A Slim Hope for Radio Marti

For more than a decade, Jorge Mas Canosa, a Cuban exile in Miami, has been the chairman of the federal advisory board for Radio Marti and TV Marti, which spend about $25 million a year in U.S. tax money to beam news and other programming to Cuba. The original aim of the stations was to provide an alternative to communist Cuba’s broadcasting and newspapers, which operate under Havana’s watchful eye.

We have long been skeptical of Marti. But there is new hope for part of the operation now that Herminio San Roman, a respected lawyer from the Miami area with a passion for objectivity and no ideological zeal, has been hired as its director. San Roman could restore credibility to the news organization--if he is freed of the political yoke of Mas Canosa. TV Marti is still an expensive lost cause, mostly unseen in Cuba because of electronic jamming. (Most radio transmissions go through.)

Mas Canosa, a prominent leader of the opposition to Fidel Castro, is about to begin his 14th year as the board’s first and only chairman. Since he was appointed to a three-year term in 1984, he has stayed without a formal reappointment, a sort of chairman by default. The biggest problem, however, is not how long he’s been chairman but how he can be chairman at all in a tax-sponsored agency whose goal ought to be broadcasting to Cuba in an objective and credible manner, much like Voice of America; his intense political beliefs make conflicts of interest and interference inevitable.

President Clinton has the power to appoint a new chairman for the Marti board, and he should. It is not in U.S. taxpayers’ interest to provide a power base for a would-be politician in post-Castro Cuba.