The Miami Herald on Cuba – all bad all the time

By Amaury Cruz

Contrary to the right-wing elements personified by CANF Chairman Jorge Mas Canosa and his infamous “I don’t believe in the Herald” campaign, I am an admirer of the Herald’s noble journalistic pursuits and outstanding staff. Its muckraking, particularly its frequent uprooting of political corruption in South Florida, made possible only by the commitment of substantial resources that no other news medium has or is willing to spend; its in-depth reporting of many issues that affect the community; its award-winning photojournalists and some outstanding, provocative opinion writers. But when it comes to the topic of Cuba, I have a suggestion: stop wasting paper and ink: just have a quarter-page daily section with a big headline that says CUBAN REVOLUTION BAD, HISTORIC CUBAN EXILES GOOD. Because basically, that’s all the Herald says, and if it didn’t go into too much detail, it would avoid falling into to the ridiculous, illogical and plain stupid, as it so often does, further diminishing the quality and credibility of what was once one of the best dailies in America.

As a random example that I put in my files for its craziness, take a column by Jackie Bueno Sousa titled “For Cubans, old habits often die hard” (July 6, 2009, p. B1). Bueno Sousa had written the previous week about the “tendency to blame immigrants for crimes and all that’s wrong with our city.” She had complained mainly of Cubans being blamed for a recent wave of Medicare fraud — although admittedly “many of those arrested locally have been, well, Cuban.” So she received much correspondence “about a general perception that Miami’s Cuban community espouses a culture that too easily accepts defrauding government and big business,” such as Medicare fraud and mortgage fraud.

Recognizing there is a grain of truth to the objectionable perception, Bueno Sosa ponders what the cause might be. Her theme: “Perhaps it’s the effects of 50 years of communism reaching over the Florida straits.” So blame corruption in Miami on Fidel. Brilliant analysis.

To top it off, the following week the Herald published a comment in its Speakup section titled “You cant’ generalize about Cuban exiles,” by Julio M. de la Mata (July 12, 2009, p. 3L). Here, the author complains that Bueno Sosa “fails to see that there are two separate groups of Cubans in Miami: pre-1980 Cubans and post-1980 Cubans. He goes on to repeat Bueno Sosa’s point that the system in Cuba forced many of these new Cubans “to find any way possible, legal or illegal, to get whatever they needed.” Never mind that the power structure in Miami-Dade is made up of pre-1980 Cubans, not the newer arrivals, or that their notorious predatory instincts have nothing to do with survival, but with boundless greed. The point, apparently, was to repair the slight damage to the image of the “históricos” that Bueno Sosa may have unwittingly caused and to perpetuate the segregationist myth of the good versus the new Cubans.

To put the lid on the jar, as the saying goes, Bueno Sosa “wouldn’t even be surprised if, as some believe, the Cuban government were benefitting from a scam that totals hundreds of millions of dollars.” (“Don’t blame ethnicity for Medicare fraud,” The Miami Herald, June 29, 2009, p. B1). No foundation, no facts, no logic. If it’s CUBA = BAD, anything goes in the Herald.

And it’s not only opinion pieces, Speakout or letters to the editor. Ninety percent of news items in the Herald about Cuba emphasize an unfavorable angle of the revolution and its current or past leaders, or Cuba’s politics, society and culture. A favorite theme is the prevalence of Cuban “spies” in our midst; this includes repeatedly labeling as “spies” people who bargained a plea of being Cuban agents but were not even accused of being spies, and baselessly tarnishing others.

As I write this, I see an article in the Florida Bar News titled “The long wait for justice” (November 15, 2009, p. 1), about a man who was wrongfully given a life sentence and was in prison for 27 years on the basis of “lies, bogus evidence from a ‘charlatan” . . . , inconsistent and recanted testimony from a witness having sexual relations with the sheriff’s lead investigator, eye-witness identification that didn’t match [the defendant], and ignored alibi and prosecutorial misconduct.” Suppose a newspaper in China, for example, only reported on this type of all-too-frequent case in the United States, or all those other cases where people have even been given the death sentence, only to be exonerated by DNA evidence, or perhaps been mistakenly executed, as has happened, despite our vaunted justice system. Suppose this newspaper constantly focused only on instances of police brutality, racial profiling and other forms of discrimination, “Christian” right intolerance, gay bashing, the 35.9 million people who live below the poverty line in America, including 12.9 million children, the 45.7 million currently uninsured, the 2.3 million people behind bars, the hugely disproportionate number of blacks and Latinos in the jail population, the record number (nearly 50 million people, including almost one in four children) who struggled last year to get enough to eat, credit card company abuses, instances of torture by the U.S. military, the prison in Guantanamo, extraordinary renditions, CIA spying and interference in the affairs of other nations, U.S. complicity with right-wing, repressive regimes, electoral fraud and gerrymandering, the corrosive effect of lobbying and political contributions on our government, the shallowness and servility of most corporate media, the increasing disparity of wealth, the rapaciousness of our financial institutions, and so on.

While this newspaper might be reporting some of the truth, its Chinese readers would not be getting the whole truth. They would have a distorted picture of reality and we, who have other sources of information, would not find it credible as a whole. Clearly, the whole truth is what we need from our news media, whether it’s the U.S. or other countries. But we need it more because of the Americans’ holier-than-thou attitude. To bend the truth in order to satisfy a segment of readers or advertisers is to do a great disservice to all of us, to our country and to our neighbors.

Surely, there are many things to criticize about Cuba, but just as surely, there are at least some good things to be said. Something about Cuba’s sports prominence? Its advances in biotechnology? Its hurricane preparedness and evacuations? The general health and education of the people? Its world-renowned musical forms? The Herald doesn’t treat those topics unless it’s to suggest that the biotechnology is a threat of bioterrorism, the health system is not as good as advertised, the people’s education is wasted, baseball players want to defect, or the absurd idea that the center of Cuba’s musical universe shifted to Miami.

The Herald urgently needs a dose of fair and balanced reporting (not in the sense of Fox News) when it comes to Cuba because of its influence on the ongoing debate about its relations with the U.S., which concretely affects people here and there. Is it prohibited by the powers that be? Is it market-driven self-censorship? I wonder whether, by fomenting its particular mentality (going back to Mas Canosa’s campaign), purging alternative columnists, and caving in to the demands for more “conservative” ones (as if there were too many real liberals), it has lost its capacity to do so.

Amaury Cruz is a Miami attorney, writer and political activist.