Journalists from Radio Martí, a US-funded news outlet aimed at communist Cuba, were in the middle of interviewing a Cuban activist in Miami when their faces fell suddenly. They had just been ordered closed by the Trump administration, the crew learned in an email. The profile of the activist, Ramón Saúl Sánchez, known for leading protest flotillas to Cuba, was scrapped. “They were very confused,” Sánchez said. “They said, ‘We think we’ve been terminated. We need to leave.'”
President Trump did in a flash what the Castro brothers in Cuba couldn’t do in four decades: he took a news station that had long drawn the communist regime’s fury off the air. Radio Martí became the latest in dozens of programs and agencies in the US government to fall to the massive cost-cutting carried out by Trump and his adviser, Elon Musk.
Radio Martí had been dogged by a reputation as an outdated relic of the Cold War, a bloated boondoggle where politically influential people found jobs for their relatives. It spent tens of millions of dollars a year producing what critics called one-sided, right-wing screeds against the Cuban government, and was repeatedly mired in journalistic and corruption scandals that were the focus of Congressional reports.
Its television station, TV Martí, was so thoroughly blocked on the island that it was called “No See TV.” But in recent years, a leaner operation with a crop of fresh recruits under new management was making serious inroads on social media platforms, like Facebook and YouTube, the agency’s data shows.
Following budget cuts by the first Trump administration that trimmed its staff and funding by about 40%, veteran journalists and filmmakers were hired to revamp the newsroom for the digital age. With short video clips posted online, Radio Martí was attracting millions of readers and viewers a year, the network’s data shows, just as Cuba underwent the largest mass migration in its history, suffered days-long power outages, and an economic crisis unlike anything seen in decades.
But the question remains: With Cuba cracking down on dissent and jailing its citizens for critical Facebook posts, and with the nation facing its most difficult period in 66 years under communism, has Radio Martí put out its last broadcast? “The website was blocked in Cuba. The TV signal was blocked, the radio signal is blocked,” said Abel Fernández, the outlet’s digital and social media director who lost his job last week. “But the people are reaching the content on social media. What we are doing is important, and it matters to people.”
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