Miami cartoonist is held after newspaper standoff

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

The Miami Herald has published investigative reports on alleged misuse of U.S. government funds earmarked for democracy-building programs in Cuba.

In September, the 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 U.S. government and staffed by prominent Cuban exiles, have long been criticized as wasteful and ineffectual because few Cubans on the island can receive them.

The Herald’s exposure of El Nuevo Herald involvement in U.S.-government financed propaganda has driven a wedge between the two newspaper staffs and led to the resignation of the papers’ publisher.

It has also widened a divide in the broader Cuban American community, with some social leaders seeking more engagement with Cuba and hard-liners who fled Castro’s 1959 revolutionary triumph insisting the U.S. continue boycotting the island.

The Miami Herald this month revised its position on the U.S. economic embargo and travel ban against Cuba, recommending in an editorial that Washington policymakers consider a less confrontational course to influence the island’s adjustment to a post-Castro era.

Varela, whose father was reportedly a political prisoner in Castro’s Cuba before immigrating here, entered the Herald building around 11 a.m. and brushed past a security guard with what appeared to be a high-powered gun with an infrared sniper scope en route to the sixth-floor offices of El Nuevo Herald.

About a dozen employees were in the newsroom when Varela entered, appearing agitated and demanding to speak with the Spanish-language paper’s executive editor, Humberto Castello, said Det. Delrish Moss, a Miami police spokesman.

After being told by the unarmed security guard that Varela appeared to be carrying a semiautomatic weapon, police deployed SWAT teams and evacuated the building, floor by floor.

Some journalists in the Miami Herald’s fifth-floor newsroom spurned the evacuation order and stayed to cover the story.

Castello was not in his office when Varela entered. An unidentified El Nuevo Herald staffer quoted on the Herald website said Varela was distraught and told female employees to leave “for their own security.”

El Nuevo Herald reporter Rui Ferreira wrote a first-person account of the intrusion for today’s edition and the website. Varela ransacked Castello’s office and ranted about the editor leading the newspaper in the wrong direction and doing nothing to stop the Miami Herald exposee of the journalists, Ferreira wrote.

“This is a pigsty, and somebody needs to pay,” Ferreira quoted the gunman saying as he trashed Castello’s office, smashing framed pictures, including one of his own cartoons.

Varela demanded that both Castello and Miami Herald Executive Editor Tom Fiedler resign.

“I am the publisher until Humberto Castello gets here,” Herald assistant security manager Arturo Le Fleur quoted Varela as saying as he stormed around the office demanding that the editor meet with him.

“You are speaking with the new director of the newspaper, and I’m here to unmask the true conflicts in the newspaper,” Varela was quoted as telling a reporter who tried to intercede.

Moss said police were told Varela was upset because some of his recent works had been “censored” by Castello. It wasn’t clear whether Varela was contending the cartoons had been altered or rejected.

Castello was away from the building and worked with police through most of the confrontation, Moss said.

Two employees of another Spanish-language medium in Miami were brought in by police during their efforts to talk Varela out of the standoff. He surrendered at 2:20 p.m. and was charged with three counts of aggravated assault with a firearm. He was being held on $22,500 bond, officials said.

carol.williams@latimes.com