Air Raid

By Amy Wilentz

In Miami's Little Havana, the event was treated as a holiday. A thanksgiving Mass was held in Coconut Grove, and scores of jubilant Cuban Americans phoned radio stations to express their approval. On the 83rd anniversary of Cuba's independence, Radio Marti, a U.S.-sponsored anti-Castro radio service, kicked off its inaugural broadcast at 1180 on the AM dial with a short salutation, "Buenos dias, Cuba," followed by a gentle folk song.

The station also had its first big news item: three hours before the broadcast, Cuban President Fidel Castro showed his displeasure with the launching of Radio Marti by suspending a U.S.-Cuba immigration agreement arduously completed only last December. Castro was particularly galled that the Reagan Administration had named the station after Jose Marti, the 19th century Cuban patriot and writer who regularly warned his country about imperialism. Castro's action, which ends visits to Cuba by exiles living in the U.S., was a direct retaliation against Miami's fiercely anti-Communist Cubans, who had been lobbying for Radio Marti since the Administration first proposed it in 1981.

The now suspended immigration agreement, which took several years to negotiate, would have permitted up to 20,000 Cubans to leave for the U.S. each year. Cuba had also agreed to take back 2,746 criminals and mentally ill people who came to the U.S. during the mass exodus of 125,000 Cubans from the port of Mariel in 1980; a mere 201 such "excludables" had been returned before last week. In addition, the agreement was to allow some 3,000 of Cuba's political prisoners to emigrate to the U.S. One hour after Castro's suspension was announced, the first, and perhaps the last, group of eleven political prisoners and their families arrived at Miami International Airport.

For the moment, the Administration is downplaying the gravity of Castro's reaction. The Immigration and Naturalization Service and the State Department are continuing to process the excludables, as well as would-be Cuban immigrants. Said one State Department official: "With every day that goes by without additional reaction, the chances are better for things to slip back to where they were." President Reagan, who personally gave the go-ahead for the station May 18, seemed unperturbed by Cuba's response. On Monday, he was due in Miami at a fund raiser for Republican Senator Paula Hawkins, one of Radio Marti's most vociferous advocates.

Congress approved Radio Marti in 1983, providing it with $25 million for its first two years. The station required more than 1 1/2 years to get on the air, in part owing to difficulty in assembling a qualified staff. Because wary legislators made the news service part of the Voice of America, Radio Marti must comply with that agency's mandate to broadcast "accurate, objective and comprehensive" news. The first day's 14 1/2- hour broadcast, which Cuba tried unsuccessfully to jam, included a melodramatic soap opera, tunes from Pop Singer Julio Iglesias and an interview in Spanish with Los Angeles Dodgers Manager Tommy Lasorda, who claimed that the island would have had a major league baseball team by now if it were not a Communist country. Most observers agreed that Radio Marti's material was mild compared with programs beamed to Cuba by several Miami-based Spanish-language stations, which routinely refer to Castro as a "tyrant" and "madman."

In a Radio Marti interview, Charles Z. Wick, director of the U.S. Information Agency, said he hoped the station would "promote the cause of freedom in Cuba and also allow the Cuban people to judge their revolution on its merits." But as the station continued its transmissions alongside the Spanish-language programs of the Voice of America, some in Miami wondered. , "Radio Marti is a useless provocation," said Arturo Villar, president of Agencia Latinoamericana, a feature syndicate for newspapers. Said another Cuban American: "The most effective radio in Cuba was 'Radio Bemba' " (word of mouth) -- the voice of the returning exiles.

With reporting by Bernard Diederich/Miami and Alessandra Stanley/Washington