Who are the real invaders?

The Miami Herald has recently written editorials favoring plans devised by a convicted felon, Elliott Abrams, and proven liars like John Bolton and Sen. Marco Rubio, to starve hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. 

Listen to what Francisco Rodríguez, a leading Venezuelan economist and critic of the Maduro government, told Aaron Maté in an interview for The Grayzone: “At this moment, given the information that we have, the most reasonable conclusion based on the data is that a famine is going to occur in Venezuela over the course of the next 12 months… I’m very concerned by the lack of discussion about what we’re going to do to stop hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans from starving to death.” 

And still, my hometown paper, instead of dealing with this real and possible tragedy, this past week decides to publish a front-page, lead story whose headline read: “Epstein traveled to Cuba at Castro’s invitation, former Colombian president says.” After reading it carefully, I found that it was just another Herald attempt trying to equate Cuba’s Castro with this year’s biggest monster. A man responsible for the heinous treatment of young women using the power of his money. There was nothing, absolutely nothing to the Epstein and Castro story.  

I assure you that hundreds of good guys, and hundreds of bad guys have been to Cuba since Epstein traveled there. If those hundreds came and went and nothing of major importance occurred… why would it merit a front page article in the Miami Herald? 

Over the years the Miami Herald has had excellent reporters, photographers and columnists. They’ve received numerous Pulitzers and other awards. They’ve broken big stories with national and world-wide implications. Most recently we can cite Julie Brown, the Herald reporter who blew the gates off the Jeffrey Epstein case: an agreement that unraveled a decade after it had been settled by former U.S. Attorney and later Labor Secretary Alex Acosta, from Miami, who gave up his post in the Trump administration because of a suspicious 2008 plea deal reached with Epstein. 

Theirs is the kind of reporting that makes journalism relevant and demonstrates the importance of a good, old-fashioned hometown newspaper. Next April, Ms. Brown probably will win a Pulitzer for her reporting on Epstein. She deserves it.

But I am also too often saddened by this same Miami Herald. A newspaper I’ve read since I was a boy of merely eight. But for the past almost three decades, their executives, and those who direct the newspaper’s politics, have been letting us down as a community.  

The situation was originally created by a certain group of Miami Cubans headed by powerbroker Jorge Mas Canosa, the deceased former chairman of the Cuban American National Foundation who some still worship and others call a terrorist, or at the very least an enabler of terrorists. Mas Canosa, for those who weren’t here then or are too young to remember, led a Trump-like campaign against the Miami Herald in 1992 complete with bumper stickers and billboards that read, “I don’t believe The Herald.” As reported by the Herald “the campaign eventually turned ugly. A Herald executive received an anonymous death threat, and newspaper vending machines were vandalized [which included excrement]. The dispute drew national attention by media, human rights and press advocacy groups.”

Since those days the Herald has bent over backwards (and oftentimes broken its back) in order to please an unyielding and often tyrannical political sector of this community. In the early years of this century Progreso Weekly would publish a weekly column, The B.S. Detector, which exposed, side by side, how the Herald (in English) would say one thing, and by removing a word here, or paragraph there, from the very same article in their Spanish version, El Nuevo Herald might say the opposite. 

Today you read The New York Times, Washington Post and a host of other major papers around the country and find many former Miami Herald alumni. I’ve spoken to more than a few who, when asked about the Herald and how they report about Cuba and now Venezuela, for example, react by shaking their head, sad look on their face.

Don’t be surprised to hear that Julie Brown, the reporter cited at the beginning, accepts a reporter’s job elsewhere.

And till today, while perusing many of those major newspapers I speak of, I’ve yet to read that Epstein’s Cuba visit had anything to do with his crimes, committed in this country, and which involves more than one U.S. president, who might possibly have enabled Epstein along the way.

Yet, while Herald executives, and both Republicans and many Democrats, endorse real crimes being committed south of our borders, what looms in the horizon for places like Venezuela, and even Cuba, does not bode well. In the same Grayzone article Maté interviews former CIA officer John Stockwell, who points out, “The point is to put pressure on the targeted government by ripping apart the social and economic fabric of the country. … That means making the people suffer as much as you can, until the country plunges into chaos – until at some point you can impose your choice of governments on that country.”

And later Trump has the balls to claim people from “shithole” countries are invading us!