Grounded "Aero Martí" [TV Marti plane]

By David A. Fahrenthold

www.washingtonpost.com

CARTERSVILLE, Ga. — At an airfield in rural Georgia, the U.S. government pays a contractor $6,600 a month for a plane that doesn’t fly.
The plane is a 1960s turboprop with an odd array of antennas on its back end and the name of a Cuban national hero painted on its tail. It can fly, but it doesn’t. Government orders.
“The contract now is a ‘non-fly’ ” contract, said Steve Christopher of Phoenix Air Group, standing next to the plane. “That’s what the customer wants.”

The airplane is called “Aero Martí,” and it is stuck in a kind of federal limbo. After two years of haphazard spending cuts in Washington, it has too little funding to function but too much to die.
The plane was outfitted to fly over the ocean and broadcast an American-run TV station into Cuba. The effort was part of the long-running U.S. campaign to combat communism in Cuba by providing information to the Cuban people uncensored by their government.

But Cuban officials jammed the signal almost immediately, and surveys showed that less than 1 percent of Cubans watched. Still, when Congress started making budget cuts, lawmakers refused to kill the plane.
But then they allowed across-the-board “sequestration” cuts. And there was no more money for the fuel and pilots. So the plane sits in storage at taxpayer expense — a monument to the limits of American austerity. In this case, a push to eliminate long-troubled programs collided with old Washington forces: government inertia, intense lobbying and congressional pride.
The result was a stalemate. And a plane left with just enough money to do nothing.
“It’s hard to state how ridiculous it is” that the plane is still costing taxpayers money, said Philip Peters, an official in two Republican administrations and now the president of the Alexandria-based Cuba Research Center.
Peters said the plane’s broadcasts had “no audience. They’ve been effectively jammed, ever since their inception. And rather than spend the money on something that benefits the public . . . it’s turned into a test of manhood on Capitol Hill.”
This plane is a last remnant of a long, weird experiment in television broadcasting across the Straits of Florida. The plan was to broadcast uncensored news and commentary on a station named for Cuban patriot José Martí.

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The hope was that something boundless — American disdain for the communist regime of Fidel and Raúl Castro — could overcome something fixed. Which was the laws of physics.

Much of Cuba was simply too far over the horizon to get a strong-enough TV signal from aircraft flying in U.S. airspace. Still, the effort moved ahead.

“I am convinced that TV Martí will succeed,” then-Sen. Ernest “Fritz” Hollings (D-S.C.), a major supporter, said in 1989. “Castro likes to tout his revolutionary credentials,” Hollings said. “But he cannot begin to match the revolutionary potential of television.”

As it turned out, he could.

The first broadcast of TV Martí was March 27, 1990. It came in clear in Havana for about 20 minutes. Then the American signal — weakened by distance — was jammed by Cuban broadcasts on the same channel.

“ ‘La TV que no se ve.’ The TV that can’t be seen,” was what Cubans called it, said Fulton Armstrong, a U.S. official in Havana at the time. Another problem: The early broadcasts happened very late at night, to minimize interference with other Cuban programming. What people saw, Armstrong said, was “a moving shadow of an image of . . . something. At something like 4 a.m.”

The TV signal was first broadcast from a blimp called “Fat Albert,” suspended 10,000 feet over the Florida Keys. But there is weather at 10,000 feet. “Fat Albert” blew off into the Everglades in 1991. It was pulled frequently out of action to dodge high winds.

In 2005, it was torn to bits by Hurricane Dennis, and the government gave up on blimps. Instead, it tried planes.

First, there was a military C-130. It cost too much. Then came “Aero Martí” and a sister aircraft (now retired), smaller planes fitted with broadcasting antennas and flown in a figure-eight pattern in U.S. airspace near Key West.

Since these planes first flew in October 2006, they have cost taxpayers at least $32 million. That’s more than $12,000 a day.

But on Cuban TV sets, they didn’t make much difference. 

In 2008, according to the Government Accountability Office, a telephone survey found about the same viewership as had been reported in 2006. And in 2003. And in 1990. Less than 1 percent (after that, the U.S. government stopped taking the survey, declaring it was impossible to get valid data on Cuban TV habits).

But the planes kept flying.

The program was repeatedly protected from Washington budget-cutters by a coalition of Cuban American lawmakers and non-Cuban legislators from Florida. To them, what looked like the program’s worst problems were actually proof that it had to be saved.

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