U.S. Begins Beaming TV-Marti Signal to Cuba : Broadcasting: Havana officials jam transmission, then warn of ‘incalculable consequences.’ But the Bush Administration calls the test a success.

The U.S. government made its first foray into television broadcasting Tuesday, beaming signals to Cuba that the Cuban government promptly jammed.

Cuban officials warned of “incalculable consequences” should the U.S. broadcasts continue.

“The initiation of tests today by the United States of a television channel in the Spanish language designed against Cuba can have incalculable consequences for almost non-existent bilateral relations,” the official Cuban news agency Prensa Latina said.

The Bush Administration, however, hailed the debut of the new television station, TV-Marti, as a success despite the jamming. “The test worked in the sense that we began programming,” White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said.

The Administration “will continue to try to program,” he added. “We just hope that at some point they see the light.”

So far, he said, “the programming aspects of it, technically and in terms of content, were successful.”

In terms of content, all that Cuban viewers of the new Havana Channel 13 would have seen, had they been watching their televisions when the broadcasts began at 1:30 a.m. EST, would have been a multicolored test pattern. By the time TV-Marti switched to actual programming--popular music, a travelogue, a tape of highlights from the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates versus Baltimore Orioles World Series and an old “Kate & Allie” show--the Cuban jamming operation was blocking the signal, officials said.

The broadcast continued for a little over five hours with all but the first 38 minutes jammed by Cuban transmitters broadcasting on the same frequency.

Since the government first began open discussions of plans to beam television and radio signals to Cuba, U.S. broadcasters have worried about threats by Cuban President Fidel Castro to retaliate with signals that would block radio broadcasts in the United States. So far, however, there has been no sign of Cuban attempts to begin such interference.

Last Friday, radio stations along the Florida coast and as far north as Nashville, Tenn., were disrupted when Cuba broadcast a speech by Castro on an AM signal to the United States.

For technical reasons, it would be virtually impossible for Cuba to broadcast a signal strong enough to disrupt television programming in the United States. For those same reasons, in fact, TV-Marti is broadcast from a transmitter suspended from a blimp tethered in the lower Florida Keys, rather than from a transmitting tower on the mainland.

Radio, however, is vulnerable to Cuban-generated interference signals. The law authorizing TV-Marti as a three-month experiment directs the Administration to end the programming if broadcasters in Florida suffer substantial interference.

Castro has spoken out on several occasions against the idea of U.S. broadcasts to his country, calling them a threat to Cuban sovereignty. Americans, he said in a recent speech, “are not even capable of knowing how much they offend the hearts and sentiments of our people.”

“They know it violates international law; they know it violates national sovereignty,” he said.

The U.S. government has broadcast radio signals to communist-controlled nations through Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty for decades. In 1985, the Reagan Administration began a similar radio broadcast effort to Cuba, dubbed Radio Marti after Jose Marti, a Cuban national hero.

In recent years, dissident organizations in various parts of the world have attempted to make sporadic television broadcasts to promote their views or undermine regimes they oppose. But a concerted effort by one government to beam television signals to the territory of another nation is a new development.

Cuba claims that the broadcasts violate a 1982 international agreement setting rules for allocating broadcast signals. State Department spokeswoman Margaret Tutwiler, however, denied that the U.S. broadcasts violated any international agreements. “We regret that Cuba has refused to permit the free flow of information and ideas,” she said.

U.S. plans to launch the television transmissions to Cuba were stalled for several years because of concerns over potential interference with domestic broadcasts. In recent months, a test of the new stations has been delayed repeatedly by technical glitches.