TRYING TO SET
THE AGENDA IN MIAMI

The Miami Herald usually takes and assumes the same positions as the Cuban government. But we must confess that they were once more discreet about it. Lately the distance between The Miami Herald and Fidel Castro has narrowed considerably. . . . Why must we consent to The Miami Herald and ElNuevo Herald continuing a destructive campaign full of hatred for the Cuban xile, when ultimately they live and eat, economically speaking, on our support?

Jorge Mas Canosa, chairman of the Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation, in a local radio broadcast, aired on January 21 and printed in full in El Diario las Americas.

The revelation that The Miami Herald and its Spanish-language counterpart, El Nuevo Herald, were in bed with Cuban leader Fidel Castro must have confounded the editors of the Cuban Communist party organ, Granma, since the Havana daily has repeatedly portrayed them as right-wing tools of the eternal CIA campaign against the thirty-three-year-old revolution.

Anywhere else, Mas Canosa's remarks might have been ignored. In the darker recesses of Miami's exile community, however, his words were clearly a call to arms. Within days Herald publisher David Lawrence, Jr., and two top editors received death threats. Anonymous callers phoned in bomb threats and Herald vending machines were jammed with gum and smeared with feces. Mas Canosa's Cuban American National Foundation quickly denied responsibility and condemned the hijinks, but Mas's words were highly inflammatory in a city where public red-baiting has served as a prelude to bombings and, in past years, murder.

That was in January, but editors at the Herald still feel besieged. Foundations ads saying "I don't believe The Herald" in Spanish are appearing on Dade County buses. Lawrence has heard that foundation people are sounding out advertisers over whether they would support a boycott -- a troubling prospect in a recession.

Coverage of the foundation and Cuba is now carefully scrutinized, Herald reports say. "There has been a watershed in how we operate with Cuban questions," says one staffer, who requested anonymity. "Before the campaign, Cuba issues were dealt with in a routine way."

Executive editor Douglas C. Clifton concedes that he "probably" reads Cuba-related copy more thoroughly now than before. "It's good sense," he says. "When you are the subject of a potential circulation boycott, an advertising boycott, an intense public relations campaign to attack your credibility, I think you'd be foolhardy not to insure that everything you put in the newspaper is something that you don't have to after the fact say, 'Oops, I wish we hadn't done that.'" He goes on to point out that "we have written lots of critical stories, potentially controversial stories and columns about Cuban issues since this began."

Tensions between the Herald and the foundation had been brewing for months. A recent internal foundation report complained that Herald coverage had been overly sympathetic to anti-Castro rivals who back a proposal for a Cuban dialogue leading to democracy. Mas, for his part, complained extensively about a Herald editorial opposing a bill intended to tighten the embargo against Castro.

"The Herald has engaged in a campaign of advocacy journalism and political bias," Mas asserted in a 4,000-word article published on the Herald's op-ed page on February 8. "In covering the Cuban American National Foundation's initiatives, you skew or deny coverage, attempting to deny the foundation's credibility."

Some critics say the foundation has actually gotten too easy a ride from the Herald. "I think they've treated the foundation with kid gloves," says Lisandro Perez, head of the Cuban Research Institute of Florida International University. "Here's an organization that has all kinds of ethical allegations, from Mas's personal finances to his feud with his brother. The logical thing would be to send an investigation team after him. And they have a particularly good investigative staff -- ask Gary Hart."

Jim Mullin, editor of New Times, an independent Miami weekly, wrote a scathing review of several 1990 column by Herald publisher Lawrence. One of them, "A Conversation with Jorge Mas Canosa," began with the exile's own words: "I am a man who easily falls in love with an ideal, I am an idealist. . . . I laugh at the image of the Jorge Mas who crushes every adversary." Another column offered a generally benign look at convicted saboteur Orlando Bosch, an anti-Castro hero to some conservative exiles, despite alleged links to terrorism.

"A more heart-warming portrait of a convicted criminal could not have been imagined. . . . Disgusting," Mullin wrote of the Bosch piece.

The media pay attention to Mas because many reporters view him as the principal spokesman for Cuban exiles. Some even think he is a contender in the contest to become the first elected president in post-Castro Cuba. Still, exactly who he represents is not entirely clear. Florida International University polls suggest a much broader spread of opinion among the Miami exile community than that which falls within the confines of the foundation's platform. For example, its most recent poll shows that 49 percent of Cuban exiles support a dialogue. Recent waves of Cuban emigres have given impetus to a more moderate social democratic exile movement, one that favors more contact between Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits.

As the Miami debate over the future of Cuba becomes both more heated and more complicated, some fault the media for tapping only the point of view of the controversial Mas Canosa. One frequently cited example involves the Today show. On February 14, Mas Canosa got six-and-one-half minutes on the show, a good portion of which he devoted to his views on how the U.S. press helped to put Castro in power and keep him there.

"We only had time for one guest and I decided that Mas Canosa was the mostrepresentative spokesman for the Cuban American community of Miami," says Today show executive producer Jeff Zucker, a Miami native. "I made that call." Ramon Mestre, a member of The Miami Herald's editorial board, says he was asked by a Today show assistant producer to suggest an exile who could provide an alternative view. He named a liberal anti-Castro activist, Ramon Cernuda, the Miami representative of a leading Cuba-based dissident group that supports dialogue. "The guy said, 'Well, Mr. Mas has said that he would not appear on the same show as Cernuda.' They caved in," Mestre says. (The foundation and Zucker deny Mestre's version of events.)

Attempts by Mas Canosa to set the agenda of the non-Cuban media are a novelty, but liberal Miami exile radio reporters have complained for years that bullying by conservative exile groups like the foundation has intimidated moderate exiles into silence and projected a distorted image of their community as a rightist mirror of one-party rule in Cuba.

One such critic is broadcast journalist Ricardo Bofill, an emigre journalist with solid anti-Castro credentials. Bofill came to Miami in 1988 after spending fourteen years as a political prisoner. But he was fired from his job as daily commentator on Miami station WQBA in June 1990, a week after he aired his support for Gustavo Arcos, a besieged dissident who proposed the dialogue. His one-hour weekly program on a cable channel was suspended two weeks later. He still gets bomb threats. Radio Marti suspended his volunteer presence on a round-table talk show in January; Bofill was invited to appear again, he says, after he wrote a protest letter to President Bush.

Bofill says that the foundation and other conservative exile groups "believe that Gustavo Arcos is a traitor and that we who support him are also traitors. They completely blacklisted me."

Herald columnist Liz Balmaseda reported that radio commentator Emilio Milian recently got a foundation letter accusing him of using his station, Radio Fe, to sully "the honesty, character, integrity" of Mas Canosa and other foundation members. Milian has a history of refusing to be silenced by intimidation -- in 1976, he lost both legs when a bomb planted under his car exploded, just after he aired editorials against political violence in Miami.

Ernesto Betancourt resigned as director of Radio Marti in March 1990, accusing Mas Canosa, who heads the Radio Marti presidential advisory board, of using the station as a fiefdom to further his political ambitions in Cuba.

Betancourt fears that a conservative monopoly on the exiles' political debate won't only muzzle the press, it will also send the wrong message to disgruntled Cubans in Havana. "If you were in Cuba and you were an army officer plotting against Castro," Betancourt says, "you would be discouraged against doing so if the alternative is that the United States was going to send a group of people who would kick you out of your job and your house and put you on trial. Because that's the image the foundation has."

The foundation's anti-Herald campaign has triggered a flurry of negative stories and opinion pieces, even from a few ideological allies, like former Reagan administration official Elliott Abrams, who has ties to a rival anti-Castro group.

In mid-March the Herald reported that the General Accounting Office of the U.S. Congress is involved in a six-month probe of TV Marti and has reportedly uncovered evidence that its newscast favors the foundation.

In March, too, the Inter American Press Association condemned press censorship in communist Cuba and "the ludicrous" accusations against the Herald in the same breath. "Such irrational charges are damaging to the cause of free speech," the IAPA said.

CORRECTION-DATE: July, 1992 / August, 1992

CORRECTION: "Trying to Set the Agenda in Miami," Jorge Mas Canosa became Jose Mas Canosa.

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