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“TV MARTI” mentioning the U.S. Dept of State was published in the Senate section on pages S8378 on July 15, 2005.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
TV MARTI
Mr. DORGAN. Mr. President, I point out an amendment I will offer to the Foreign Operations appropriations bill. Let me show a picture of something called Fat Albert. Fat Albert is an aerostat balloon. It is on a tether far up in the sky. The purpose of Fat Albert is to broadcast television signals into the country of Cuba to tell the citizens of Cuba that life under Castro, life in communism in Cuba, is a pretty awful life and you ought to aspire toward a democracy and here are all the good things democracy has to offer.
The fact is, the Cubans already know all that. That is why they get on rafts and risk their lives trying to leave. In any event, if they don't know that, they can tune into a Miami radio station 90 miles away. If they choose not to tune in to a Miami radio station, they can tune in to Radio Marti. That does work. It sends signals to the country of Cuba and people listen to it. But TV Mart does not work.
TV Marti doesn't get into the Cuban marketplace. The Cuban people can't see it, because the Castro regime jams the signals. We have now spent $189 million on TV Marti. We send television signals the Cuban people can't see. We spend $189 million. Apparently, someone feels better because we have wasted this money.
I had an amendment earlier this year to shut this down. Strangely enough, this Senate turned it down. I will give them the chance again on the Foreign Operations bill. I am going to take the money out of that bill, and we will vote on it again.
Why do the Cubans not see these signals? Because Castro jams them. The President is asking for $21 million more to send television signals to Cuba. They used to use Fat Albert. Fat Albert got loose at one point, meandered over into the Everglades. They had to find some grapple hooks to rescue him. But that wasn't enough.
Incidentally, for most of the time they have broadcast these signals, they broadcast them from 3:30 a.m. until 8:30 a.m. All were jammed. They decided to change that on May 20, 2002, and then they began to broadcast in prime time. An administration official from the State Department said this: We don't have any official evidence that the audience has increased due to the broadcast schedule change.
Chris Coursen, former chairman of the President's board of advisors on broadcasting to Cuba, says until 6 years ago, TV Marti used to do exit interviews with Cubans coming to the United States on rafts and so on to determine whether Cubans, in fact, watched TV Marti. It was clear from those interviews no one was seeing TV Marti in Cuba because Castro was jamming it. We get people coming off a raft. We say: Have you watched Television Marti? No, we can't see it. It gets jammed. What do we do? We keep spending money anyway. And they stopped doing exit interviews with Cubans coming here, because they didn't want to document the fact that nobody could watch TV Marti.
It is now not enough to do it by an aerostat balloon. We now have a specially equipped airplane flying once a week, a C-130, Commando Solo, which is a very special airplane designed for communications strategies in warfare. We have taken an Air National Guard Commando Solo, put it up 4 hours a week, and it still cannot overcome the jammers in Cuba. We went from spending money we don't have on things we don't need to send television signals to people who can't receive them, and then we went to airplanes.
Now the President wants to buy an airplane just for this purpose, buy a new one. The President wants to spend $21 million more sending a television signal no one can see. It is unbelievable. I want to see somebody vote to continue this funding and then go home and thumb their suspenders and crow about how they oppose Government waste. I want to see one person do that. If ever there was a demonstrated waste in Government, this is it. Everybody in this Chamber knows it. We will see whether finally this Senate will decide to shut down money that is spent that unwisely.
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