How the Radio Mambí sale escalated the fight over Miami’s Spanish-language airwaves
It was once through the microphones of Radio Mambí, Miami’s premier Spanish-language radio station, that Republican campaign operatives and personalities helped the GOP stop Miami-Dade County’s recount of the 2000 presidential election.
In what contributed to the movie-like protest at the Stephen P. Clark Government Center downtown, Mambí’s anchors helped stir fears of a power grab happening right under their noses — something that could have emerged from Fidel Castro’s Cuba. Now known as the “Brooks Brothers Riot,” the protesters’ rowdy intervention helped pressure the Miami-Dade County Canvassing Board to stop its hand recount of disputed ballots, helping President George W. Bush win Florida and his first term.
Over 20 years later, with claims of election fraud and other warped narratives once again percolating in local and national media, tensions over the influence of Miami’s Spanish-language airwaves are at an apex. And Mambí, a fixture of Miami’s Cuban exile community, is back at the center of controversy over truth and power amid a struggle over who gets to narrate the story of Miami’s Hispanic communities.
Phone lines lit up last week when Mambí’s current owner, the Spanish-language mammoth corporation TelevisaUnivision, announced it would hand over the reins to Latino Media Network as part of a $60-million deal that includes 18 stations in majority Hispanic markets. In Miami, the sale includes WAQI Mambí and WQBA-AM.
Following months of increasingly polarized debate over the veracity of content in Miami’s Spanish-language media, the deal threw Mambí into an emotional firestorm tinged with references to communist Cuba, claims of censorship and threats of boycotts and strikes. Critics have noted that an investment firm tied to Democratic mega-donor George Soros is helping to finance the deal and called the new ownership group “Radio Granma” in an allusion to Cuba’s state-run media. Callers flooded Mambí programs with messages of solidarity.
The opposition to the sale has grown so widespread that Cuban exiles, along with Lt. Gov. Jeannette Nuñez, have promised boycotts and denounced the sale as the silencing of Cubans in exile that would prevent access to news about human rights violations in Cuba. Sen. Marco Rubio and Miami Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart have sent letters to the federal government opposing the sale. And Gov. Ron DeSantis’ campaign released a Spanish-language website and ad backed by a $6,500 buy on Mambí attacking Soros’ investment and calling it a “propaganda takeover.”
“This concerted effort to take over our beloved Radio Mambí station is something that we are not going to stand idly by,” Nuñez said Wednesday during a press conference held at the Bay of Pigs museum in Little Havana.
The deal between TelevisaUnivision and Latino Media Network includes stations in 10 U.S. cities. But the reaction was most intense among conservative Latinos in Florida, where the sale is the latest escalation in an ongoing battle that has unraveled since 2020 over control of content on the Spanish-language airwaves.
Democrats argue that Spanish-language disinformation is rampant, largely unregulated and needs to be challenged, while Republicans say their opinions are being censored and conservative hosts scapegoated by a party that is bleeding support among Hispanic voters.
“If there’s something that bothers this group of progressives,” Ninoska Pérez, a conservative commentator on Mambí, said while reacting to the sale on the air last week, ”it’s the Cuban exile.”
It’s unclear what, if any, changes the new leadership will bring to WAQI and the 17 other stations that could soon be in its portfolio.
The Federal Communications Commission still has to evaluate each station independently before approving a sale, and it’s a process that the buyers expect will take at least a year.
LMN founders Stephanie Valencia and Jess Morales Rocketto say the sale was motivated by a desire to keep the station in the hands of Latino owners. The group has said there won’t be any personnel changes in the near future, but a spokesperson for LMN told the Herald it is difficult to predict the circumstances of the market once the sale is finalized.
In a statement, Valencia and Morales Rocketto said they “believe in freedom of expression, the right to protest, to assemble, and a free press which values verifiable facts and balance,” adding that “all points of view will be welcomed.”
“The stations we acquired in Miami have been institutions in the Cuban community for decades and Cuba’s freedom is one of their flagship issues. We believe wholeheartedly in that mission, and we will remain true to that spirit of liberty that has guided them over decades,” the statement read.
The Impact of Radio in Miami Politics
The Mambí sale has fanned the flames of a debate that intensified in 2020, as some Spanish-language media elevated conversations that had conspiratorial origins about elections fraud, Black Lives Matter, communism and other topics.
The scrutiny has gone beyond radio. Journalists and analysts warned of manipulated narratives in group chats on messaging apps and on YouTube, where Spanish-language influencers are rising in influence. At one point, a Democratic Miami congresswoman requested an FBI investigation into disinformation in Spanish-language media.
And in the months that followed the 2020 election — when Hispanic voters in Miami-Dade County dramatically shifted their support to ex-President Donald Trump — the intensity of the debate only increased: Florida Congressman Darren Soto and other members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus publicly opposed the sale of a Spanish-language station in Miami over fears of what Soto called “silencing progressive voices,” and Democrats on the Committee on House Administration held a hearing downtown to warn of Spanish-language media manipulation.
Radio Mambí, historically a megaphone for Miami’s conservative Cuban exile community, has at times featured in the debate. Following the Jan. 6 riot at the US Capitol, several nonprofits with ties to progressives issued a report asserting that hosts on the station promoted caravans associated with ex-President Donald Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally in Washington and then spread disinformation about who was behind the insurrection and what happened that day.
Raul Martínez, the former mayor of Hialeah who hosts the YouTube show Sin Mordaza con Raúl Martinez, said that what hosts say on Mambí’s shows spreads by word of mouth.
“What people do is repeat the lies,” said Martínez, who participated in the congressional committee’s Feb. 7 hearing at Miami Dade College. “They’ll listen to the show and instead of checking it out because they don’t have the time, they’ll go to the beauty parlor or the barbershop or they’ll go to the store and just start repeating it.”
Republicans have pushed back. Nuñez, as Republicans gathered in Little Havana this week to denounce the purchase of Mambí, described the acquisition as an effort to “silence conservative voices and elect extremist candidates and support extremist causes.”
Giancarlo Sopo, who worked on Trump’s reelection campaign as a Hispanic communication strategist, argues that Democrats’ claims of Spanish disinformation are less about commentators spreading false narratives and more about Republicans’ growing momentum among Hispanics.
“Coming to terms with this problem and course-correcting is what the Democrats should do, but they won’t. Instead, they resort to illogical excuses for their losses,” Sopo said. “The Democrats can complain about Spanish-language radio stations all they want, but they clearly have much bigger issues with Latinos and themselves.”
Owning the airwaves
But the uproar over who gets to own a Spanish-language radio station, however loud, has not been one-sided.
Last year, America CV, the parent company of local TV station AmericaTeVé, made a move to purchase Miami’s Radio Caracol.
Unlike Mambi, WSUA Caracol 1260 AM serves a wider demographic of Miami Hispanics, like Colombians, an electorate Republicans have worked to organize.
While the sale might have otherwise gone under the radar, the incoming owners — attorney and Cuban-American businessman Marcell Felipe and America TeVé CEO Carlos Vasallo, a Spanish media mogul — fired Martínez, the former Hialeah mayor and host of Caracol’s flagship show.
“The next morning I get a call, ‘your program is off the air’ part of the deal was that I’d get to say thanks and goodbye to the audience. But then they told me I couldn’t,” said Martinez, who once unsuccessfully ran for Congress as a Democrat against Republican Cuban-American luminary Lincoln Diaz-Balart.
Controversy ensued. Florida Democrats got involved in Congress, asking the FCC to get involved in the sale.
“When Caracol was bought, before they transferred the license, they did something that is patently illegal, which is fire their content director and their number one show on the air,” said Joe Garcia, a Democratic former Miami Congressman.
Garcia ended up filing a complaint with the FCC opposing the application, and claiming ATV Holdings, the trust controlled by Felipe, was lying about who the real buyer was and was omitting information. While the application presented Felipe as the main owner, the FCC asked questions about Vasallo and his connections to the deal.
Instead of answering the questions, ATV Holdings withdrew the application and the sale was halted. Martinez has not been reinstated.
“Marco Rubio, Rick Scott and Mario Diaz-Balart immediately supported that deal and said the FCC had no part in the issue of content,” Garcia said. “And now they’re arguing the opposite.”
Felipe said in a statement to the Herald that the government “should not and cannot grant or deny licenses based on the ideological reasons.”
“They should get their license,” Felipe said of LMN. “The question is, will it do them any good if they don’t have the right message.”
The Evolution of Spanish-Language Radio
Because stations like Radio Mambí build a level of trust with their listeners, they become loyal to the hosts and become accustomed to tuning in every week, Martinez said. Yet, for all the talk about the power of Spanish-language talk radio, the purchase of the 18 radio stations was surprising to some experts.
“They must know something I don’t know,” Eduardo Gamarra, a politics professor and director of the Latino Public Opinion Forum at FIU, said of LMN’s acquisitions. “I don’t see radio growing as much as people think … People over 65, sure, but younger generations are just not really listening to radio.”
Though it boasts Nielsen’s top overall rating for Spanish-language talk radio in South Florida, Radio Mambí’s audience has shrunk as more people are getting their news online or through television, Gamarra added. New leadership and a change in programming, such as a lack of focus on Cuba, could further decrease listenership.
“Spanish-language radio has been devolving over the years here in Miami. Univision radio, for example, bought stations that were once incredibly successful. There were 14, 18 really powerful stations that had a lot of impact on the community, and did really good news as far as I know,” Ricardo Brown, a veteran journalist and host of the show Panorama Nacional on Actualidad Radio, said. “They haven’t done as well … since they were sold to Univision.”
And as far as topics discussed on air, “There’s a big difference now,” Brown added, saying programs delve more between their current discussion of national politics compared to past shows focused more on older shows when they were catering to Miami’s Cuban diaspora. “It wasn’t just Radio Mambi, it was Cuban radio…They talked about things that interested us. Cuban culture, literature. I don’t hear that anymore.”
Still, since it was announced, the sale of Mambí has been the talk of Miami — and its conservative politicians.
On Friday, joined by U.S. Rep. representative Carlos Gimenez and Hialeah Mayor Esteban Bovo in Doral, Florida’s two Republican senators took turns blasting the plan, claiming that it would result in the silencing of important Cuban exile voices who oppose the island’s communist regime.
Rubio emphasized that he feels the recently formed purchasing group needs to be vetted.
“This is a brand new group,” Rubio said. “This is not a company that existed a month ago. These people dropped out of nowhere.”
In an interview with the Herald after the panel, Scott seemed to soften the attacks, suggesting the sale is only a concern if it’s “silencing voices.”
“I think it’s all the same. I think we just want to make sure these things are being done for legitimate business purposes,” he said. “And that they don’t silence voices on either side.”
When asked if the FCC should evaluate the sale in terms of what political content will be aired, Scott said that “It shouldn’t be done with the purpose of silencing voices.”
“I mean, this is like book-burning,” Scott said. “People have the right to buy radio stations, but let’s make sure the voices are still heard in the community.”
Miami Herald staff writer Joey Flechas contributed to this report.
This story was originally published June 12, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "How the Radio Mambí sale escalated the fight over Miami’s Spanish-language airwaves."
