Radio TV Martí Dodges DOGE

In an Op Ed in the Miami Herald, Álvaro Alba, the deputy director of the Office of Cuba Broadcasting (OCB), celebrated how the outlet created 40 years ago to beam propaganda into Cuba has survived the DOGE axe.

Describing the station as “a lifeline to truth” for Cubans, he said the outlet “reopened its doors amid a sweeping transformation” this spring. He added: “None of this would have been possible without the consistent support of Cuban American elected officials who have fiercely defended OCB’s mission.”

Alba, a Miami-based Cuban American, claimed Radio y Televisión Martí content is now consumed by millions of Cubans. In reality the outlet has a small audience on the island, and has long been considered a pork barrel project benefiting Miami politicians and far-right ideologues like Alba, who took a salary of $183,702 last year, according to OpenGovPay. He has worked for OCB for more than two decades – but that hasn’t stopped him from looking for side hustles. In 2020, Alba was one of the founding officers of a non-profit media organization called Digital News Association (DNA), which shortly after received a grant from USAID of more than $400,000 (in 2019 and 2020, USAID’s Latin America bureau was run by fellow Cuban-American hardliner John Barsa, a Miami native who later became the agency’s acting head). Digital News Association has almost no digital footprint and seems to be an affiliate of the hard-line media outlet ADN Cuba (ADN is DNA in Spanish) – both are run by Cuban-American Gelet Martínez. Last September, Alba began trying to further cash in on his U.S. government-funded career, forming a company called Alba Media Consulting Corp. Its website offers little information about what it does or who its clients are.