba,” he recalls. “There’s no doubt that Radio Martí managed to reach a popular audience, and the government saw it as a worrying threat to its news monopoly.”

From the United States, the station broadcast on shortwave and mediumwave on the 1180 AM frequency, which could be heard in Florida and Cuba. A kind of "radio-electronic" war immediately broke out: while the United States did everything possible to broadcast, Cuba tried to interfere with and block a station they considered "illegal" and essentially "anti-Cuban." The Cuban government even denounced its existence to the UN's International Telecommunication Union.

It is said that in urban areas of the island, a kind of beep could be heard when trying to tune in, but in rural areas the signal was better. Radio TV Martí was so demonized in Cuba that people played it clandestinely. Listening to it was a manifestation of disobedience, and even dissent. Cancio recalls that many “listened to it more quietly.” “They called it Radio Casualidad (Radio Coincidence), because in more or less formal conversations, so as not to assume they could hear the station, many people would say: ‘I was somewhere and by chance they had Radio Martí on.’”

Although there are no records of anyone being arrested or convicted for listening to the station, doing so placed you in the crosshairs of the Cuban political police or the so-called Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. “Homes where Radio Martí was listened to were marked as problematic,” Cancio notes. “That changed rapidly at the pace imposed by everyday life. Other alternative sources of information emerged, and control mechanisms also crumbled amid the country’s general deterioration.”

During those years, Radio Martí informed the Cuban people of events that would otherwise have remained obscure, hijacked by the Castro narrative: the 1987 desertion of Brigadier General Rafael del Pino from the Cuban Air Force and his subsequent landing, along with his family, at the Boca Chica naval base in Florida; the tragic sinking of the 13 de Marzo tugboat in 1994, which killed 41 Cubans; the Maleconazo in Havana, which gave rise to the so-called rafter crisis of the 1990s; the downing of the Brothers to the Rescue planes by the Cuban government in 1996; the war in Angola; the so-called Black Spring of 2003 and the trials of 75 prisoners, and the nascent Ladies in White movement that same year. More recently, the outlet has covered the most important anti-establishment protests and given voice to dissidents and political prisoners across the island.

TV Martí appeared in the 1990s, but according to some interviewees, there is no confirmation that it has been seen inside Cuba. Later, with the arrival of the internet, a digital version would also arrive. For years, the outlet has been the target of criticism from both sides: some argue that it was born to please wealthy exiles; others say it already fulfilled its purpose during the Cold War years and that its target audience — Cubans — barely watched it; and the outlet’s journalistic excellence has also been questioned.

In recent years, Radio TV Martí has become more professional and diversified its newsroom, expanded its coverage, and broadened its reach within Cuba through social media content and the growing presence of the internet on the island. Its loss, its journalists agree, would not only leave dozens of people and their families who depend on it in limbo, but would also be a great loss for the Cuban people. “The work of Martí Noticias is essential to its audience, which is the Cuban people,” insists Abel Fernández. “I am hopeful that this situation will be reversed, and I hope that all employees can return to Martí soon.”

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