Joel Hefley: “Mr. Chairman, I am also a member of the Committee on Appropriations, and we have worked very, very hard to work with…”

“Mr. Chairman, I am also a member of the Committee on Appropriations, and we have worked very, very hard to work with very few funds this year. If we were talking about the things that the gentleman from New York and the gentlewoman from Miami were talking about, if we were getting results, all right. Nobody shows us any results from these broadcasts. You air from 3 o'clock in the morning until 8 o'clock. I am convinced if they were not jammed, there would be very few people watching television at 3 o'clock in the morning. If you look at the cost, there is not any television station or a band of television stations that the cost is as much as it is for TV Marti. Somebody is making a lot of money, it is not very efficiently run, and there is, as I said earlier, not a corporation in the world that would invest money in as few listeners as TV Marti has. I made the point about the yoke of communism that the Cuban people bear, and that is a tragedy. But we have had a policy in Cuba ever since I have been involved in politics that has not been effective. TV Marti is not effective, and even the proponents of TV Marti can give you no numbers of how many people that TV Marti is reaching and what the cost per listener is that it costs the taxpayers of this country.”