Our shame

By Varela

It’s not that I have a thing against El Nuevo Herald, but that El Nuevo has a thing against its readers.

It humiliates them, mocks them. Screws them, takes advantage of them. And doesn’t apologize.

And the worst is that it pretends to be a serious newspaper.

At least we know that The National Enquirer screws around for the hell of it. It says that Sharon Stone had a son by an extraterrestrial and that Angelina Jolie has sex with her Pekinese, but, when we read that at the supermarket checkout counter (we don’t buy it because it’s not worth it; we leaf through it while standing on line to pay for our groceries) we know that it is a yellow tabloid that profits from farce and sensationalism, pure and hard.

But El Nuevo? Sheeet.

A newspaper to which I devoted 13 years of my life, well devoted years in which I contributed 14 awards to its gallery, day after day, without taking any vacations, with one cartoon a day, one comic strip a day (A Jondred Percent Hispano) which won the prize for the best Spanish-language comic strip in the United States. Not to mention one page every Friday in the paper’s entertainment supplement, Viernes.

I feel bad about that. I even feel pain in my soul for having participated in its shamelessness and for lying each morning to so many thousands of readers.

I remember how we used to create “dissidents” out of nothing.

As if the “dissidents” were spontaneously generated, born of a drop of dew, the expectoration of a drunkard, or the piss from a goat.

For example, El Nuevo would say that there was an organization in Cuba – named it whatever it wished – identified someone as the leader of that phantom organization, and tried to sell him as an oppositionist or anti-Castro activist. And then it signed the article “Herald news services.” Nobody took responsibility for the lie!

That kind of trickery was sad, but true.

And I participated in that – I’ll swear it in court if I have to – because I didn’t have the guts to say “enough” and be myself, because being oneself is very difficult in a life full of invoices and debts that force you to prostitute yourself for fear of being thrown onto the street.

Remember that famous lady doctor with the long fingernails who arrived in Panama saying that she was Fidel’s personal physician, talking nonsense about nonexistent illnesses? El Nuevo gave her all possible credit, as if she were a super-academician. And later it became known that she was simply another phony (not even a physician) who came here to buy fame and a new life.

These are painful attacks (but fully intentional) against freedom of the press in our city.

Here’s another for-instance. Jorge Villaverde was murdered in 2002. He was another drug trafficker who was in prison for illegal weapons possession. After he came out of prison, some time later, he was shot dead at his Redland farm by a sharpshooter, from a distance. The man owed money to 11,000 virgins and the Cuban narcos from New Jersey, his worst enemies.

I know all this because I worked for him in his estate, when I ran a burglar-alarm company in the 1980s and installed a whole security system with cameras, two-way communications and infrared alarms at the entrances to the estate and his shooting range.

My former wife became a friend of his wife. And I remember how Jorge protected himself from the New Jersey criminals. He lived in fear of them.

Then El Nuevo reported his death but said nothing about his low life, hinting that he may have been killed because of his anti-Castro militancy (all these people belonged to anti-Castro groups) and that it was likely the Cuban government that killed him. The fact was that all these criminals were killing each other over illegal businesses and unpaid debts.

There was something tragical and comical in all this. Tragical, because death and family pain were involved; comical, because all those people had been in prison in Cuba and had been released so they could come to the U.S. And I don’t understand why the Cuban government would waste bullets on them in Miami, when it could have eliminated them in a Cuban prison by having other inmates stab them to death in a corridor or a latrine.

Let’s be honest and stop eating garbage with our politics. We’re Cubans.

Last week, The Herald comes out with the story about Gerardo, one of the five Cubans sent to prison for being antiterrorists. The newspaper, fresh as a cucumber, claimed that Gerardo had said this and the other about Basulto’s airplanes, counter to Cuba’s official version.

I’m not going to go into the details of the topic because it’s ridiculous. Everyone knows the truth.

Then comes Gerardo’s lawyer and rebuts The Herald. He practically accuses it of libel. But The Herald keeps going. It continues its routine as if nothing had happened. Without apologizing to the community, without issuing a correction, without justifying one single lie.

El Nuevo Herald is the greatest cause for shame the American press has at this moment. And it isn’t me who says so (it accuses me of criticizing it and of having attacked it), but lawyers, people who study the law.

I broke away from the paper bluntly and convincingly.

When will its readers realize that they subscribe to a swindle?