Our disinformation
By Varela
I remember when, two decades ago, I began to work for a publication in Miami for the first time. The Chicago Tribune, through The Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, hired me because it had launched an interesting, 75-page tabloid called Éxito! that was snatched by readers as soon as it hit the stands.
It filled the readers’ demand, their need, at the right time. Its columns dealt with issues that El Nuevo Herald didn’t even touch.
In my talks with the weekly’s editor, I understood that the alternative press not only criticizes the bad information offered by the establishment press but also fills the information vacuum created by the shameless journalists who pander to the powerful local institutions and groups.
Éxito! touched on topics that were taboo at El Nuevo Herald, issues that bordered on scandal in a society where conservative and Puritan right-wingers tried to impose their views – but couldn’t.
The tabloid dealt with homosexuality, AIDS, political fraud, abortion, biased immigration, poor education and (of course) anti-Castroism in its crudest and cruelest forms. Without the pomposity and patriotic fervor commonly used to paint the news.
I saw how the alternative publication forced the establishment press to open spaces, to inform in a more objective manner and to stop taking sides so as not to lose the little credibility it had, not to mention the drop in advertising caused by the decline in readership.
After 20 years, however, what was an alternative for Miami no longer is. That is why, when a truth is told, it seems more brazen, bold and irreverent. The same adjectives bestowed on Éxito! at the time.
While Miami’s trauma began with Batista supporters and former revolutionaries, mutating later to hardliners and dialogueros, it has now metastasized in the Cuban community to many more visions and social groups eager to diagnose our nation and its émigrés.
For example, the interview Progreso Semanal has just published with dissident Darsi Ferrer (a professional whose wife is more photographed than him, like the wives of soccer star Beckham and French Prime Minister Sarkozy) is great news because of the opinions expressed by the dissident, who has distanced himself from both the recalcitrant Miami and Havana’s officialdom.
Ferrer elegantly avoids both extremes and proposes a consensus within the plurality of ideas, especially thanking the efforts of the Cuban Catholic Church, which has been brutally attacked in the press of the so-called “combative exile” in Miami.
Naturally, Ferrer hears no echo in Miami’s Cuban press, other than a simple “welcome” to his release.
The censorship is obvious. One can always criticize opposing points of view, but what cannot be denied is the veracity and importance of alternative publications within those societies that wish to call themselves free.
Born in Cuba in 1955, José Varela was an editorial cartoonist in Miami for 15 years at the magazine Éxito (1991-97) and El Nuevo Herald (1993-2006). A publicist and television writer, he is a member of the Progreso Semanal team.
