Cartoonist storms Miami paper with toy gun in row among Cuban exiles

A Cuban-American editorial cartoonist wearing camouflage and armed with what turned out to be a toy gun stormed into The Miami Herald building on Friday...

A Cuban-American editorial cartoonist wearing camouflage and armed with what turned out to be a toy gun stormed into The Miami Herald building on Friday to confront an editor he said was destroying a Spanish-language sister paper and allowing Cuban exiles to be humiliated.

A three-hour standoff ensued, with police SWAT teams crouching among the palm trees outside the six-storey newspaper offices on Biscayne Bay, before the man, identified as Jose Varela, 50, surrendered to police without incident.

But the dramatic confrontation carried live on local television and radio stations revealed the political

tensions riling Miami’s once-unified Cuban community now that Cuban President Fidel Castro appears to be on his deathbed.

Story continues below this ad

The Miami Herald has lately published investigative reports on alleged misuse of US government funds earmarked for democracy-building programmes in Cuba.

In September, the Miami Herald disclosed that at least eight journalists for its Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald prepared articles and broadcasts for Radio and TV Marti. Those stations, financed by the US government and staffed by prominent Cuban exiles, have long been criticised as wasteful and ineffectual because few Cubans on the island can receive them.

For decades a mouthpiece for anti-Castro exiles who occupy most positions of power in Miami, the Herald’s exposure of El Nuevo Herald involvement in US-financed propaganda has driven a wedge between the two newspaper staffs. It has also widened a divide in the broader Cuban-American community, as some social leaders want more engagement with Cuba while hard-liners who fled Castro’s 1959 revolutionary triumph demand the US continue boycotting the island. The Miami Herald earlier this month revised its position on the US economic embargo and travel ban against Cuba, recommending in an editorial that Washington policymakers consider a less confrontational course.

–Carol J Williams