The Hitler mirage

Never underestimate the ability of The Miami Herald to be irrelevant. Case in point: its coverage of “the strange-looking photo” on Page One of the Cuban daily Granma of Dec. 4.

“Is it Castro or Hitler? Photo stirs speculation,” said the headline in The Herald Dec. 30, raising an issue that was, in itself, mere speculation.

A photograph made as President Fidel Castro addressed American students at the Palace of Conventions in Havana showed “what many believe to be a striking resemblance to Adolf Hitler,” the story contended. “Using magnifying glasses to get a detailed look, Cubans were stunned by what they surmised was a deliberate manipulation of the photo.”

“‘The head [looks] like Hitler,’ said [a] diplomat who spoke on condition of anonymity. … ‘It looks like he has a Hitler mustache.’”

“The face of Hitler is perfectly clear,” a Cuban writer told The Herald. (He, too, asked for anonymity.)

Had someone at Granma retouched the photograph with mischievous intent?

 An optical illusion

A Granma employee who answered the phone Dec. 29 “acknowledged that the newspaper had been flooded with phone calls,” The Herald reported. The employee explained that a microphone had cast a shadow on Castro’s face that resembled a small mustache.

The newspaper’s editors had conducted “an investigation, but there’s no problem,” the employee told The Herald.

That should have been the end of the story, but The Herald managed to slip a reference to the publication “several years ago [of] a photo that appeared to show a skull over Castro’s face when looked at from a certain angle.”

Well, we know of at least one picture of George W. Bush whose eyes seem to follow you around the room if you look at it from a certain angle, but that doesn’t mean the eyes in the picture move. And we know of dozens of pictures where people photographed from a distance – as in the Palace of Conventions photo – turn out looking like someone else.

The distance between the subject and the lens, the lighting, the shadows, the subject’s movements, and the coarse screen through which most newspaper pictures are reproduced are elements that often combine to blur the image and fool the reader. But such oddities seldom “set off [the] storm of conspiracy theories” The Herald claims this picture did.

The real news goes unreported

Our point is not only that The Herald made a mountain out of a molehill, but also that it did so at the expense of many legitimate news stories that are coming out of Cuba – stories that more richly deserve the space given to this frivolous bit of trivia.

Every day, the major news agencies report from Havana on developments in science, trade, tourism, the arts, entertainment, and other topics of general interest. Little, if any, of that appears in neither The Herald nor El Nuevo Herald. Instead, the Miami papers publish reports of Fidel Castro sporting a Hitler mustache, or rumors that Raúl Castro is dying of cancer or that Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave Fidel a jet plane as a Christmas present.

How can we take these newspapers seriously if they don’t take themselves seriously? And we’re not the only ones to feel this way. Other newspapers utterly (and justifiably) ignored The Herald’s story. Our search of data bases showed that no other major U.S. newspaper picked it up.

CROCODILE TEARS

We were touched by Andrés Oppenheimer’s two-paragraph commentary Dec. 21 in defense of freedom of association.

“Miami’s Channel 22 decision to temporarily pull Argentine comedian Guillermo Francella’s show off the air because of his meeting with Cuban dictator Fidel Castro is unfortunate,” wrote the Argentine-born Oppenheimer as a postscript to his regular column.

His reference was to a news item in The Herald and El Nuevo that said WDLP-TV had suspended Francella’s program (“Turn Francella on”) because the entertainer had attended the 25th Festival of the New Latin American Cinema in Havana Dec. 12 and had chatted with the Cuban president, who was there that day.

“While Francella’s reported softness to a dictator who earlier this year executed three people and jailed 75 peaceful opponents is regrettable, Miami should pride itself on being a more open society than Cuba. Let’s hope Channel 22 will reconsider its decision,” Oppenheimer wrote.

We won’t dwell on the fact that Oppenheimer never came out in defense of any Cuban artist who has been harassed by Miami extremists – or prevented from performing in the United States, for that matter – but we must remind him that executing criminals as a form of punishment is not an uncommon practice in this country. Neither is imprisonment.

Three people were executed in Florida in 2003 and 24 were put to death in Texas, President Bush’s home state. In all, 64 people were executed in the United States last year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (www.deathpenaltyinfo.org). And let’s not forget that dozens of “peaceful opponents” to the Free Trade Area of the Americas were jailed just a few weeks ago right there in Miami.

An ulterior motive

And here’s an interesting bit of information, gleaned from the Argentine newspaper Clarín.

WDLP-TV “is owned by William de la Peña, a prestigious eye surgeon who was adviser and spokesman on health topics for George W. Bush during [the 2000] presidential campaign. It is well known that the White House leader repudiates Castro.”

Perhaps Oppenheimer should appeal directly to De la Peña.