When the Servants Cry: US-Funded Anti-Cuban Media are Pleading for Money

By Randy Alonso Falcón on March 19, 2025

First it was the media funded by USAID, then those that received money from the NED howled; now Radio and TV “Martí” itself have fallen on the list of cuts; the counter-revolutionary media apparatus, at the service of the United States, is in a state of despair in the face of the Trump administration’s measures.

A breed of freeloaders

The anti-Cuban industry, or “the industry of evil” as Francisco Aruca called it, has been a space where hundreds of characters and organizations in the US have thrived for almost 7 decades.

From the Batistianos and Masferreristas, to Mas Canosa and the Cuban-American National Foundation, Gutiérrez Boronat and his so-called Cuban Democratic Directorate, and other specimens of the worst kind, right down to the horde of YouTubers who today pay for their hatred on social media, US taxpayer money has been squandered in Miami and beyond – even in Madrid, Prague and San José – under the banner of the “struggle for Cuba’s freedom”.

In all these years, dozens of media projects have been attached to this cash cow, born within the Miami organizations themselves (to have another source of income paid for by the US budget) or created expressly to make the anti-Cuban communication campaign more profuse. Some were born during the first wave of the Bill Clinton presidency; others, in the more abundant and digital network forged and financed by the Obama administration, which identified the digital space as the stage for the symbolic dispute par excellence between our political systems: “… the web is part of a larger political battle.” (Ted Henken, 2011).

This new Washington Consensus for Cuba, which in the last decade redirected a large part of the funding for subversion towards programs implemented in the digital public space, continued later in the first Trump administration and the Joe Biden period.

Change in the rules of the game?

Watching the empire drown in debt, declining in economic, technological and military power, with serious internal fractures and numerous external challenges, the plutocracy in power today has seriously considered dismantling the state apparatus, with incalculable consequences and undesirable effects for part of the American elite and for sectors that have been suckling for years on the national budget.

With Elon Musk wielding the scythe, the White House has set out to cut hundreds of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in spending from the deficit-ridden public purse. USAID, NED and structures of the US State Department, which have squandered US money on thousands of failed programs in various countries, have been cut down to size.

Perhaps the oldest, most failed and rotten of these programs are those aimed at Cuba; a nation against which billions of dollars have been spent without being able to overthrow the Revolution, although it has filled the pockets of a few loudmouths in Miami.

When presenting his administration’s actions to Congress after barely a month and a half in office, Donald Trump listed among the ridiculous projects to be eliminated the one and a half million dollars earmarked for rebuilding the anti-Cuban media monstrosity.

The message was clear, but the amount listed by Trump was pure deception. It is not known if the president’s advisers did not want to put into perspective the ridiculousness of the situation with Cuba or if they did not want the US press to remember the hundreds of millions that were squandered in the previous four years of Trump.

Between 1990 and 2018, US administrations allocated $45,030,183 for “Media and free flow of information” projects against Cuba. That does not include the hundreds of millions spent on the misnamed Radio and TV Martí. (3)

In the first Trump era, these funds were focused on financing a cluster of digital publications, created during the time of his predecessor, which reproduce like spores the matrices that are imparted by media such as CiberCuba and the pathetic show of Otaola with his website Cubanos por el mundo (Cubans around the world). Also, to sustain an army of haters on social networks, who earn crumbs by sticking to their computers all day long handing out prizes, punishments and offenses, like a machine of digital mud.

As revealed by the American journalist and researcher Tracey Eaton, in October 2020, USAID awarded $410,710 to the Asociación de Noticias Digitales (ADN Cuba) to promote human rights in Cuba.

In those four years (2016-2020), other cogs in the anti-Cuban media machine received large sums directly from federal funds. Diario de Cuba pocketed $1,320,000 and the infamous Cubanet got $1,350,796 to distribute its “news” and support the troop of censors and virtual harassers that accompany them.

With both hands

During the Biden administration, the abundant financial flow to anti-Cuban media continued unabated.

Before the freeze on funds, the Pan American Development Foundation (PADF) had an active grant approved in 2023 and valid until September 2025, for $2 million, for “democracy programs in Cuba for independent media and free flow of information.”

According to USAID’s own statistical sources, in 2023 the agency dedicated a budget of $9.5 million to programs on Cuba. While in 2024, USAID graciously handed over a total of $2.9 million to these dependent media outlets alone.

For example, on September 30, 2024, USAID approved a budget of $1,085,895 for ADN Cuba, the media front created to promote manipulated and harmful information against Cuba. This program renewed a previous fund of $1.5 million that USAID allocated to ADN Cuba during the 2022-2024 period.

Since 2020, ADN Cuba has received a total of $3,072,123 from USAID, of which it has spent less than half, according to its reports. The destination of the rest of the funds is unknown to date.

The thirty-something year old Cubanet received $500,000 from USAID in 2024 alone. They have stated that the disappearance of these funds “has affected our ability to support the work of our collaborators on the island. Without the support of organizations like Cubanet, these journalists will not be able to continue doing their work…”

It is understandable why the editors and employees of these sites are whining and making half-hearted complaints about the unforeseen cut in funds.

When the NED stops giving you a free ride

Among the most whining on social media are the members of the editorial team of El Toque, a publication that was born in Cuba in 2014, with US payments outsourced through Radio Netherlands International and which later moved to Miami to suck directly from the teat.

There, its main director, José Jasán Nieves, created the company Media Plus Experience Inc, which was hired by the US Embassy in Havana to monitor the media, for which it received $24,000 in payment for services on January 31, 2023, according to a documented investigation by Cubainformación.

That same year, in September, they would receive another payment of $27,000 (to finance El Toque) for the alleged development of social networks.

The Spanish media’s investigation also points out that on August 11, 2023, the State Department awarded that company $50,000 to promote professional developers and artistic talents.

In November 2022, the El Toque boss boasted on social media about starting to run the Martí Verifica program on the Radio y TV Martí digital platform; an excellent example of the services this character provides to the United States government, which is the direct owner of these means of propaganda against Cuba.

One of El Toque’s most frequent financiers is the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), a CIA front created during the Reagan era.

It is known that the State Department, through its Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL) awarded a grant to the NED for $6,172,839, to be executed between September 27, 2022, and September 30, 2025, for “programs to promote democracy, political pluralism, independent media and political activism in Cuba.

El Toque, while manipulating exchange rates in Cuba as its main communicational objective, received several payments amounting to $292,369 from September 2024, through the companies Mas Voces Foundation and Media Plus Experience.

In turn, the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) – which has also just been cut back – awarded a contract to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies Inc, with a start date of November 8, 2024, until November 11, 2025, aimed at training and providing financial support to “artists, activists, journalists and independent writers from Cuba.”

Poynter has worked with El Toque on the development of chatbots for platforms such as WhatsApp, Telegram and Messenger, designed specifically for Cuban audiences.

The International Fact-checking Network fund, of the Poynter Institute, on its website, lists the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and the Open Society Foundations among its financiers, and through this channel El Toque receives more than $50,000, supposedly to support its fact-checking program.

Following the freezing of funds by the US government, El Toque has issued a desperate call to its readers for financial contributions to sustain it, while announcing that it will lay off half of its staff (15 people) and cancel “dozens of temporary contracts” with freelancers. It is not known whether the team that updates currency exchange rates at will is among those laid off.

Eloy Viera, part of the “El Toque” team, has taken to social media to complain about the chop that Trump and Musk have given him, with a letter from Marco Rubio. According to him, the main audience for these media is in Cuba, a country where the population faces extreme economic difficulties. “The models of press sustainability that are applied throughout the world are not applicable in Cuba. That includes advertising and subscriptions,” said Viera, who also whispered the Miami risk: ”The costs of living in exile are much higher.”

Misnamed….

The new news that is rocking the Miami media sewer is that the most expensive, failed and corrupt communications project in the history of the United States has reached an impasse. Since Monday, March 17, the offices of Radio and TV Martí have been closed to their employees.

The misnamed Radio Martí was born in the middle of the Cold War, in 1985, as an imitation of Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, attempting to subvert the order in Cuba from the airwaves. The Reagan administration doubled down by founding TV Martí five years later.

On Friday night, Trump instructed his administration to reduce the functions of several agencies to the minimum required by the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service Act: including the United States Agency for Global Media; the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at the Smithsonian Institution; the Institute of Museum and Library Services; the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness; the Community Development Financial Institutions Fund; and the Minority Business Development Agency.

The White House decision affects Radio and TV Martí, but also the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, among other entities, all under the supervision of the United States Agency for Global Media (USAGM).

As a group, USAGM employs some 3,500 workers with a budget of $886 million in 2024, according to its latest report to Congress.

On Saturday morning, former presenter Kari Lake, whom Trump appointed as the agency’s senior adviser, wrote on the social network X that employees should check their emails because of Trump’s cutbacks.

In support of the order issued by the US president, USAGM issued a statement saying that “this agency is beyond rescue” and is “irretrievably broke”, which is effectively a death knell.

“From top to bottom, this agency is a gigantic rot and a burden on the American taxpayer – a risk to this country’s national security; and it is irretrievably broken. While there are bright spots within the agency, with many talented and dedicated public servants, this is the exception rather than the rule,” the statement said….

And very corrupt

Radio and TV Martí have cost the US public purse some 800 million dollars. It had around 100 workers between federal employees and contractors. Of the 46 professional employees registered on the federal payroll, all receive salaries of over $100,000 per year, despite the evident poor quality of their content.

The abysmal journalism and rampant manipulation that has prevailed in the anti-Cuban propaganda machine was reflected in a content audit report by a panel of experts that determined, in 2019, that the Office of Broadcasts to Cuba produces both “bad journalism” and “ineffective propaganda” and […] “there is little or no attempt to elicit a response or provide counter-information.”

“Well-established standards of objectivity are routinely ignored in favor of propagandistic communication tactics,” the panel said.

Another US government report, in July 2014, revealed that Radio and TV Martí suffered from ‘low morale,’ ‘lack of transparency, of administrative rigor,’ ‘security breaches,’ and a ”case of theft of property.” The report contains 34 pages of criticism of this project and is signed by John M. Jones, of the Office of the Inspector General, who carried out an audit of the US government’s Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB).

The commission of inspectors reviewed the accounts of Radio TV Martí, recommended attention to the vendors and the elimination of “covert” transactions; and also detected irregularities in travel expenses (per diems or allowances), which are mainly pocketed by its managers. The report also expresses concern about the lack of control over technological equipment, and refers to some specific incidents such as the loss of equipment worth more than $25,000.

In January 2015 it was revealed that the OCB had paid a total of $4,087,706 to Phoenix Air Group, the contracting company that owned Aero Martí, an airplane that did not fly anywhere because it had been stranded in a warehouse for more than a year, from June 1, 2010 until that date.

The waste also reached the network; the space where Radio and TV Martí gambled that they would have influence in Cuba. To do this they created Piramideo, a social network aimed at sending millions of text messages to Cuba. Although the project was a failure, its creator, Washington Software, received $4,321,173 from June 2011 to July 2014.

Other subsequent projects continue to bet on the use of new technologies for subversion and propaganda in the face of the failure of radio and TV broadcasts. The Florida-based weekly Miami New Times documented the operations on Facebook to create fake profiles and troll farms funded by the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), which administers and directs broadcasts from the United States to Cuba.

The 2019 report by the experts states that Radio and TV Martí’s broadcasts and publications “openly encourage opposition to and hostility towards the Cuban Revolution in all its social, political, cultural and economic aspects. Almost any criticism is allowed and they make it with a rhetorical and ideological approach unchanged since the hottest days of the Cold War. It failed then, and it is failing now.

The ideologues in the service of imperialism, when they founded the misnamed Radio and TV Martí, thought that these broadcasts would be as effective as those made by Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty to the countries of Eastern Europe, in the sense of favoring political and ideological subversion to destroy the Cuban Revolution, but it backfired: They are neither seen, heard nor read in Cuba; they have only served to drain millions towards a band of crooks and mercenaries of the paid word.

And so?

Over the years, the Martí stations faced some budget cuts, controversies surrounding their directors, plans to merge with the Voice of America and criticism of their journalistic quality. At all times, the Cuban-American congressmen from South Florida managed to keep them operational.

Their television programming remained on the air for decades, although it could not be seen on the island due to the Cuban government’s interference with their signals. In recent years, the television programming, which was mainly watched in Miami, was phased out as the Bureau focused on promoting the online news site Martí Noticias and video content for social media.

In 2021, ten U.S. lawmakers called on the Joe Biden Administration to increase the budget for Radio and TV Martí and the programs created “to promote democracy in Cuba.”

According to the document at the time, this media outlet “breaks the regime’s information blockade to disseminate necessary and reliable information to the Cuban people,” said Mario Díaz-Balart, Marco Rubio, Rick Scott, Albio Sires, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, Alex Mooney, Anthony González, María Elvira Salazar, Nicole Malliotakis, and Carlos Giménez.

“We are concerned that further cuts will result in reductions in the federal workforce and damage to OCB operations at a time when the people of Cuba need information from the outside world and from their fellow citizens on the island,” the congressmen and senators said.

The letter emphasized that “the US has supported democracy programs in Cuba since 1996, and fiscal year 2008 (the end of W. Bush’s term) was the highest level of funding for the Cuba democracy program, with $45.7 million.”

A week ago, the cutbacks department headed by Elon Musk included the lease agreement for the Radio and TV Martí headquarters in Miami among the targets to be “rescinded”. Canceling the lease on the Jorge Mas Canosa building would save $5.32 million, according to the DODGE website.

Will he now think of opening his big mouth to Marco Rubio?

Time and depth

Some Republicans have accused the Voice of America (VOA) and other publicly funded media outlets of being biased against conservatives, and had called for their closure as part of the efforts of tech billionaire Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency to downsize the government.

So far, Musk’s DOGE has cut more than 100,000 jobs in the federal civilian workforce of 2.3 million members, frozen foreign aid, and canceled thousands of programs and contracts.

On Saturday, Musk played down the cuts to USAGM. “While this global government propaganda agency is closed, it has been temporarily renamed the Department of Propaganda Everywhere (DOPE),” he wrote on X.

It is impossible to predict how long the freeze on funds for the anti-Cuban media machine will last. As with all Malthusian monstrosities, the strongest are sure to survive and the weak will disappear. But Musk’s scythe has served to show the degree of servility and dependence of these media on federal funds from Washington, and the inefficiency and corruption that accompanies their actions.

Randy Alonso Falcon is a Cuban journalist who is the General Director of IDEAS Multimedios and the Cubadebate web portal, he is also the anchor of the popular Cuban Television program “Mesa Redonda”.

Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English