MIAMI, Sept. 26 — Soon after Fidel Castro announced his mysterious illness in July, the Bush administration stepped up its anti-Castro television broadcasts to Cuba with a new $10 million system.
For the last two months, a twin-engine plane has beamed the signal of the American broadcast, called TV Martí, toward the island from over the Straits of Florida for four hours a day, six days a week, up from four hours of transmission from an Air Force plane on Saturdays. Because the plane flies at 20,000 feet, administration officials say, the Cuban government cannot jam the signal as easily as in the past, when a blimp tethered 10,000 feet over the Florida Keys did the transmitting.
But in interviews in the past two weeks, many Cubans said they still saw just snowy interference where the TV Martí broadcasts should be. About a dozen people in Havana said they still had never glimpsed the station even after the expanded airborne broadcasts began, raising questions about the usefulness of the $10 million expenditure.
Some said they would not watch the station even if they could, because they assumed that it would be biased.
“In my opinion, that is wasted money,” said a 35-year-old homemaker in Havana who, like all those interviewed, asked that her name not be used. “It’s propaganda.”
She and her husband said many Cubans tried to pick up commercial programs broadcast from Florida, but what they wanted was Spanish soap operas, not TV Martí.
A few Cubans in the interior of the island, away from Havana, said they were able to pick up the signal, but others said they could not.
Nonetheless, Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Republican of Florida, who has long championed TV Martí and its sister station, Radio Martí, said the government had received some promising anecdotal reports about the new plane, which started flying on Aug. 5.
“The U.S. has received reports from Havana and Matanzas that it is being seen every day,” Ms. Ros-Lehtinen said of TV Martí, “and it’s getting better as the equipment is being fine-tuned.” The government, however, has no hard evidence of the station’s popularity.
The federal International Broadcasting Bureau, which also operates the Voice of America, says the purpose of Radio and TV Martí is to broadcast “accurate and objective news and information” to Cuba, where news is tightly controlled by the government.
The stations, which have broad political support among Mr. Castro’s many opponents in southern Florida, hope to have legions of Cubans tune in to pro-democracy news and talk programs and others like “Office of the Chief,” a laugh-track comedy with Cuban exile actors playing dimwitted versions of Mr. Castro and his brother Raúl.
Cuban exiles in Miami do most of the writing and acting for TV Martí, which was moved here from Washington in 1996 after intense lobbying by exile leaders. On a recent episode of “Office of the Chief,” which TV Martí calls its most popular show, an actor playing Raúl Castro said he would mummify Fidel Castro when he died by wrapping him in the pages of a book by Karl Marx, then display him on Havana’s seaside boulevard.
The laugh track went wild.
For years, though, critics of the stations have called them overly blunt tools in what should be a nuanced campaign to promote democracy in Cuba.
“The really shrill, outrageous kind of stuff they broadcast has no credibility in Cuba,” said John Nichols, a communications professor at Pennsylvania State University who studies Radio and TV Martí.
Mr. Nichols said elected officials in Washington would not dare to anger Miami’s 350,000 Cuban-American voters by eliminating a popular anti-Castro program, even if it was largely symbolic.
“It’s a litmus test of support for a certain policy on Cuba,” he said. “Few right-minded politicians or government bureaucrats are willing to take that on. So essentially we’ve created a pork-barrel patronage system and the policy is hands-off.”
Both stations have been accused of shoddy journalism and hiring practices, especially since the move to Miami, where some say they are primarily a jobs program for hard-line exiles.
In 1999, the inspector general of the State Department told Congress that the stations had “problems with balance, fairness, objectivity and adequate sourcing that impacted credibility.”
Another inspector general’s report, in 2003, criticized the hiring practices and program quality at the Office of Cuba Broadcasting, prompting its director to resign. His successor, Pedro Roig, says he has improved Radio and TV Martí by hiring freelance professional journalists and broadcasting more news and youth-oriented programming like music videos. But this month, three journalists moonlighting at the stations were fired by El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language affiliate of The Miami Herald, after the newspaper’s publisher learned of the arrangement and called it a conflict of interest.
Rob Carr, the director of engineering services for the journalism school at the University of Florida, said airborne broadcasts could be easy to jam because the signal output from planes was generally weak.
Mr. Roig declined to be interviewed, but Joe O’Connell, a spokesman for the International Broadcasting Bureau, said TV Martí relied on correspondence from Cuba and reports from recent immigrants to gauge viewership. A telephone survey commissioned by the International Broadcasting Bureau in 2005 found that 13 people out of the 1,589 respondents had seen TV Martí in the past year. Mr. O’Connell said the real number was probably higher, because many Cubans are afraid to admit they watch the station.
In addition to the initial $10 million expense to begin the new airborne broadcasts, he said, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting has requested about $6 million a year to operate and maintain the plane. It is also replacing the blimp, which was destroyed in a hurricane last year.
Altogether, the Office of Cuba Broadcasting received about $38 million this fiscal year, up from $27 million in 2005. The office spends nearly $400,000 to broadcast TV Martí by satellite, a more reliable transmission but one that only a few Cubans with illegal satellite dishes receive.
Several Cubans interviewed said they saw Radio and TV Martí primarily as a source of income for well-connected exiles in Miami, a view shared by José Basulto, founder of Brothers to the Rescue, a strongly anti-Castro exile group.
“The joke goes on,” Mr. Basulto said. “They pay individuals who are instrumental in making the lives of United States politicians easier come election time.”
One man in Havana said his neighbor knew people who had seen TV Martí in Matanzas, a province east of the capital. Some reports suggest that the Cuban government focuses it jamming efforts in Havana.
Most of the Cubans interviewed said that while TV Martí remained inaccessible, they were able to receive Radio Martí, albeit with interference that sounded like heavy rain. Some said Radio Martí used to be an important news source — such as when the Cuban government regime sank a tugboat hijacked by would-be migrants in 1994 — but that many more options existed now.
Shortwave radios — which are not sold in Cuba but are smuggled in — can pick up Radio Canada, Radio Netherlands and the BBC, several said. Satellite dishes, while illegal and rare, can pick up television broadcasts from South Florida, Mexico and the Caribbean.