ON THE RADIO : U.S. BROADCASTS TO CUBA MISS TARGETED START-UP

Fidel Castro broadcasts Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie hits these days, and the National Assn. of Broadcasters remains nervous that the Cuban premier will also use giant super-transmitters to jam half the radio stations in America.

But, beyond that, the Reagan Administration’s long-threatened answer to Radio Havana--the $11-million-a-year operation known as Radio Marti--has had little impact on either the United States or Cuba.

It isn’t even on the air yet.

Monday was the 132nd birthday of Jose Marti, the Cuban George Washington. And Monday reportedly was to have been the start-up date for the United States Information Agency’s long-awaited Radio Marti AM radio operation.

Radio Marti was to have begun broadcasting into the heart of Cuba over the 1180 AM frequency from one of the Florida keys. Sen. Paula Hawkins (R-Fla.) told her heavily Cuban-American constituency several weeks ago that Administration officials had said that Monday would be the inaugural date for the controversial station, which has pledged 14 1/2 hours of daily programming in Spanish, aimed at the Cuban people.

A USIA spokesman said Monday, however, that Radio Marti has hired only 100 of its authorized complement of 188 staff people. It still has to run another 90 of them through security clearances before it will be ready to go on the air.

In addition, former KHJ-AM (930) programming consultant Paul Drew, who accepted the Marti director’s job in October, resigned three weeks ago and returned to Los Angeles.

Drew told The Times on Monday that he quit for several reasons, citing among them a lack of coordination between the operating staff of Radio Marti and Administration and congressional policy makers. Until accepting the Radio Marti position, Drew was a private radio consultant after leaving RKO General 10 years ago; he has returned to his consulting business.

Radio Marti, created by Congress in October, 1983, has been plagued by technical and political problems since it was first funded. Radio Havana has been playing much more rock ‘n’ roll during the last year in what is believed by the Reagan Administration to be a direct response to the threat of Radio Marti winning over Cuba’s young listeners (half the island’s population is believed to be under 21), according to USIA spokesmen.

Castro also has threatened to use powerful transmitters to jam AM radio frequencies in the United States and has vowed to arrest any of his citizens caught listening to Radio Marti. The biggest single source of opposition to Radio Marti beyond Castro himself remains sections of the National Assn. of Broadcasters, which continues to worry about the possibility that Castro might make good on his threat to jam American stations.

A USIA spokesman said that Radio Marti has hired only 100 of its authorized complement of 188.

Should that occur, it is actually possible that Cuba--about 2,300 miles from Los Angeles--could interfere with Southern California radio signals as well as Eastern ones. If Castro retaliates for Radio Marti, the estimated 100,000 Cuban expatriates living in Southern California may get to hear “Beat It” all night long over Radio Havana--just like everyone else in America.

MEMORY LANE: If survivors are the heroes of the ‘80s, then two programs this week feature interviews with a platoon of L.A.’s Legion of Honor.

The sole surviving blonde bombshell of the 1950s--one Joan Olander from Rowena, S.D.,--appears Wednesday at North Hollywood’s Palomino Club, courtesy of KRLA-AM (1110) program director Jim Pewter.

Olander’s stage name, Mamie Van Doren, is a little more familiar to campy rock loyalists and film buffs like Pewter who caught her mini-film festival last year in Los Angeles. Pewter--who sees his role as host of KRLA’s weekly “Saturday Morning Wake Up Special” as a kind of rock culture curator--moseyed down to Van Doren’s Newport Beach ocean-front home recently. He collected the well-preserved sex symbol’s views on everything from the care and handling of her orchid garden to the late Cardinal Spellman’s disdain for her singing-in-the-shower movie scenes. In her heyday, she faced the singular challenge of acting with such diverse co-stars as Eddie Cochran, Doris Day, Jerry Lee Lewis and Clark Gable.

Pewter’s hourlong special, featuring several Van Doren vocals, aired over the weekend, but will be repeated, according to Pewter.

KPFK-FM (90.7) offers its own live nostalgia extravaganza Sunday, 9 a.m. to midnight, when Roz and Howard Larman’s “Folkscene” celebrates its 15th anniversary.

Since 1970, the Sunday-evening show has carried interviews-cum-live in-studio performances with almost any performer who could remotely be termed a “folk singer,” from Maria Muldaur and T-Bone Walker to the Chambers Brothers and the late Steve Goodman.

Most of the interviews--including one satisfying segment with Goodman, who wrote “The City of New Orleans”--are taped, making it a kind of “Best of . . . “ program, though the Larmans promise live commentary throughout the day. It doesn’t matter much. Borrowing an analogy from guest folk-poet Tom Waits during one of the interview segments, the overall production values of “Folkscene” are “slicker than deer guts on a doorknob.”

Friday at 2 p.m., “Reggae Beat” host Roger Steffens also leaps on the nostalgia bandwagon with his own early-rock program over KCRW-FM (89.9).

“The Sound of the ‘60s” will be a re-creation of early FM stations, such as KSAN in San Francisco and KPPC in Pasadena. Using tapes of both the music and the spot commercials of the era, Steffens promises that:

“No reference will be made to any event or music which came after 1969.”