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News from the Caribbean as of
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Miami publisher resigns in uproar over anti-Castro payments
Thursday, October 5, 2006
MIAMI, USA (AFP): The publisher of The Miami Herald has resigned amid an uproar over the firings of three writers for taking US government payments for appearing on anti-Castro propaganda programs.
Jesus Diaz, who had led both the Herald and its Spanish-language sibling El Nuevo Herald, resigned after intense lobbying and a threatened boycott by the influential Cuban-American community.
Two reporters and a stringer for El Nuevo Herald, who routinely cover stories of interest to the staunchly anti-Castro Cuban-American community, were fired in September after it emerged they were paid by the US government.
One of them had received almost 175,000 dollars from the US government over five years for taking part in programmes at Radio Marti and TV Marti, the US broadcasting service aimed at undermining Cuba's communist government. They are not broadcast inside the United States due to laws against propaganda.
Subsequently, Diaz said, the paper learned another six writers received payments from the same US-government run services, and that their editors had approved their involvement.
Diaz said he believed the writers failed to meet ethical standards but that the paper may have been unclear in communicating its policies, so all of those involved were granted an amnesty and those dismissed were reinstated.
He said the atmosphere created by the controversy over the firings made it impossible for him to continue in his post.
Aside from the Herald staff, a newspaper investigation revealed seven more members of the south Florida media also had been paid by Radio and TV Marti.
There are more than one million Cuban-Americans, most of whom live in south Florida. Many in the "older generation" of Cuban-Americans, who fled shortly after Fidel Castro took power in 1959, are business leaders in the Miami area.
The Miami Herald and its associate newspapers are owned by the McClatchy group, which bought it this year from the Knight Ridder group.
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