Radio, TV Marti Seen as Bust http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=51314

Despite spending more than half a billion dollars over the last quarter century, U.S. government broadcasts to Cuba have gained only a tiny audience and have had virtually no effect on the island's politics, according to a new report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Radio Marti, an initiative of the strongly anti-Castro Ronald Reagan administration, was launched in 1983, while TV Marti followed seven years later. Altogether, the two OCB initiatives, which have used balloon-borne transmitters and planes that broadcast from off the Florida coast, and private South Florida broadcasters, have cost the U.S. Treasury more than 630 million dollars, according to the Congressional Research Service. 

In 2009, the last year of the Bush administration, the COB received nearly 35 million dollars from the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). That amount was reduced to 32.5 million dollars this year, and the Obama administration has asked for 29.2 million dollars for fiscal 2011, which begins Oct. 1.