Winning hearts and minds: the importance of radio in the Cuban

revolutionary war

Cat Wiener

INTRODUCTION

In this essay I will examine the role played by the clandestine guerrilla radio

station Radio Rebelde in the success of Cuba’s 1959 revolution and argue

that it was because it formed an authentic and organic part of a popular

movement – and was recognised as doing so – that it was able to survive,

grow and have an impact on historical events. By way of contrast, I shall

briefly consider the very different ideology of some of the anti-Castro radio

stations subsequently sponsored by the United States.

Radio propaganda: ideology and subjectivity

Much has been written about the uses of radio for propaganda since the

earliest broadcasts. The Museum of Broadcast Communications

Encyclopedia of Radio admits that ‘It is difficult to say with any accuracy when

radio was first used as a medium of propaganda’, but suggests that many

authors date it to Lenin’s 1917 broadcast after the Russian Revolution,

announcing the beginning of a ‘new age’ and seeking to influence

revolutionaries in Europe.1 There is, however, general agreement that radio

began to be used for propaganda in Europe around the time of the First World

War, reaching maturation in the competing broadcasts of Nazi Germany and

the Allied forces in the Second World War. But it is important to note that the

prism through which ‘propaganda’ is analysed is in itself frequently subjective.

The author of the Encylopedia’s ‘Propaganda’ section, Robert Forstner,

defines his topic, rather sniffily, as ‘selective and biased information aimed at

indoctrinating, converting and influencing people’ – but by implication

considers it only something practised by ideological ‘enemies’ eg the Soviet

Union, Nazi Germany – while describing the BBC as demonstrably

1 ‘Propaganda by Radio’, Robert Forstner, p1114 Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Radio, Routledge 2003

1

broadcasting ‘the truth’.2 I would argue that all radio – indeed, all mass

communication – is at heart an ideological construct, embodying and

promoting a set of values and views, whether from a dissenting minority or

from the prevailing orthodoxy. The radio waves constitute a perpetual battle

for hearts and minds: it is simply that in the case of first the Cuban July 26

Movement’s Radio Rebelde and later the anti-Castro broadcasts of the CIA-

sponsored Radio Swan and US-backed Radio Marti this battle is overt.

‘Today, throughout the world’s radio spectrum, ardent opponents battle for the

hearts and minds of attentive publics…Indeed, over eighty countries daily

broadcast some 22 thousand hours of international programming to over 250

millions listeners throughout the world. In few regions of the world is this war

as intense as it is in the Americas between ideological rivals Cuba and the

United States’.3

The history of competing ideologies battling it out on the airwaves during the

20th and early 21st centuries is comprehensively examined by Lawrence C

Soley and John S Nichols.4 There is clearly an overlap between ‘propaganda

radio’ and ‘clandestine radio’. In her examination of popular and revolutionary

radio in Mexico, Mary E Beadle defines clandestine radio thus:

‘Clandestine radio stations are unlicensed transmitters that advocate civil

war, revolution or rebellion; they usually operate in secret…they are aimed at

the overthrow of a government by revolutionary forces or by another state

seeking to subvert an adversary without armed intervention’. 5

Soley and Nichols cite broad categories for propaganda radio, developed by

US intelligence analysts:

2 Forstner, p1118, Encyclopedia.3 Howard H Frederick, p1, Cuban-American Radio Wars: Ideology in International Communications, Ablex Publishing Corporation 1986. Obviously these figures pre-date the end of the Cold War.44 Clandestine Radio Broadcasting: A Study of Revolutionary and Counter-revolutionary Electronic Communication, Lawrence C Soley and John S Nicholls, Praeger 19875 Radio Nation: Communication, Popular Culture and Nationalism in Mexico 1920-1950, Mary A Beadle, University of Arizona Press 2000

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‘White’ radio stations: these operate legally and openly identify

themselves. Their mission is to propagandise. They give examples

such as Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. To this I would add

Radio Marti. The terms also refers to foreign service, armed forces and

similar above ground stations.

‘Clandestine’ stations are subdivided into ‘grey’ and ‘black’.

‘”Grey”’ radio refers to clandestine stations attributed to or purportedly

operated by dissident groups within a country…

‘Black stations’ are “broadcasts by one side that are disguised as

broadcasts by another”

‘Collectively, clandestine stations comprise the dark side of the spectrum’.6

But analysed from a revolutionary paradigm, the clandestine radio of the rebel

movement can be seen in a different light. For Ian Baucom, analysing the

writings of the Algerian anti-colonialist Frantz Fanon, the very act of listening

to clandestine radio broadcasts, in his case Voice of Algeria in the 1950s,

actively contributed to ‘a collective politics of anti-imperial nationalism’.7

Baucom reflects that ‘the radio…has been put in the service of anti-colonial

nationalists, post-colonial nationalists…but also serves the interests of empire

and imperial control’. 8

I shall also argue that, unlike the US-sponsored radio stations I shall consider

later, Radio Rebelde can claim what Nancy Lynch Street and Marilyn J

Matelski consider to be authenticity, for example in terms of location. For

example, while many ‘clandestine’ stations may claim to be broadcasting from

within the country, few actually do because it would be too easy for the

6 Soley and Nichols, p10-11, Clandestine Radio Broadcasting, p10-11. 7 ‘Frantz Fanon’s Radio: Solidarity, Diaspora and the Tactics of Listening’, Ian Baucom, p17, Contemporary Literature, Vol 42, No 1, Spring 2001, University of Wisconsin Press 20018 Ibid, p21

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government to close them down. But where – as for example in Cuba

between 1956 and 1959 – opposition forces ‘may be able to establish

liberated zones from which to broadcast’, then ‘the mere existence of an

indigenous station over an extended period of time is strong evidence of the

guerrillas’ strength and the government’s weakness and can contribute to the

fall of the regime’. They go on to stress that ‘Cuban exile groups broadcasting

from outside of the island do not have the same legitimacy as would the

sponsor of an indigenous station.’ The CIA’s Swan Radio, as we shall see,

was based on Swan Island, off Honduras.

Lynch Street and Matelski also reflect that ‘The existence of a clandestine or

other station broadcasting political propaganda, the type and location of the

station and the political circumstances within which it operates are more

important than any content it may broadcast’. They liken the post-Marconi

world to the period after Gutenberg’s printing press:

‘the possibilities for information, education, propaganda and international

diplomacy would be infinite, limited only by the philosophical direction of the

institution using the technology’. 9

1. AQUI RADIO REBELDE!

‘Radio Rebelde constituted a formidable weapon for the revolution. Its

broadcasts clarified, broadened and made concrete to the whole nation the

most far-reaching and resonant events in the armed struggle against the

Batista dictatorship…Each night, the air of the island thrummed to the radio

waves of the world of the Sierra Maestra, cascading down onto the citizens of

the plains and cities…’10

At the end of the film Soy Cuba,11 a dramatisation of the revolutionary struggle

from 1956-1959, the peasant who has long resisted joining the insurgents in

9 Lynch Street and Matelski, p79, Messages from the Underground10 Ricardo Martinez Victores, 7RR: La Historia de Radio Rebelde, Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 1978. All translations from this book are mine.11 Soy Cuba (I am Cuba), director Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964

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the mountains of the Sierra Maestra is finally pushed too far. Having lost

everything to the tyranny of the Batista regime and the United Fruit Company,

he picks up a rifle and heads for the hills. As he climbs upwards, gun in hand,

and the credits begin to roll over his silhouette, the words come ringing: ‘Aqui

Radio Rebelde!... transmitting from the free territory of the Sierra Maestra, on

the threshold of Santiago…’ For, as William Barlow has argued, within months

of being set up in February 1958, the brainchild of guerrilla leaders Fidel

Castro and Che Guevara, the rebel radio and its trademark call, ‘Aqui Radio

Rebelde!’, had become ‘the voice of the revolution in the making’.12

And yet the station only operated as an arm of the guerrilla movement for a

period of about nine months, from 24 February 1958 to 1 January 1959, when

the rebels took power. Che Guevara was later to say that the very first

broadcast was probably only heard by one peasant who lived on the opposite

hillside, and yet by December 1958, Radio Rebelde had the highest radio

ratings of any of Cuba’s radio stations’.13

Radio as resistance, pre-1958

Before the revolution Cuba had been an economic colony of the United

States; US investors owned two-thirds of arable land, the Mafia controlled

Havana’s gambling and tourism and by the period after the second world war,

Cuba had become a trans-shipment stage for ‘French Connection heroin into

the US and a degenerate playground, brothel and casino for well-heeled US

capitalists. Meanwhile the largely rural population had an average income of

$91.25 – a fifth of that of the poorest state in the US, Mississippi – were

largely illiterate and a third of the workforce was semi- or permanently

unemployed.14 A military coup, supported by the US, in 1952, had enforced

this system, against rising popular unrest, with a military dictatorship and

brutal repression. However, by 1958, the revolution was in full swing. Fidel

12 William Barlow, ‘Rebel Airway: Radio and Revolution in Latin America’, p124 in The Howard Journal of Communications, spring 1990.13 Che Guevara, p271, Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War, Pathfinder Press 199614 Trevor Rayne, p3, Cuba Vive! Defend Socialism!, Rock around the Blockade 1996

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Castro and his Rebel Army, who had landed in Cuba in 1956 with only a

handful of armed men, now controlled a swathe of territory around the

southeastern city of Santiago from their base in the Sierra Maestra mountains.

Although many of the core of the group already considered themselves

communists of one sort or another, the movement itself was based on broad

anti-imperialist, democratic and nationalist sentiment. Their credo was

Castro’s speech at his 1953 trial after the ill-fated Moncada uprising which

identified with ‘the 600,000 Cubans without work…the 500,000 farm labourers

who live in miserable shacks…the 100,00 small farmers who live and die

working land that is not theirs, looking at it with the sadness of Moses gazing

on the Promised Land…those dispossessed to whom all make promises and

whom all betray – these are the people, the ones who know misfortune and

are, therefore, capable of fighting with limitless courage’. 15

Radio Rebelde was founded, crucially in a ‘liberated’ zone, where the rebels

already had a workshop and a printing press.16

Che Guevara had long been arguing for a radio station. He had been in

Guatemala in 1954 at the time of the bloody US-sponsored coup against

democratically-elected President Arbenz and had witnessed the powerful role

played by the CIA-sponsored Voice of Guatemala radio station in bringing

about Arbenz’s downfall.17 Fidel Castro had long experience of the political

uses of radio, which was a popular and developed method of entertainment

and communication in Cuba throughout the 1940s and 1950s, heavily funded

by the US, which had poured in technical expertise and advertising dollars,

creating a system monopolised at the top by a few big networks based in

Havana which relied on an urban middle-class audience and virtually ignored

Cuba’s large rural population.18 In the late 1940s, when Fidel Castro was a

young member of the opposition Ortodoxo Party, Ortodoxo leader Eduardo

Chibas had used a weekly radio slot to denounce the corruption and

15 From Fidel Castro, History will absolve me, cited by Rayne, ibid16 Soley and Nichols, p169, Clandestine Radio Broadcasting.17 Don Moore, ‘A history of Cuban Radio’ Patepluma Radio, http://www.pateplumaradio.com/central/cuba/rebel1.html18 Patepluma Radio

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depravation of the Prio government, before shooting himself on air in 1951.19

After the Batista coup in 1952, Carlos Franqui, who would take over the

running of Radio Rebelde in April 1958, recalls how he and a group of young

Cuban revolutionaries had used a popular radio programme on the

mainstream CMQ ‘University on the Air’ to ask sharp questions about state

repression live on air before the microphone was abruptly switched off. As he

put it

‘We lashed out at Batista on a programme heard by at least a hundred

thousand people. That was the important thing…Young members of the

opposition started showing up…The programme, the only one the opposition

had, became a fantastic success. There were a million radios in the country

and CMQ was our most powerful station’.

When a few weeks later Batista’s ‘paid assassins’ brutally attacked the

station, beating up everyone within the studio, the whole country heard about

it:

‘The younger generation had used the radio as an instrument for the first

spontaneous offensives against the dictatorship. That was when I personally

began to use broadcasting as a weapon of revolution.’20

Radio was an obvious medium to turn to in the face of overwhelming

censorship by the Batista government. Already in the urban movement in

1953, when building for the assault on Moncada, Fidel Castro had acquired a

couple of radio transmitters to broadcast secret messages in Havana.21 As

Barlow points out, ‘Radio reaches more people than any other medium in

Latin America. It is more accessible in remote regions and less expensive to

own than television…Moreover, literacy is not required to understand the

spoken word’.22 It is estimated that at least 43% of the Cuban population were

19 C Fred Judson, p30, Cuba and the Revolutionary Myth, Westview Press 198420 Carlos Franqui, p45, Diary of the Cuban Revolution, Editions de Seuil, 197621 Soley and Nichols, p166, Clandestine Radio Broadcasting22 Barlow, p123, Rebel Airways

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illiterate in 1958, and 70% were rural.23 In addition, as Jose Ignacio Lopez

Vigil has pointed out in examining the success of Radio Venceremos in El

Salvador in the 1980s, carrying a political leaflet or paper may bring the risk of

arrest, torture or death, while listening to a radio broadcast leaves no visible

artefact.24 ‘Hence radio is especially popular among the rural peasantry and

the urban poor, two groups integral to serious revolutionary activities in Latin

America’.25

Revolutionary radio

Despite being beset in the early days by the unfavourable terrain and

weather conditions, frequent bombardments by enemy forces and an irregular

broadcast schedule, within six months Radio Rebelde was ‘the most listened-

to radio in Cuba’26 and ‘once on air, the broadcasts were instrumental in

galvanising popular opinion sympathetic to the revolution’ and ‘indispensable

to the mobilisation of popular support for the rebels before their conquest of

state power’.27 By the fall of the Batista regime on 1 January 1959, it had

grown into a network of 48 domestic transmitters linked to several foreign

stations and could be heard easily throughout the Caribbean and much of

Latin America.28 The French Marxist-Leninist Regis Debray argued that there

were lessons to be drawn for all revolutionary movements in Latin America,

‘Beyond an armed struggle, must there not be an effort to play an ever-larger

role in the country’s civilian life? Whence the importance of a radio transmitter

at the disposition of the guerrilla’.29 In 1961, preparing for its own covert

operations against Cuba, the CIA reported that: ‘There are about 1,000,000

radio receivers in Cuba [for a population of about eight million] of which at

least 10% can tune short wave. There is considerable evidence that the

number of short-wave receivers may however be significantly higher, many of

23 Rayne, p3, Cuba Vive24 Jose Ignacio Lopez Vigil, Rebel Radio: the history of Radio Venceremos, translated by Mark Fried,: Curbstone Press, 199425 Barlow, ibid26 Che Guevara, Episodes of the Cuban Revolutionary War27 Barlow, p132, ibid28 Soley & Nichols, p163, Clandestine Radio Broadcasting29 Regis Debray, p108, Revolution within the Revolution?, Monthly Review Press 1967

8

them having been smuggled into Cuba during Batista’s regime in order to

hear Fidel Castro’s short-wave broadcasts’.30

For Che Guevara, revolutionary radio served a dual purpose. On the one

hand, there was the information and propaganda aimed at areas not

controlled by the guerrilla army: this, whether print or broadcast, should be

‘devoted to general matters in the country and will inform the public exactly of

the state of the guerrilla forces, observing always the fundamental principle

that truth in the long run is the best policy’.31 Aimed at peasants, students and

workers, it also serves to unite the population. Che saw the radio as a means

of ‘clarifying, directing and mobilising the masses, and, above all, telling the

truth’ - ‘a weapon against lies and obfuscation and misinformation by

bourgeois propaganda’32 – it had a class content and agenda. He argued that

guerrilla-operated stations are important because they can reach the whole

nation, acting as a unifying force; because radio, unlike newspapers, does not

require its users to be literate; because radio can present more immediate

news than print and because it is best at communicating and stirring

emotions.

‘At moments when war fever is more or less palpitating in everyone in a

region of the country, the inspiring, burning word increases this fever, and

communicates to every one of the future combatants. It explains, teaches,

fires and fixes the future positions of both friends and enemies.’33

More than that, it asserted the primacy of the popular guerrilla movement in

the mountains over more reformist tendencies in the cities, or llanos (plains).

‘Radio is an instrument by which guerrillas maintain leadership of civilian

organisations even though they remain geographically remote from cities and

populations’. Debray emphasises the point, again drawing wider lessons for

the continent:

30 Jon Elliston, p33, Psy War on Cuba, Ocean Press 199931 Quoted in Soley & Nichols, Clandestine Radio Broadcasting32 Quoted in Martinez, p197, 7RR33 Che Guevara, p61, Guerrilla Warfare, Monthly Review Press 1961

9

‘The radio permits headquarters to establish daily contact with the population

residing outside the zone of operations. Thus the latter can receive political

instructions and orientations which, as military successes increase, find an

ever-increasing echo. In Cuba, Radio Rebelde…confirmed the role of the

Rebel Army’s General Staff in the directive force of the revolutionary

movement. Increasingly everyone, from communists to Catholics, tuned in to

get reliable information, to know “what to do” and “where the action is”.

Clandestinity became public. As revolutionary methods and goals became

more radical, so did the people…It is by means of radio that the guerrillas

force the doors of truth and open them wide to the entire populace, especially

if they follow the ethical precepts that guided Radio Rebelde – never

broadcast inaccurate news, never conceal a defeat, never exaggerate a

victory. In short, radio produces a qualitative change in the guerrilla

movement’. 34

The highly centralised system, with 7RR in the Sierra Maestra as the hub –

despite the rapid addition of transmitters – helped make the Rebel Army,

rather than the urban underground, the propaganda focus of the opposition.35

The listener as combatant

It can be argued that the very fact of the radio, for its audience, constituted a

weapon for revolution, for collective activity, for self-organisation. Certainly,

the very first radio stations in Latin America were based on this concept. From

1946, for example, Bolivian miners in the mines of Siglo Viente had set up

Radio Sucre. Using homemade equipment, ‘Radio Sucre’ broadcast to the

miners, frequently in the local Quechua language, organising strikes and

protests and surrounding their radio station with dynamite from the mines to

prevent it being destroyed by the army.36 In Colombia, in 1947, Radio

34 Regis Debray, pp83-85, Revolution35 Soley & Nichols, p172, Clandestine Radio Broadcasting36 Alan O’Connor. ‘Miners’ Radio Stations in Bolivia: A Culture of Resistance’, Journal of Communications Vol 40, 1990

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Sutatenza was founded by a Catholic priest in part to broadcast the

Christian doctrine to Colombian peasants but also to educate and

contribute to the community's development. Listeners, organised

into informal classes, would meet at neighbours’ houses to listen to

the programmes and discuss the lessons. And so, from its inception,

radio in Latin America was seen as serving a community purpose,

encouraging collective organisation and promoting social change.

For Frantz Fanon, both the content of the radio itself and the collective act of

listening [my emphasis] can serve the anti-imperialist cause so that: ‘Hearing

is not only an acoustic experience, it is the expression of desire. Fanon’s

villagers gather less to acquire information than to gather themselves, to

collectively expose themselves to a common experience’.37

Thus when Radio Rebelde operative Eduardo Fernandez joins with other

comrades to listen to Fidel Castro’s broadcast on 1 January 1959 and

describes it as ‘an apotheosis – the streets and the rebels and the people all

joined together’38 he is capturing something of that experience. Or the writer of

the anonymous letter, received and broadcast by the station on 11 November

1958, who described how in the homesteads of Cuba, ‘at a certain hour that

everyone was aware of, as the clocks ticked towards that moment, tense with

the fear of being discovered, the whole family would gather around the short-

wave radio and carefully switch it on, very very quietly, incase an informer

were somewhere at hand and, through the static and interference, the sound

of the national hymn and the cry “Aqui Radio Rebelde!” and everyone would

squeeze closer so as not to lose one word.’39 ‘At nights, many closed their

windows and turned to the one source of information they knew wasn’t

controlled by Batista: Radio Rebelde. Each night, at 7pm and 9pm on the 20-

metre band, at 8pm and 10pm on the 40-metre band, an announcer… began

shouting in a voice so dramatic that it seemed he was trying to overcome the

limitations of his small transmitter hidden somewhere in the Sierra Maestra:

37 Ian Baucom, ‘Frantz Fanon’s Radio: Solidarity, Diaspora and the Tactics of Listening’, Contemporary Literature, Vol 42, No 1, Spring 2001, University of Wisconsin Press 200138 Martinez, p401, 7RR39 Martinez, p14, 7RR.

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“Aqui Radio Rebelde, transmitiendo desde el territorio libre de Cuba!” That

announcement usually sent shivers of excitement through its listeners, even

those who were not ardent Castro supporters’.40 It is hard not to agree with

Fanon that in such circumstances, ‘The war of the sound waves…re-enacts

for the benefit of the citizen the armed clash of his people and colonialism’.

Following Fanon, Baucom goes further:

‘Carried beyond itself, carried from the field of battle to the living quarters of

the suddenly combative “non-combatants”, listening…becomes a tactical

activity, an act of guerrilla warfare in which the radio dial substitutes for the

trigger’.41

For C Fred Judson, it is precisely that transformation from passive listener to

engaged combatant that lies at the heart of the revolutionary process: ‘From

Fanon to Cabral…they advocate nothing less than the transformation of the

extant political culture into a revolutionary political culture’.42

Radio as a strategic and military weapon

However, the importance of Radio Rebelde to the eventual success of the

revolutionary movement, and in particular the leadership role of the rebel

army gathered around Fidel Castro, was as much strategic and military as

ideological. It overcame the censorship of the Batista regime, which

exaggerated army victories and rebel casualties, and hence rallied its troops.

Raul Castro, on the 15th anniversary of the station’s first broadcast, recalled

that: ‘All the other major communication networks imposed on our people by

US imperialism and the Batista dictatorship, bound by the pseudo-freedom of

expression which, in certain conditions the bourgeoisie will tolerate, this

possibility of transmitting directly, on a daily basis, the message of the

revolution to the masses…conferred on the earliest Radio Rebelde

broadcasts an undeniable historic importance’.43 By this time, Radio Rebelde

40 The Winds of December, John Dorschner and Roberto Fabricio, MacMillan 198041 Baucom, p23, Frantz Fanon’s Radio42 Judson, p3, Revolutionary Myth43 Martinez, p17, 7RR

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was being retransmitted through ‘La Voz de Cuba Libre’ in Venezuela and on

through other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, in what became

known as the Cadena de la Libertad, or Freedom Network. 44 Raul Castro saw

Radio Rebelde as being vital not solely from a military and ideological

perspective, but also for directing military operations45. The rebels made a

point of broadcasting the names of their comrades who had been captured

and appealing to the Red Cross to ensure they were not tortured and killed.

Battalions were told to send in reports of battles and skirmishes, even

personal messages were read out. Much propaganda was directed against

Batista’s troops, the ordinary soldiers who had not committed major war

crimes, urging them to come over to the other side, reminding them that the

rebels were known not to murder enemy prisoners or torture them, or

abandon comrades to die. ‘Each time we kill an adversary, we suffer regret,

for ours is the most just of all wars, a war for liberation’.

After Luis Boch had developed the complicated codes, based on an Italian, an

English and a Portuguese dictionary, that were used to the end of the war, it

allowed the military leaders to communicate with the troops: by the end of the

war, every column had its own transmitter. During the tense make-or-break

stand-off with the military in June 1958, Castro was to say:46

‘It can be said that by now Radio Rebelde had become such an important

element of our struggle that it was seen by the enemy as a strategic asset and

therefore something we needed to defend’ – as important as the Sierra

Maestra hospital where the wounded were treated and the workshop where

they made mines and grenades. When it seemed at one moment in June that

all was lost and the guerrillas would be forced to abandon camp and disperse,

Castro gave orders for the station to be blown up rather than fall into enemy

hands. Dynamite was strapped inside the transmitter and then, as Eduardo

44 Dorschner and Fabricio, Winds of December45 Martinez, p19, ibid46 Ibid p249

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Fernandez remembers, ‘even with a bomb inside the transmitter we carried on

broadcasting, whilst also preparing to flee at a moment’s notice’.47

After the crucial victory, Castro announced over the radio:

‘Today I return to speak on this station that has never failed to broadcast even

during the days of mortars and bombs raining down on its aerial, but with part,

if not all, of that promise kept…’ He went on to announce the rebels’ victory,

listing all those who had taken part and the role that they had played, paying

tribute to the fallen, explaining their strategy’.48 Once the radio station had

nationwide coverage, it was used effectively to generate popular civilian

campaigns. One such campaign was the ‘03C’ advertising campaign of

December 1958. A sympathetic American, Henry Wolff, placed

‘advertisments’ in the newspaper for ‘O3C’, explaining to newspaper

salesmen that they were teasers for a hair tonic that would later promise zero

calvicie (baldness), zero caspa (dandruff) and zero canas (grey hair). He even

showed them a bottle, produced by MORECI Laboratories – luckily they failed

to realise that the letters stood for Movimiento de Resistencia Civil. Radio

Rebelde started broadcasting ‘What is O3C?’ and revealed the truth:

First presenter: ‘Now Radio Rebelde brings you the answer. Pay attention!

Because 03C is a matter of life or death for you!

Second presenter: What is 03C?

Third presenter: What is 03C?

Fourth: 03C?

Fifth: It is the watchword for public shame! Zero cinema! Zero consumer

purchases. Zero cabaret. Movement of the Civic Resistance!

Then the rebel announcers broke into a chorus of verse, ending with:

All: If Cuba is at war, don’t you go to the cabaret!

47 Martinez, p261, 7RR48 Ibid, p441

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And so the December consumer boycott in Havana was launched. 49

But the crowning moment for Radio Rebelde, in terms of military victory, can

be considered to be the morning of 1 January 1959, as news emerged that

Batista had fled the country and there was the very real fear of a US-

sponsored military coup. The broadcast could so easily not have gone out at

all: on 29 December the station producers – the staff had grown from three or

four to 20 - had been instructed to dismantle the transmitter and move it down

to the forward camp at Palma Soriano. When they finally pitched up at an

abandoned hut on 31 December, there was something wrong with the

equipment and for the first time, they did not broadcast that night. From 7pm

to 1am they laboured to repair it, with engineer Miguel Boffil telling his

companions, ‘We have to fix it because there’s a really complex situation

going on and if Fidel finds out the equipment’s broken, he’s going to be livid!’

In the morning, as news of Batista’s flight reached them, they rushed to

broadcast the news and urge the population to wait for the announcement of

the commander-in-chief Fidel Castro. Castro – three days’ march away from

Havana, the centre of power – used the radio that day to mobilise the

population to strike and fight if there were any attempt at a coup d’etat.

‘Revolucion si! Golpe militario no!’50 His call to the people of Cuba, appealing

to them not to throw away a victory that had cost so much blood, can be

heard at http://www.freedomarchives.org/audio_samples/Che.html51 Workers

and peasants across Cuba responded with a general strike. On 8 January, the

victorious Rebel Army, with Castro at its head, entered Havana amidst

hundreds of thousands of cheering Cubans and promised that the Revolution

would continue. 52

2. ‘THE FISH WILL RISE’: COUNTER-REVOLUTION ON THE AIRWAVES

49 Dorschner & Fabricio, p254, Winds of December50 Martinez, p283, 7RR51 This excerpt begins with the voice of Che; Fidel Castro then comes on the air.52 Rayne, p5, Viva Cuba

15

‘Radio Rebelde became the most sophisticated clandestine radio operation in

the history of the Western hemisphere and the paradigm of revolutionary

stations in the Americas. And, in turn, revolutionary Cuba became the target

of the most intense counter-revolutionary broadcasting campaign on record’.53

The importance of radio in the struggle for hearts and minds in Cuba was not

lost on the United States, which rapidly became hostile to Cuba’s developing

socialist stance and by 1960 concluded that Castro had to be removed. CIA

covert action, including a clandestine radio station, was enlisted, as in many

other parts of the world, to undermine a leader’s legitimacy.54 It was a

strategy, after all, that had worked well against Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954.

The US had helped the Batista government run, briefly, a couple of

clandestine stations in 1958, such as La Voz de la Libertad, which lambasted

the rebels as ‘drug addicts, thieves, pimps and drunkards’.55 Now it organised

itself more seriously. As Castro consolidated his revolution, the CIA garnered

those who had lost power, or lost faith, or lost land and left Cuba, and set up

Radio Swan, with a 50-kilowatt transmitter diverted from Voice of America on

Swan Island off Honduras56, in partnership with the United Fruit Company,

who had lost a lot of land in Cuba through nationalisation. United Fruit had

also been involved in the Guatemala coup. By 1960 President Eisenhower

approved a CIA plan to create a unified opposition against Castro, covert

action within Cuba and the creation of a paramilitary force that would

culminate in the Bay of Pigs invasion. The station went on air on 17 March

1960. One of the announcers was Jorge Mas Canosa, head of the anti-Castro

Cuban American National Foundation, who would go on to help the US

government found its ‘white’ anti-Cuba station Radio Marti. As the CIA put it,

‘Radio Swan is for Cubans to talk to Cubans. Its purpose is to excite its

listeners and to ridicule and undermine the regime’.57 Castro responded by

complaining to the UN and jamming Radio Swan’s signals. Voice of America,

a ‘white’ station, also broadcast into Cuba from a hostile ideology. But on 17

53 Soley & Nichols, p165, Clandestine Revolutionary Broadcasting54 Ibid, p71.55 Ibid, p17456 Ibid, p17557 Jon Elliston, p34, Psy War

16

April 1961, as a group of Cuban exiles armed and trained by the United

States prepared to invade Cuba, the following mysterious broadcast was

made by Radio Swan:

‘Alert! Alert! Look well at the rainbow! The fish will rise very soon. Chico is in

the house. Visit him. The sky is blue. Place notice in the tree. The tree is

green and brown. The letters arrived well. The letters are white. The fish will

not take much time to rise. The fish is red’. Although this was essentially a

nonsense message designed to ‘confuse and misdirect Castro’s regime’.58 It

was followed by a call for an uprising against the Cuban government. Later

that day the Bay of Pigs invasion began.59

The invasion was of course roundly defeated and used as an opportunity for

Castro to announce the socialist nature of the Cuban Revolution. Radio Swan

struggled on for a few years before fading out and eventually being shut

down. Other clandestine stations flourished briefly and disappeared, mainly

supported by the CIA whose purpose was ‘to air real or fabricated letters

telling of acts of sabotage and resistance within Cuba’.60 These stations

included the shadowy Radio Alpha 66, with links to the terrorist anti-Cuban

groups of the same name, the short-lived Radio Caiman, generally thought to

have been set up with money from the Contragate scandal in the 1980s. The

battle of the airwaves reached feverish highs during the Missile Crisis of 1962.

In 1985, however, the US government changed tactics, setting up the ‘white’

Radio Marti, funded largely by USAID ‘to promote freedom and democracy in

Cuba’. 61The US Navy constructed four 250-foot transmitting antennae for the

station 12 miles north of Key West, Florida (Frederick, Cuban American Radio

Wars, p29) Amongst other things, it launched an ‘interference war’, with both

sides attempting to jam the other’s signals. It continued to be largely staffed

by a virulently anti-Castro exile community in Miami and throughout the

1990s, despite the phasing out of much of its Cold War output in other parts of

the world, the US stepped up its efforts to bring down socialist Cuba. The total

58 Ibid, p4759 Soley & Nichols, p1, Clandestine Radio Broadcasting60 Elliston, p15861 Lynch Street and Matelski, p85, Messages from the Underground

17

number of organisations broadcasting to Cuba roughly doubled and the total

hours of anti-Castro programming aired increased, as well as the number of

frequencies used.62 Despite millions of dollars being pumped into Radio Marti

over the years, as part of a US strategy to destabilise the government from

‘within’, it is questionable what success it has had. As HH Frederick points

out, ‘People typically avoid messages that are dissonant with their beliefs…

Radio Marti, as a voice of the US government, probably would not be widely

listened to in Cuba. Cubans already listen to US radio. By and large, they

have faith and trust in their own government and they do not find the news

coming from present US stations to be credible on Cuban affairs’. As he puts

it, ‘Two competing political systems are fighting “a war of ideas”…The

ideological apparatuses that generate and reflect a society…[and] the

gatherers and transmitters of ideological propaganda both reflect and create

the ideological content of their respective national systems’. 63

Lynch Street and Matelski suggest some more tangible reasons why Radio

Marti might fail to influence the Cuban people, which contrast with the role

that I have described as being played by Radio Rebelde. They contrast, for

example, groups transmitting from within a country from those that claim to be

doing so. Whereas an authentic guerrilla radio gains legitimacy from the fact

that it must establish liberated zones from which to broadcast, its mere

existence is evidence of its strength, and can contribute to the fall of the

regime, ‘Cuban exile groups broadcasting from outside of the island do not

have the same legitimacy’ and suggest, instead, an external threat, the

‘financial, organisational and political support of a hostile foreign power’.64

They add that the longer Radio Marti continues, the less legitimacy it has

within Cuba, describing an ‘ossification of anti-Castro broadcasting’ and ‘signs

of stagnation in the anti-Castro exile movement and institutionalism of US

policy towards Cuba that is increasingly alien to the contemporary Cuban

experience’. (p118)

62 Ibid, p11263 Howard H Frederick, p82, Cuban American Radio Wars, Ablex 198664 Lynch Street and Matelski, p83, Messages from the Underground

18

In comparison with Radio Rebelde, the counter-revolutionary stations of the

United Stations, while equally broadcasting what might be considered

‘propaganda’, can be seen to lack authenticity. They reflect and inspire not a

movement of all the people, but a small, privileged and exiled elite and,

crucially, fail to relate to the reality of their audience. Nor are they seen as

truthful or essential. The US would appear, to date, to have failed in its

mission to win the hearts and minds of the Cuban people. Yet, 52 years on,

we can still be stirred by the thought of Radio Rebelde – even those who, like

Don Moore of the US DXers Association, who edits Patepluma Radio

(http://www.pateplumaradio.com) and, while hostile to the direction then taken

by the Cuban revolution, cannot fail to thrill at the thought of its history:

‘In the history of clandestine radio warfare, few stations can compare to Radio

Rebelde. Rebelde was both a voice of the guerillas to the people and a

complicated network of mobile transmitters linking dozens of guerilla bands

into a cohesive fighting force. Furthermore, it was successful. Radio Rebelde

is one of just a handful of clandestine stations that survived a revolution to

come down from the mountains and become a voice of its national

government. Today, Radio Rebelde operates some of the most powerful

medium wave transmitters in the Americas on numerous frequencies. Its

broadcasts are relayed to the world via shortwave on 5025 and 3366 kHz.

Why not tune in Radio Rebelde tonight, and imagine the station in its glory

days ... in a mud hut in the heart of the rugged Sierra Maestra ... "Free

territory in Cuba."’

19

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