Our Man In Havana

This Saturday at noon, we will be welcome journalist/author Anthony DePalma to the Northern Alliance Radio Network Mach 1 (11am-1pm) to discuss his book, The Man Who Invented Fidel: Castro, Cuba, and Herbert L. Matthews of The New York Times:

Writing about Cuba is not for sissies. Covering this fiercely contested slice of Caribbean real estate has singed the fingers of many, but few have felt the burn as badly as New York Times correspondent Herbert L. Matthews.

Back in the 1950s and '60s, Matthews was the first in a long succession of reporters bedazzled by the wily Fidel Castro. But Matthews enjoyed a singular distinction, as he noted to his editor in 1958, "as [the] inventor of Fidel Castro." Of course, Castro didn't need Matthews to invent him, though it's hard to imagine Castro having achieved a more satisfying result without the eager Timesman.

In December 1956, UPI gullibly trumpeted a government report that Castro had been killed; in fact, the 29-year-old leftist rebel leader was hiding out in the Sierra Maestra mountains. Desperate to jumpstart his revolution -- and his life -- Castro dispatched an emissary to find an A-list messenger.

After a grueling trek, slogging through the near-impenetrable Sierras, Matthews was told to wait in the wet, chilly, dark woods. It was dawn before Castro, ever mindful of stagecraft, descended from the hills -- establishing his standard, media-savvy operating procedure. The result was a heroic portrait that landed on page one of the Times and ran for three days.

Anthony DePalma, another Times reporter, carefully chronicles Matthews's Cuba story and decades-long career. Cuban history aside, The Man Who Invented Fidel is a cautionary tale about the uses and misuses of the media.

Throughout the 1950s and '60s, the erudite and multilingual Matthews enjoyed an unusual hybrid perch as both editorial writer and news reporter. It was a woeful arrangement for which both sides would pay dearly. But Matthews, an elegant writer and dresser (he was partial to fedoras, gloves and spats), had become the paper's golden-boy correspondent. It didn't hurt that he was a favorite of Arthur Hays Sulzberger, the paper's publisher (and grandfather of the current one), or that Sulzberger's wife, Iphigene, was godmother to Matthews's son.

Blurring of the lines between the news and editorial pages, reporters romanticizing leftist leaders, AND a writer receiving special treatment because of his connections? Almost sounds like a certain local newspaper today, doesn't it? The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Tune in locally on AM1280 The Patriot WWTC to catch the interview with DePalma and all six hours of the NARN (11am-5pm) this Saturday or listen to the internet stream from anywhere in the world.