Changing of the guard at The Herald
Menendez
column will be missed; jury is out on Marquez
By
Max J. Castro
On
July 13, Ana Menendez, who has been writing columns for The
Miami
Herald
for the last three years, announced that “[E]arlier this year, I
accepted a Fulbright grant to teach at the American University in
Cairo. I return next summer, but this is my last column.”
The
news was not a surprise. Menendez’s departure had been rumored for
weeks. The rumor, which apparently was based on a leaked internal
Herald
communication, turned out to have been accurate down to the details.
But
what does Menendez’s somewhat enigmatic statement to the effect
that she will return next summer but that this is her last column
mean? Was the decision entirely her own?…
Changing
of the guard at The
Herald
Menendez
column will be missed; jury is out on Marquez
By
Max J. Castro Read Spanish Version
majcastro@gmail.com
On
July 13, Ana Menendez, who has been writing columns for The
Miami
Herald
for the last three years, announced that “[E]arlier this year, I
accepted a Fulbright grant to teach at the American University in
Cairo. I return next summer, but this is my last column.”
The
news was not a surprise. Menendez’s departure had been rumored for
weeks. The rumor, which apparently was based on a leaked internal
Herald
communication, turned out to have been accurate down to the details.
But
what does Menendez’s somewhat enigmatic statement to the effect
that she will return next summer but that this is her last column
mean? Was the decision entirely her own? Is she returning to the
United States next summer but not the paper? Will she be back at The
Herald
but not as a columnist?
When
Menendez was installed as a news columnist in the summer of 2005, in
the wake of the firing of Jim DeFede and a year and a half after The
Herald
dropped my own column, I was very skeptical. It was clear that The
Herald,
desperate to maximize profits and allay the conservative powers that
be in Miami, was simultaneously moving to the right and dumbing down
the newspaper.
Where
did Menendez fit into this pattern? Menendez’s first column, which
appeared not long after Arthur Teele had committed suicide in front
of the newspaper’s office, seemed to announce a fluff column that
would be a celebration of the wild, wacky, wonderfully multicultural
character of Miami. I savaged it.
I
am delighted to say I was wrong — totally, spectacularly, and
absolutely.
Ana
Menendez turned out to be a columnist in the best tradition of
American journalism. She consistently took on powerful persons and
organizations, challenged the conventional wisdom, and used humor to
expose the absurdity of certain attitudes and the hypocrisy of proud
public figures.
Moreover,
if the bosses at The
Herald
had wanted a Cuban American columnist that would channel the
political outlook of the el
exilio histórico
— blind support for a hard-line Cuba policy, for President Bush, and
for Republican policies — they were in for a surprise. Menendez
regularly fired virulent broadsides at the Cuban government and its
leaders and expressed support for its opponents, but she also
criticized the Bush administration, the hard core exile mindset, and
U.S. policy toward Cuba.
We
don’t know whether any of this had anything to do with Menendez’s
departure. What is clear from the torrent of mean-spirited comments
in response to her final column is that right-wingers of various
stripes and ethnicities saw Menendez’s dissents from hard-right
orthodoxy as unforgivable sins. One reader wrote:
“Ana Menendez: You were
part of the problem of the Miami-Herald with your far left positions
and views against the Cuban Community. Finally the situation caught
up with you and now the Newspaper undoubtely [sic] will be a better
place without you. When a ship is sinking sometimes is [sic] good to
throw over board the ballast and that will help for a while and you
were a Liability for the Newspaper and definitely you never belonged
to this Community. Nice Farewell but please never, never comeback
[sic].
The
Herald wasted
no time in replacing Menendez with Myriam Marquez, another Cuban
American. Will she prove to be the ideologically reliable Cuban
American columnist The
Miami Herald
seems to always be searching for? I won’t make the same mistake
with Marquez that I did with Menendez. I will withhold a definitive
judgment until I read a number of columns.
However,
for now, I will say that after reading Marquez’s initial offering
(“Finding sanity in ‘la vida loca’”), I am skeptical. Among
other things, in an apparent effort to show her ideological
flexibility, Marquez wrote that she voted twice for Democrat Lawton
Chiles and Republican Jeb Bush because “both were strong governors
who set out to build a better Florida.” Jeb Bush, who never saw a
tax that affected the rich he didn’t want to cut or a program that
helped the poor and vulnerable he didn’t want to slash? I have a
hard time imagining Ana Menendez equating the middle-of-the-road
benevolence of Lawton Chiles with the take-no-prisoners ideological
ferocity of Jeb Bush.
But
there I go again.
