 an analysis program brought to you by CodePinx Latin America team. Tonight I'm joined by CodePinx CodeBounder with the Benjamin and we'll be speaking with Tracy Eaton of the Cuba Money Project. Take it away. Yes, well we're very excited about the program tonight. Tracy is an award-winning writer, a producer, multimedia journalist. He's worked throughout Latin America and his stories appeared in hundreds of outlets including NBC, USA Today, Business Insider Newsweek. He travels often to Cuba and he is the founder of a very unique project which is called the Cuba Money Project and it's something I think Tracy that you started in 2010 then stopped for a while then started back up again. It tracks US tax dollars spent in Cuba. An important thing for us to know and something that is rarely talked about in the US media so we're excited to have some time with you Tracy and can you tell us about the Cuba Money Project? Well thanks so much for having me. Yeah as you say I started it about 10 years ago, 10, 11 years ago and I was curious to see you know how the US government was spending its money or money tax dollars in Cuba and I wondered you know it's been now more than 60 years that the US government has been trying to influence internal events there in Cuba and millions of dollars have been spent and rather than wait until some documents are declassified I wanted to try to get a more of a you know real-time view of what the programs were doing and whether they're effective and so I started trying to follow the money you know use that old journalist journalist slogan and so that's that's how I got it started. Wonderful well can you tell us give us a sense of how you do this what you found if you can help us understand how much money is going to Cuba and who is it going to? Sure can I share my screen for a moment? Yes absolutely. Okay so okay so I used to work in in Cuba I was the Dallas Morning News correspondent in Havana for about four years and so I've been and I've been traveling to Cuba since 1994 been very interested in what goes on there and after I started the Cuba money well the reason I started the Cuba money project one reason was I saw that nobody was doing it and I thought that you know it's such a fundamental important thing to know not just what are you the US government policy is but where the money goes I decided to just start looking into it and what I've discovered is that there are at any one moment dozens of NGOs and also for-profit groups that support Cuban democracy activists and journalists and dissidents and by my estimates about a fifth of all the projects are secret and the the recipients of the money are never disclosed and very conservatively I can say that USAID and the State Department have spent more than 300 million on the program since 1990 and there's also been a lot of money that's gone toward radio and TV marty around a billion under President Trump at least 54 groups operated USAID or national endowment for democracy programs I want to play a about a one-minute clip of a prominent Cuban dissident talking about his view of the support that they receive to get details on specific what the projects are like you know how they work and and and what the what the goals are and so I've tried to use the freedom of information act and in 2011 I just started filing a flurry of FOIA requests and maybe you could explain FOIA in case anybody doesn't know what that is sure so the freedom of information act allows anyone not just US citizens but foreign foreigners to send in a request for documents about programs and policies that you're interested in and it's a kind of a laborious process it takes a long time to get an answer from the US government sometimes and just a couple weeks ago I got the State Department got in touch with me and said are you still or no it was USAID they said are you still interested in this FOIA that you filed and it was one that I filed 10 years ago and I said yes of course I'm still interested you know I would hate to have them just throw it in the trash after I've been waiting for 10 years for for for a document so it it can take a long time and I think the FOIA the the system is it's broken in a way because it takes so long and also they give you heavily redacted documents like this here's here's a sheet that I received for one Cuba program everything's redacted so this is the kind of stuff that you get back after waiting for you sometimes years and even appealing to to get information and and this is what you get back so there are two main reasons why they deny access to the information one is that they say democracy building is a is a trade secret which seems pretty strange to me that it would be a trade secret but it is they can't you know the the for-profit and non-profit companies that do democracy building don't want to share their techniques with other other groups and then they also want to protect the security of the participants and then I can understand a little bit more because they might face reprisals this photo there is of a boogie board that's really a satellite dish that was part of a us finance program where they were smuggling boogie boards into cuba disguised as satellite dishes in one of the one of the programs and so I would in the other way around they were satellite dishes disguised as boogie board yeah sorry I said it wrong and so and so they're I would say there's there's not just two reasons why they don't reveal the information the third reason is to save themselves from embarrassment because sometimes the schemes that they have to try to bring democracy to Cuba are pretty are pretty wacky and the money is can be difficult to trace because it's it's sometimes channeled through third countries and if an NGO for instance is operating in the United States they have to file a form 990 a tax form uh and then they reveal what they did with the money you know they give some details but if they're operating in a third country oftentimes the they don't have to file the same kinds of forms and it's easier to hide what they're doing this gives you a sense for some of the USAID payments for Cuba programs the big dip there from 2015 to 2017 that's during a period of improved us cuba relations during the Obama administration and then you can see when Trump took office the they kicked the programs back into into gear so we see a dip from a high of about 10 million going down to uh less than well just a little bit over 1 million yeah and this this doesn't represent the entirety of all the us programs this is just one specific USAID state department also has programs and uh but but I wanted to try to keep my teeth is separate yeah yeah and so this is USAID grant of payments from 2012 to 2020 and I wanted to try to show uh kind of a timeline you know when diplomatic relations were renewed and kind of what the the funding picture looked like and this is by quarter and so you can see you can see more clearly by quarter the big rise after Donald Trump took office so basically it's clear when you look at this that when there's an opening of relations and more of a respect of cuba sovereignty uh then the funding for these projects goes way down when it's a more hostile relationship and more overt kind of trying to uh to uh threaten and of course ultimate goal is to overthrow the Cuban government then the funding goes way up is that how you would read that that's kind of what it looked like to me um again this didn't take into account state department money and so I don't have the full full picture but but I don't think it's a coincidence that the funding dropped during that period of improved relations well and obviously if you're trying to have good talks with the Cubans they hate the Cuban government they hate these programs right yeah yeah they object to them and they're not legal under Cuban law and they certainly what sorry it's curious to me that it seemed like the funding before the rapprochement was actually a little bit higher during the Obama era compared to the Trump era what do you attribute that to well um Donald Trump took a very dim view of foreign aid and these assistance programs fall under foreign aid and so the White House the the budget office the White House budget office would propose drastic cuts and then the political interests would kick in and and they would ask for more money from what was proposed by the White House and and and so there was a so it was a very contradictory kind of approach um you know Trump seemed to attack Cuba more with sanctions than with these programs these programs are are largely symbolic because it's such a small amount of money compared to the entire U.S. budget but you can do a lot of mischief in Cuba with a small amount of money and they're also significant just because of the historical um you know you look at history and and the U.S. government's role in Cuba in trying to intervene over so many decades they become they become very important in that way but but Trump did not I mean George W. Bush during during his administration these programs peaked at um something like I can't remember 40 million or 42 million something like that so it was it was nothing compared to what Trump and Obama did I mean the money has gone gone way down but again you can do a lot with not a lot of money you can cause you can cause quite a bit of of discord with a smaller amount of money well especially since salaries are so low in Cuba uh you know paying somebody well you know a big a good salary in Cuba would be like a hundred dollars a month right yeah yeah definitely imagine what you could do with a budget of a hundred thousand dollars so this is just a general idea for you know where that USAID money went so these are some of the some of the big categories here so the biggest ones are uh humanitarian assistance to Cuba so what does that mean that a lot of that goes to dissidents but as I'll show you the amount of money that reaches the people on the ground who are really the ones who are risking their necks is a tiny amount of money compared to the the salaries and overhead and all the money that goes toward the people who run the programs in Miami and in Washington and other cities so a lot of the money you know I went one time I asked a USAID official how much money really reaches Cuba and he said well the intention is that the vast majority reaches Cuba but that's it doesn't happen the vast majority does not reach Cuba the dissident leader that I showed you before in that little video clip Jose Daniel Federer he's not joking when he said that if we had all that money we could do a lot more because all that money does not reach the distance and that's one of the and that's why I think in some ways this is this is more political than it is you know if the US government wanted to really do something they could dump a whole lot more money onto Cuba than what they do and are you going to give us an estimate of how much money actually reaches Cuba yeah I'll show I'll show what I'll show some examples of what Cuban dissidents get so this the purpose of this little snapshot here is to show that a lot of these programs last from one to three years and so even though you know there's a certain amount of grants say say 15 million given out in one year those then last for three years and so at at any one moment you have really dozens of projects going at once overlapping by time overlapping by theme and and so and and sometimes organizations run a number of different Cuba programs and so it becomes very difficult to try to follow all these you know you know because each one you could you could spend quite a bit of time just trying to figure out what one organization is doing but you know it's tough to to figure it all out so these organizations are some of the ones that were prominent during the the Trump years so can you just give us a sense of you know where is most of the money what what kind of programs are receiving most of the money the vast majority of the money goes toward shaping the narrative about Cuba it's it's really and it's a it's a low intensity war but it's an information war in a lot of ways the whole idea is to is to shape the narrative and so the money goes to groups that highlight human rights abuses and it becomes kind of a echo chamber where you you know a group will highlight certain human rights abuses and then that'll go into a report which will then be used to push for more money for more programs and other groups and so it kind of feeds on itself I mean I I think it's I don't think it would be inaccurate to say that these programs give a distorted view of Cuba I'm not saying that they don't reveal some truths and do some important work and I'm not saying that there aren't courageous people involved in in these programs but but I think that it's certainly true that the overall picture that they would give would be a one-sided kind of distorted view of Cuba which is used to try to secure more funds for more programs and wouldn't you also say Tracy that when a group it becomes known for getting money from the United States that that destroys the legitimacy of that group in the eyes of many Cuban people well I I mean the Cuban government has it it's it's position on that you know I don't want to broad brush all the all the groups and and say that that their work would be destroyed just be their image would be destroyed just because they receive us funds all that other people weigh in on the politics of it so we were we were talking about how much money reaches Cuba and it's impossible to know exactly how much reaches Cuba but there are clues that are scattered out in public documents this is from a form 990 public document showing that the directorio democrático cubano paid 746 people a little over a hundred thousand dollars or about a hundred and thirty eight dollars per person but that would be over a one-year period so it's not a lot of money but it's as you said illegal so those 700 plus people would be taking money illegally yeah yeah illegally by Cuban law and then here's another tax form this is other money that went to 1930 activists and this would be 25 dollars each so there's no it's you know I don't know how that money was distributed maybe certain people who were the leaders got way more you know I mean I have I really don't have a picture for how that works and who knows if it's true yeah it's what their report and these millions of dollars the the u.s. government spends millions of dollars just to audit all these groups and I filed for us to try to get the audits and have not been successful so sometimes when I'm going through the records to look for you know what happens with the money I find really strange payments so this is an example of a payment that to me looked very strange 3.2 million dollars to a law firm this is Scott Gilbert in the photo and look at the look at the description strengthen the legal regulatory institutional and information environment which protects and enables the growth in associational life and the development of independent and sustainable civil society organizations so what the heck does that mean and this group is in Miami no the the law firm I don't I believe the law firm is based in DC but as it turns out Scott Gilbert is Alan Gross's lawyer and who is Alan Gross Alan Gross is an international development worker who was working for a sub a USAID subcontractor and he went to Cuba to install Wi-Fi hotspots that were independent and would get around Cuba's you know internet and communication system and so they would be independent Wi-Fi hotspots where people could go to use the internet and on his fifth trip to not yeah it wasn't legal on his fifth trip to Cuba he was arrested and he wound up spending I think five years in prison and he was eventually released as part of the negotiations between the US and Cuba as they resume diplomatic relations and so that's that's Alan right down down there on the right and you know I think that Alan Gross is he's a highly qualified international development worker um was doing a you know had a very successful business successful career but he probably wasn't the right person for this job because he didn't speak Spanish and so he he went to Cuba and he he later sued his employer saying that they didn't adequately prepare him for Cuba and and that he you know suggesting that he didn't know what he was getting himself into because you know the Cuba has a very sophisticated uh security service that will detect these kinds of programs and then surveil them and down here the the photo that's right to the left of Alan Gross is a screenshot of a Cuban agent there on the right and then on the left is an American who worked with one of the USAID or state department contractors working in Cuba and that's surveillance that they had on them so that the the programs operating Cuba sometimes the operators of those programs may not know that they're being recorded and they're under surveillance and all and so Alan Gross you know the the Cuban government was up on what he was doing the whole time and then if he won his lawsuit he he received a settlement and he now lives in Tel Aviv and we're Facebook friends and I've written extensively about him in his his case which I found really interesting because as part of his case there were way more documents revealed about how these programs work than FOIA would ever deliver and so one thing I discovered because because of his his lawsuit and his efforts to get accountability was that there are there are just hundreds of pages of documents that that are never even offered to you when you file a FOIA the the things that were revealed in his in his case I'd filed FOIAs for the same kind of information and I would get almost nothing in return so the documents exist it's just that the government doesn't want to give you the documents and it's pretty ridiculous because the state department in USAID before they send before they answer a FOIA they give the contractor the opportunity to say what documents should be released so they leave it up to the contractor to decide what gets released and they say that's part of the reason for the delay oh we're contacting the contractor to see what the what's okay to release of course they're not going to release anything and they don't and so it's a it it it is not a transparent system at all and and what you showed us before of the the the firm Gilbert that represented Alan Gross so the US taxpayers paid for his legal support yeah well as you can see from this description we don't know exactly what it paid for but it paid for something this was probably this 3.2 million was probably we taxpayers got their money's worth because at least this helped the two countries come together you know at least that's the way I look at it so this was probably a good thing but my point about showing this this description of the the spending is also just to say that they can say anything they want they can put down any purpose and any description and most people don't even look don't even care and and millions and millions of dollars are spent other times the description on what they spend is so vague that it might as well be redacted because it's just not a you know it doesn't mean anything so I've I've interviewed a wide range of people who are connected with the programs I've interviewed a lot of dissidents many of whom I admire for their courage and and for what they do I've interviewed Cuban officials uh I've talked to uh Cuban state security agents who have infiltrated programs like this woman here agent Vilma who infiltrated one of the democracy groups and and was in there for quite a few years before the Cuban government decided to reveal her identity and and at any one moment you know the Cuban government is going to have people placed in in all these programs I would imagine based on history and based on you know from time to time the Cuban government will reveal okay we had these 10 people placed in all these different organizations and and then they'll produce concrete evidence of how things work and they'll produce documents and photos and other things and so uh the the uh you know this is also part of um you know the Cuban government they're trying to protect themselves and what I was alluding to before about the fact that I think this is an information war and the one-sided nature of it is that uh there's a lot of things that you can investigate or write about Cuba and you don't have to always just look for the very worst thing I mean if we could do that for the United States and you can uncover quite a few negative things about the United States if we put millions of dollars into investigating what goes on in our country as part of this this uh effort to try to bring out the kind of the worst things that it can find um here's about five million dollars for two programs one to raise awareness about the failures of the Cuban revolution another to investigate Cuban doctors working abroad so Cuban doctors you know that picture on the left I I took that of two Cuban doctors who I met in in Haiti when Aristide was forced out of the country and all the all the hospitals closed and there was nowhere to get for where people could get treated for gunshot wounds except one little clinic operated by Cuban doctors and they never close and that was a place where you where if you're get shot and there were people dragging out themselves in and going to this little clinic and getting treated by these Cuban doctors and so I saw with my own eyes some of the good work that Cuban doctors do and and yet there's millions of dollars being spent to really demonize what Cuban doctors do and sure they do get a smaller they get only a portion of the total amount of money that a foreign government might pay the Cuban government for their services but I never saw any Cuban doctors who were forced to go abroad they wanted to go abroad because they would they would get more money than they would get in Cuba and they would also have other benefits of being able to import you know I think maybe I can either a container load of of things or you know they could bring in things from other countries to help their families so that's one of the that's one of the things where that our tax dollars are going to well we can also add there that our government officials particularly under Trump were strong arming other countries to either send back the Cuban doctors that were there or to not request for help and that was very clear during this pandemic when the US government has told other countries don't accept the help that Cuban doctors were offering to several dozen countries and it has really affected the income of the the Cuban government because they were making at one point quite a lot of money from the monies being paid by other governments or UN agencies for the doctors abroad so this is a little bit of money that was spent to make the program look bad and then that and then and getting doctors to defect and then that was used as a way to go to the governments of these other countries to say you know look how bad this program is and there's thousands of doctors that have served you know so I'm sure you can find 10 who are going to say awful things so again I think it's there's a lack of balance so the United Nations it's not just Cuban law that prohibits the United States from intervening in in Cuba but also the United Nations has resolutions that speak out against this and there's also of course the United Nations says that government should promote and defend all human rights so this is from a recent report by the Center for Democracy in the Americas and the Washington office on Latin America and it suggests that human rights would be better served in Cuba by trying to engage the country rather than you know running these these provocative democracy programs so there are alternatives that some people support and there have been tens of thousands of people that have joined in petitions and and other groups to try to eliminate the economic sanctions against Cuba which represent the longest harshest sanctions against any country in history as far as I know so those are the slides I was going to show so I'll stop sharing my screen here and would be happy to try to maybe answer any questions you have or whatever I can do to help well thank you Tracy that's fascinating I wanted to ask you what you thought maybe we're an example of the biggest waste of US money or the most negative consequences and maybe a program you thought was actually good let's see I think the biggest waste have probably been some some money spent just to do studies and you know the US government will ask a university or a think tank to study a problem and then that's then they'll employ people to do it and then put it out there and I say that's probably the biggest waste wouldn't it be more of a waste to all the money we put into radio and TV marty over these years that barely gets seen in Cuba well you know I I I try to avoid giving an opinion on the value of the different programs I'd rather put out information about them and let other people decide whether they think that they're a waste of money or not well the Cuban government blocked those for so many years you couldn't even see radio TV marty in Cuba and we were still paying for it yeah yeah no I would agree with that here's what I would the part of that that I would agree with that I can say for certain is you know there were there were planes that were in hangars that were paying rent on related to radio and TV marty and you know spending all that money to reach only 10 people or whatever I mean I think that can be considered a waste too but I'm not gonna I'm not gonna weigh in on whether you know I think that a free flow of information is a good thing and and I think that it's good that there's a flow of information so but as far as saying this program's good this one's bad or whatever you know I'm not gonna get into that to me I kind of find it fascinating that there's that so much of this money is spent here in the United States and it really seems like there's an industry now that's benefiting from these attempts to that regime change in Cuba would you agree with that yeah for sure and and Phil Peters who's a Cuba expert uh and and he's often quoted about Cuba he called it the democracy was it democracy promotion industrial complex or something like that and I thought that was a good good term for it because it is a it is a you know a little cottage industry of NGOs and other companies that are that are just involved in in this work and the the category of funds that that is spent in Cuba it's it's in the same category of economic support which in another country it might go to helping reduce hunger or something like that and so it's in a category of aid that other countries would welcome but we're giving it to Cuba against their will and so it's it's it's a it's it's a very overtly political type of type of assistance now I know you know you unlike us we get into the politics of it all which you don't and I I appreciate that but I do want to say that I have seen how this money divides groups in inside Cuba de legitimizes groups inside Cuba you take for example hip-hop artists I remember when hip-hop was all the rage in Cuba and it was a really cool movement and then us started putting money into it to influence it and then that the whole movement got divided and we see now with the San Ysidro movement that what might be a you know legitimate call for more freedom of the of cultural expression gets immediately co-opted because it's it's fulfilling a goal of the US government to create more opposition in Cuba and again I don't I don't I don't want to put you on the spot to comment on it but I've seen how how it backfires inside Cuba and I would say that it doesn't create more openings and more reforms and more democracy quite the opposite it causes the Cuban government to crack down and and put a lot of people in the same boat and and accusing them of taking government money even if they're not because there've been so many examples of these efforts being financed by the US yeah I I understand what you're saying I can see in the harm that can be done in that way the the reason that I guess I was being so kind of vague or maybe even evasive about trying to say something about the value or lack of value of some of the projects is that I've known people who are closely involved with them and I've seen some good work that they're doing and I'll give an example um some years ago I was going through these spreadsheets and I found something that I thought was astounding and it was that there was a former covert action officer for the CIA who was managing a team of journalists in Cuba I thought wow that's really interesting and so I immediately blogged about it I wrote a big long piece about it and and then as I you know would go to Cuba and I would talk to people I met one of the journalists who was being paid by the the program that hired the former CIA officer and this journalist was not a human rights activist but just a straight journalist who would go out and do some of the best reporting I saw in neighborhoods in Havana when there were floods in Havana he went into the water up to his neck to go report with a microphone and a video camera and he went into people's flooded homes up to his chest in water and interviewed people to give a apolitical view of what was going on in their neighborhoods he wasn't condemning the Cuban government he was just telling a story about you know a journalism story just like CNN would have done or some other news outlet would have done and just like Cubans do all the time without being paid by the US yeah but but my my point is you know I I don't I don't want a broad brush you know I don't think all these people should be broad brushed and say okay just because you get funds you know I don't think their work should be necessarily delegitimized but on the on the by the same token let's let's take another another case not not the case of okay this what I consider a very good journalist going in and reporting on the flood but there are other instances of episodes and things that have happened like I'll mention two things the death of Osvaldo Payá and the death of Laura Poyan both those if you start googling Laura Poyan or Osvaldo Payá you're going to you're going to find a lot of people who will say that they were murdered and my my view is I don't think there was ever enough evidence to show that Osvaldo Payá was murdered he was killed in a car accident his supporters and his family say that state security agents rammed his car from behind and forced him into a tree but there were other people in the car with him and I just think it's crazy to think that state security would decide okay let's go kill Osvaldo Payá and it's okay that we have these couple foreigners in the car we'll kill them too who cares it's a very it would be a boneheaded move I just don't think it it happened and yet if you talk to there there are programs now that rely on the the legacy of Osvaldo Payá funded by the US government to promote the idea that it was a murder and he's a martyr and similarly Laura Poyan who died of an illness in a hospital and I don't think she was secretly injected by some concoction by a government agent I think she probably just died and so US funds now go toward promoting this narrative that I think is probably false I mean I don't have all the facts I can't say with absolute certainty but I'm just let's say I'm just not convinced that those narratives are true that I think is harmful so if you want harmful that but having a Cuban reporter getting paid to go out and and cover environmental problems or you know things going on in neighborhoods and things like that I think that's good so so that says that's about where I would go is to try to make a judgment on some of the programs yeah I mean I understand the distinction that you're making but I think the counter argument is that if you as a journalist even someone who might not necessarily take a position that's oppositional to the government but if you take funds from a country that's been sanctioning and threatening your country with regime change and war for 60 years sanctions that have caused devastation to the economy and the families and the health and everything you know you can imagine then that almost kind of has to delegitimize you in the face of your peers of your fellow citizens in some way but I mean respecting your point of view of course. Yes and I think we also really respect your work and profit from it because as you said in the beginning there's so few people who are looking into this and this is our money and now that we have a new administration and we're trying to get them to turn the wheels around and go back to the Obama years and establish normal relations with Cuba if we had normal relations these programs wouldn't be a problem because we have these kind of programs in places around the world and so I think the issue is how do we stop the US government from trying to overthrow the Cuban government and instead have programs and use of our tax dollars that are actually helping Cubans and trying to build a more robust economy a more robust democracy I mean you know though all of that could be positive in a different situation so I want to thank you Tracy for spending your time with us and for showing people how we can get this information and let's just once again give out the website so they can go and learn more. CubaMoneyProject.com And is there anything final? Yes anything final you want to say before we close? Just I'm very grateful that you would invite me to talk about this and it's been great fun and I appreciate it. And I hope people follow your example and start doing something similar for Venezuela, Nicaragua, Iran, all these other countries where we have so much money being spent in a very non-transparent manner. Thanks so much for your time Tracy. Thank you. Thank you Tracy. Bye-bye.