Published Wednesday, September 20, 2000, in the Miami Herald

When `objectivity' becomes deception

Luis Aguilar León
Luis Aguilar León is a former professor of history at Georgetown and Cornell Universities and now directs the Institute for Cuban Studies at the University of Miami.

A few days after President Clinton's ``routine'' handshake with Fidel Castro at the United Nations, a major New York newspaper, lacking a photo of the handshake, provided separate photos of each leader with outstretched hand, basically suggesting the occurrence.

The New York Times, which apparently controls the negative, denounced the legerdemain, stressing the importance of preserving the ethics of the press. Of course The Times has every right to protect that ethic and to criticize its violators, just as I do to place The Times's conduct in perspective with some recent events having to do with Cuba.

One of the oldest methods of deception is to reveal part of the truth while concealing most of it. Subtlety is essential here. In this way, The Times, which considers itself the ``newspaper of record,'' does lead its readers to the debatable conclusion it wants them to reach.

For instance, whenever The Times reports ``objectively'' on Castro, it omits the word dictator, and too-rarely mentions his repeated international condemnations for violating human rights. Take as an example the Sept. 2 edition, with its front-page photograph of Cuban school children in impeccable uniforms.

The caption read, ``A famous Cuban returns to school. Elián González and his classmates . . . in the first day of class, sang songs and proclaimed: We are communist pioneers; we'll be like Che!''

Doubtless a large part of U.S. readers with a vague notion of what transpires in Cuba breathed a sigh of relief that the Elián saga had a happy ending. The boy was safely back in school singing the praises of communism and some obscure hero he hopes to emulate. The picture's colors suggested almost yuletide cheer, to be celebrated both in Cuba and here.

Not to be a grinch, but did the world-famous Times photographers visit any other Cuban schools to compare them with Elián's pristine, spacious one? Did they see if the economic crisis wrought by the ``imperialist blockade'' deprives them of basic learning tools such as lunch food? Did they question whether Elián's school could be a false front to fool international visitors? Not on Elián's life. Was Elián's pristine school a front to fool international visitors?

Perhaps some Times reporters read part of the textbooks to learn more about those ``communist pioneers.'' Maybe they balked at the emptiness of the ideological canards forced upon children and at the intensity of their indoctrination to be loyal to the Great Leader and to hate that source of all Cuba's ills: the barbaric, imperialist United States. If so, in the name of objectivity, their disgust never made it in the newspaper. Neither did any questions about parental rights or human rights in Cuba. In Cuba, children don't belong to parents but to the state. And the mere mention of human rights can separate fathers and sons faster than a raft-trip to Florida, and more permanently.

The reporters could have asked the teachers: ``Who was this obligatory idol named Che, being forced down the throats of their students?''

He was the man who initiated execution without trial in Cuba; the one who urged making guerrillas into ``cold killing machines.'' He was the man who failed as a minister in Cuba, as a revolutionary in Africa and, fatally, as a guerrilla in Bolivia. Is that what Americans wanted for Elián and all the Cuban children?

Apparently The Times think so. I don't.