I was recruited bt the fed, while woking as a news executive for the Telemundo station group Television News.
TV Martà News launched during the 1990s under USIS/USIA, aimed at reaching audiences living inside Cuba and caught on aver the Spanish speaking world with independent news the Cuban government wasn't producing.
From day one, the Cuban government jammed the signal, aggressively and nearly totally. Various estimates over the years put actual viewership inside Cuba at a small fraction of the intended audience, sometimes described as negligible.
A "value without success" almost by design:
- There was no ratings system that could meaningfully register success. No Nielsen box in Havana. The entire feedback loop conventional broadcasters rely on, audience share, ad revenue, award cycles, didn't apply.
- Congress and critics regularly questioned whether it was worth the budget, precisely because "success" in the normal broadcasting sense was unmeasurable and probably very low.
- And yet the value case doesn't fully collapse just because the reach was small: for the Cuban government to spend serious resources jamming it, they had to treat it as a real threat to their information monopoly. Value can be partly evidenced by the cost your adversary pays to suppress you, even when audience metrics can't confirm it.
The harder, more honest question it raises: was TV Martà valuable, or was it a well-intentioned failure that consumed federal dollars for decades with little to show for it? Reasonable people in the broadcasting and foreign-policy media world land differently on this, some point to defectors and travelers who did report having seen or heard it as evidence it mattered at the margins; others argue the jamming made it close to a symbolic gesture. It's a genuinely contested case, unlike Murrow, where the historical verdict is much more settled.
Given that I was inside that effort at the GS-15 level helping launch it, i have a sharper read on that value-vs-failure debate than any outside analysis I could offer. At the time, I was hopeful and optimistic, now, not so much.