WETV's existence was cut short when an act of Congress ordered the channel's reservation for TV Martí, the new United States government television service for Cuba, and the government paid the owner to surrender the license.
[4] This brought the unbuilt WETV under an ambitious umbrella; in 1989, PBAC would announce its plans for WPPB-TV 63 in Boca Raton, planned as a station targeting senior citizens, and WTCE-TV 21 in Fort Pierce, alongside a station on channel 9 in Islamorada that would be known as "Hispanivision" (and was never built).
[1] In 1988, a task force—consisting of the United States Information Agency (USIA), Voice of America, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, the Department of Defense, and the FCC—was convened to select a VHF channel for transmission of television programming to Cuba, as there were virtually no UHF receivers in place in the country at the time.
This act of Congress barred any reassignment of TV channels that would affect domestic service when those stations had been on air on January 1, 1989[2]—not the case for WETV, which had signed on (at the earliest) July 1 and could have its channel, the only one identified by the 1988 task force as suitable for the purpose, reassigned for government use.
[6] However, as TV Martí was approved for full-time operations and with the law authorizing WETV and TV Martí to share time on the channel (by way of Martí leasing it from WETV) only through November 30, the FCC moved in October to dismiss the application to sell the station, saying it would not be in the national interest to authorize the sale when the channel was weeks away from being reclaimed under the provisions of the Television Broadcasting to Cuba Act, which afforded no discretion to the commission.