50 Years Later, Who Wins and Who Loses

Although the Bush administration has requested another $20 million to fund Cuba programs for 2009, the Obama team will presumably slow the gravy train or review its contents and recipients.

Radio and Television Marti. The International Broadcasting Bureau spends around $35 million in taxpayer funds annually on these two stations, which transmit Spanish-language broadcasts to Cuba. In 2006 and 2007, the GAO found all manner of funny business at the Martis, which have received roughly half a billion dollars over the past 20 years. Known in Miami as "botellas" -- slang for pork-barrel sinecures -- the stations have long operated as gift baskets for Miami's political elite. For a period, the fathers of Miami Republican Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart, who champion funding for the stations, had their own shows on Radio Marti.

Because the Cuban government jams both stations' transmissions, Congress approved $10 million in 2006 to buy TV Marti its own airplane from which to beam its signal. Nevertheless, according to recent studies, listener- and viewership have declined as the Martis' programming has become progressively more shrill since their 1996 move from Washington to Miami. Cubans are keen for uncensored news of the world and their country, but they get all the screeds they need homegrown.

The 2007 GAO report found that the Martis had awarded more than $1 million in contracts to Miami's TV Azteca and Radio Mambi, renowned for its deep bench of anti-Castro bloviators, to aid transmission, bypassing federal contract-bidding procedures. More dubiously and perhaps in contravention of the Marti charter, the two stations have been running Marti's programming locally.

Bets are on that Obama's team will compel the Martis to professionalize their content and their bidding practices. They may also choose to bring the stations back under the umbrella of the Voice of America, to keep a closer eye and ear on them.

Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart. The Miami Republican does most of the heavy lifting and horse-trading in Congress to ensure that anti-Castro programs are amply funded. He has been a lifelong satellite around Planet Fidel: The two share a birthday, and Diaz-Balart is Castro's nephew by marriage, his most ardent foe and his would-be successor. As George W. Bush's quarterback, Diaz-Balart has dictated virtually all policy and staffing regarding Cuba. That will not be the case come Jan. 20.

The Cuban Liberty Council. This fiercely hard-line organization will no longer be arranging the place settings at the White House on Cuban Independence Day. Replacing it will be the CANF and the Cuba Study Group, an exile organization led by conservative but pragmatic Cuban-American businessmen.

The Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is likely to see its Cuban sails trimmed. OFAC's chief mandate is to enforce sanctions against countries harboring terrorists. But a 2007 government study found that 61 percent of the office's investigations since 2000 had been aimed at just one target: Cuba. Between 2000 and 2005, OFAC penalties for violations of the Cuban embargo represented more than 70 percent of all the penalties the office imposed. In 2004, a congressional hearing revealed that tax dollars earmarked for the war on terrorism were spent on tracking unauthorized travelers to Cuba. At the hearing, OFAC acknowledged that it had just four employees searching for the funds of Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein, as opposed to more than 20 full-time investigators charged with hunting down suspected violators of the embargo. American taxpayers had picked up the tab for OFAC's prosecution of a 75-year-old grandmother from San Diego who took a bicycling trip to Cuba, an Indiana teacher who delivered Bibles and the son of missionaries who traveled to the island to spread his parents' ashes at the site of the church they'd founded 50 years before.

Luis Posada Carriles. The new year isn't looking especially bright for the fugitive bomber and would-be Castro assassin, who has enjoyed safe haven in Miami for the past year. The Obama Justice Department might actually move on the evidence collected by the FBI and a federal grand jury -- seated for almost three years at a cost of millions of dollars -- reportedly tying Posada to a string of bombings in Cuba in 1997.

Carlos Valenciaga. Fidel Castro's secretary and longtime faithful aide, who solemnly announced Castro's health crisis on television in 2006, has fallen out of favor -- and out of a job.

La Revolución. Although a significant deposit of oil was discovered last year in Cuban waters, the country, one of the world's last Marxist outposts, is still struggling to pay its bills. And until dividends begin to trickle down to the kitchen table, the island will continue to hemorrhage young people, who have despaired of seeing promised reforms. An estimated 80,000 Cubans -- many of the country's best and brightest -- have left for the United States since 2005.

That's why Havana's premier dissident blogger, Yoani Sanchez, thinks that the revolution itself falls into the loser category. "Revolutions don't last half a century," she wrote in a December posting. "They always expire, trying to make themselves eternal. . . . Nothing will manage to raise it from the tomb and bring it back to life. Let it rest in peace."

bardachreports@aol.com

Ann Louise Bardach is the author of "Cuba Confidential" and the forthcoming "Without Fidel: A Death Foretold in Miami, Washington and Havana."