Christ

The biggest superpower on the earth is still battling the tiny island of impoverished Cuba - and still losing.

The US government has spent more than $24 million to fly a plane over Cuba and forcibly broadcast American propaganda on television. The plot was neutralized by the Cubans, who have consistently blocked the transmissions with their own signal.

Dubbed AeroMarti, the initiative has attempted to give Cubans an alternative to the government-controlled media for several years running. It first debuted nearly two decades ago and has cost taxpayers close to $25 million over the past six years alone.

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The plane is currently suspended because of government sequestration – federally mandated spending cuts that put many government duties on pause because of the ongoing fiscal crisis – but its ultimate fate lies with the House of Representatives and the Senate Appropriations Committees.

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The US Broadcasting Board of Governors oversees AeroMarti and, according to Foreign Policy magazine, has asked Congress to discontinue the program two years in a row, admitting it has been a failure.

“Proponents of the program say we can’t stop doing it because it would send a bad message to the Cuban government,” said John Nichols, a communications professor at Penn State University in Pennsylvania. “That’s bogus: It’s ineffective, it wastes a huge amount of money and the compromise we make to keep it on air, knowing it violates international law, is not at all worth it.”

AeroMarti has cost American taxpayers more than a billion dollars since debuting in the mid-1980s.

  RT

I wonder how many wasted dollars have been spent on failed missions to take down Cuba over the decades since Fidel kicked out the mafia. This obsession is unhealthy.