Journalists from Radio Martí, the U.S. federally-funded news outlet aimed at communist Cuba, were in the middle of interviewing a Cuban activist in Miami on a recent Saturday when bleak looks suddenly came over their faces.
The 40-year-old news agency, designed to send uncensored news in Spanish into Cuba, 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,” Mr. 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 U.S. government to fall to the massive cost-cutting carried out by Mr. Trump and his adviser, Elon Musk.
The broadcaster had for years been dogged by a reputation as an outdated relic of the Cold War, a bloated boondoggle where politically influential people found jobs for their relatives.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 percent, 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.”
Mario Díaz-Balart, one of the three Cuban American members of Congress, told Telemundo that he would work with Mr. Trump to restore Martí.
Asked whether Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who is Cuban American, supported the broadcaster, the State Department said the president was elected to make tough decisions, and “the situation remains complex and fluid.”
As a U.S. senator from Florida, Mr. Rubio was among a bipartisan group of lawmakers who signed a 2022 letter demanding a “through justification” for planned layoffs.
The White House declined interview requests with Kari Lake, who is overseeing the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which includes Radio Martí.
Mauricio Claver-Carone, President Trump’s adviser on Latin America, said he believed some semblance of Radio Martí would be saved.
“I think you can appreciate the historic importance of something and the role it plays while recognizing it needs to be updated toward the world we live in — it’s not the 80s anymore or the 90s or even early 2000s,” he said. “We can look at this as the great Martí reset.”
Ronald Reagan created Radio Martí in 1983, at the height of the Cold War, at the urging of a prominent Cuban American exile leader, Jorge Mas Canosa. It was meant to penetrate censorship on the island, where media is tightly controlled by the government and independent journalists generally wind up in prison or in exile.
It went on the air in 1985, and later expanded to include television. But as recently as 2019, an internal audit commissioned by the U.S. Agency for Global Media said it produced “bad journalism” and “ineffective propaganda.”
The audit came months after a widely criticized piece calling billionaire philanthropist George Soros “a nonbelieving Jew of flexible morals” led to the firing of several journalists. Another top official was caught falsely claiming more than $35,000 in expenses.
The Castro brothers detested Radio Martí’s programming, and former President Raúl Castro famously demanded it be taken off the air. “The United States maintains programs that are harmful to Cuban sovereignty, such as projects to promote changes in our political, economic and social order,” he said in 2015, after President Obama normalized relations between the two nations.
As the internet became widely available in Cuba, critics wondered whether Martí was even necessary.
But Martí had a distinction that set it apart from the other pro-democracy stations like Voice of America and Radio Free Europe that were also silenced last week: the dictatorship it targets is still in power.
“Radio Martí was designed for a different time in the 1980s in Reagan’s battle against the Soviet Union and communism, but the fact is that Cuba never transitioned, and now we live in a digital world,” said Ted Henken, a Baruch College professor who studies Cuba’s media landscape. “Martí has had to reinvent itself three or four times.”
After several shake-ups and scandals, Mr. Henken said the operation, which he recently visited, appears to be leaner and more professional. It scrapped the TV station and although its annual budget was set at $25 million, it was spending $17 million, according to several employees who were not authorized to speak publicly.
In the past two years, audiences started to surge. According to Tubular Labs, a video analytics firm, with six months left in the fiscal year, Martí has already doubled its viewership with 14 million views on YouTube so far this fiscal year, and another 84 million on Facebook, where it has more than 1 million followers. About 80 percent of their audience is in Cuba, editors said.
Mario J. Pentón, a Cuban journalist who moved to the United States a decade ago and began working at Martí a year ago, was told his contract would end this month. He said he was proud of the work the outlet did, particularly in informing the public of approaching hurricanes during times of massive power outages that limited even the Cuban government’s ability to issue storm warnings.
Martí has won eight Emmy awards.
“I think it has a future, because I think the mission is more important than ever,” Mr. Pentón said. “Cuba is going through its worst crisis, and in the middle of this crisis, this information blackout debacle only benefits the regime.”
Martí’s top news editors said they were not authorized to speak publicly about the Trump administration’s cuts.
Ms. Lake, a former television journalist whom Mr. Trump chose as a special adviser to the United States Agency for Global Media, last week called the agency rotten to the core. On X, she suggested that employees check their emails.
Shortly afterward, employees received emails saying they were on paid administrative leave until further notice, then they were locked out of their email accounts. New employees who were on probation had already received termination notices, and journalists who were on contract were also let go.
Although she provided no examples, Ms. Lake said in a news release that she found “massive national security violations, including spies and terrorist sympathizers and/or supporters infiltrating the agency.”
She added that “waste, fraud, and abuse run rampant in this agency and American taxpayers shouldn’t have to fund it.
Mariya Abdulkaf contributed reporting.
