Sunday, February 17, 2008

 

Does Herald have qualms with calling Castro dictator?

 

BY EDWARD SCHUMACHER-MATOS

Here is a lead to a news story that many readers of The Miami Herald might like:

Dictator Fidel Castro will have himself reelected president in elections next Sunday.

It is not the reelection that is appealing. It is the upfront labeling of Castro as a dictator. The Herald, like most newspapers in the country, shies from doing that, usually opting for the sanitized terms of ''leader'' or ``president.''

More than semantics are involved. The Miami Herald is one of the most influential newspapers in the country concerning U.S. policy toward Cuba. But many South Florida readers, especially Cuban exiles, have long criticized the paper for being naive and soft on Castro.

Commenting online on an article last month by reporter Frances Robles on legislative elections and Castro's upcoming possibilities, one reader posted: ``A useless article exploring something that doesn't exist in Cuba, democracy or free elections.''

''Incredible that after 50 years we still have such idiotic thinking by U.S. journalists,'' wrote another. 'If you don't have information, why turn your ignorance into a `news' story?'' said a third. And a fourth added: ``The Herald has no grasp of the Castro regime's lust for complete hegemony.''

I don't agree with these criticisms. Herald editors and reporters I have talked to are all fully aware of the horrors under Castro. Reflecting South Florida, a good number are of Cuban descent themselves. I don't know of any who are pro-Castro, as some readers have charged. Certainly, the Castro government has not looked kindly on The Miami Herald, barring its reporters, criticizing its stories and tweaking the paper by allowing the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, its main competitor, to open a bureau in Havana.

But the Herald continues to sneak reporters into Cuba on tourist visas, and the reporters write anonymously so they can sneak back in again. It is heroic work.

And they do so with a great sensitivity to be as professionally objective as possible. But therein, paradoxically, lies my concern. They are often too sensitive. They do sometimes use the word dictator, but almost reluctantly, it seems. A search of new stories since 2000 by research editor Monika Leal found that Castro was called dictator 68 times. That compares with 518 times as leader and 445 times as president. In the last six months, he was referred to only twice as dictator.

One need not go so far as to use my hypothetical lead, but being more upfront in terminology might also help assuage many readers, too.

Elections are indeed scheduled for next Sunday. The National Assembly, the country's legislature, will elect members of the Council of State, a sort of executive committee for the country, and the council's president. That technically has been Castro's position, though at the moment his brother Raúl is acting in his place while Fidel lies ill.

There is a possibility that the 81-year-old Fidel will totally step aside for his younger brother. Fidel is frail and writing the reflective essays of a dying man. ''My basic duty is not to cling to office,'' he wrote to the Cuban people in December, ``and even less to obstruct the path of younger people, but to pass on the experiences and ideas whose modest worth stems from the exceptional era in which I have lived.''

But if he does take some formal advisory or symbolic title, Herald editors will be faced with the conundrum of deciding what his real powers are. Will he still be the dictator? The former dictator? The half dictator? Or if he dies, what should his obituary say?

''The key question is how we portray Castro,'' said Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal. ``If you read the coverage over time, you see him in full detail as a dictatorial failure and as a man who has caused enormous pain and suffering.

'The question is how he is defined in his position. We usually settle on the word `leader' because it's the most straightforward and direct. But that doesn't preclude us from calling him other positions, from dictator to president to disaster.''

Robles, for example, wrote near the beginning of her article that the National Assembly was a ''rubber stamp'' and that the 614 candidates were running unopposed. A member of Plantados, an organization of former political prisoners, was quoted as calling the election a ''sham.'' A second article said Fidel got 98.2 percent of valid popular votes. The news was that Raúl did even better, getting 99.4 percent. A scholar was quoted as saying that voters were probably moved by fear.

Nowhere in the two stories was Castro called a dictator, however, or the government a Communist dictatorship.

For Susan Purcell, director of the Center for Hemispheric Policy at the University of Miami, the issue is one of consistency with all dictators. ''There is no doubt Fidel Castro is a dictator,'' she said, ``but it all depends on whether the newspaper has a policy regarding calling certain kinds of governments dictatorships and the people who run them dictators.''

I once interviewed Augusto Pinochet when he was president of Chile, and he openly referred to himself as a dictator. An amateur historian, he placed himself in the classical definition derived from Roman magistrates given absolute powers in times of crisis. Karl Marx, the intellectual father of Cuban communism, openly prescribed a party dictatorship. Neither Marx nor Pinochet was squeamish.

Journalists, however, are, and usually for good reasons. They avoid tendentious characterizations. A formal title is objective and safe. But calling Castro a dictator is a fact, as much as it is that most contentious of things, a truth. Indeed, he is the world's longest-ruling dictator.

Complicating the case of Castro is a certain romanticism that surrounds him. He overthrew a right-wing dictator in a cause supposedly for the poor, he is not ostentatious in a way that would indicate corruption, and he portrays himself as a David confronting the hegemony of the American Goliath. But whatever his intentions, and some good accomplishments, they do not justify the murder and jailing of political opponents, the massive security state and a brainwashing propaganda machine.

A dictator is a dictator for good or ill -- in this case, now mostly ill.