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Cuba tries to quash TV satellite dishes

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published February 9, 2007

HAVANA - The U.S. government strives mightily to stamp out intellectual property theft all over the world - except for Cuba, where it tries to broadcast anticommunist messages to anyone able to see U.S. programming through illegal satellite dishes.

Now the Cuban government is striking back, warning TV signal pirates that they face stiff fines and jail terms.

The Communist Party newspaper Granma dedicated a full page Thursday to an account of the discovery and prosecution of four men who sold or maintained the sort of satellite TV systems believed to be hidden on thousands of rooftops in Cuba.

It came three days after Cuba denounced a U.S. government strategy that began in December to use Florida television stations to get around Cuban jamming of TV Marti - a move that has made the U.S.-funded station, aimed at undermining Fidel Castro's government, accessible to thousands of Cubans who could never see it before.

By law, TV Marti is barred from broadcasting propaganda inside the United States, but anti-Castro advocates believe they've found a loophole - that the Florida stations can be used to reach the island as long as any U.S. viewing is "inadvertent."

Cubans themselves aren't saying much about the programs. This may be due to the fact that commercial U.S. signals provide a rich alternative to the programming on Cuba's four state channels, whose offerings include courses in mathematics, nightly 90-minute progovernment debates and local baseball.

Miami-based commercial Spanish language stations are popular, and their news and political programs - many of them created by Cuban exiles - are often as stridently anti-Castro as TV Marti's programming.

Granma said Thursday that many of those U.S. channels, along with TV Marti, transmit a message that is "aimed at destroying the revolution and with it the Cuban nation."

[Last modified February 9, 2007, 00:44:52]