Cuba in the Obama budget

The Voice of America is going to eliminate its Croatian and Greek language broadcasts, according to the document listing program terminations and reductions in President Obama’s budget for fiscal year 2011.

But there’s not a word about TV Marti, the U.S. government station that has been on the air nearly twenty years and has no audience in Cuba. Even President Bush’s director of Radio and TV Marti, Salvador Lew, has said that TV Marti “is not seen” in Cuba. I could find no specific numbers for the Radio/TV Marti budget in the White House budget documents because it is folded into a bigger account for international broadcast operations (see here, pdf, page 1224).

Meanwhile, it appears that the President is asking Congress to provide $20 million for USAID’s Cuba democracy program next year (see here, pdf, page 70).