The Battle In Miami: Too Easy To Ignore   

Extremist words and violent deeds are an echo all too familiar.

The South has largely left behind a disgraceful era in which extremists spoke violently and then disavowed nightriders' violent actions aimed at stifling dissent. But down on the tip of Florida we are seeing it again in a different guise.

This time it is not white supremacist politicians speaking the words while Ku Kluxers skulk by night. It is extremists among Miami's Cuban Americans who spew the venom while other people do the deeds, which include death threats against Herald executives and destruction of newspaper vending machines.

For the first time in its 50-year history, the Inter American Press Association sent a team to investigate a press problem in the United States. It called pro-Castro charges against the Herald "ludicrous," "irrational" and "damaging to the cause of free speech." It also said the Herald had been "slow to understand the new cultures within its readership area," a significant point, but that the paper "is clearly trying very hard" to do that.

Ordinarily someone who said "pro-Castro" about the Miami Herald would not be taken seriously for more than, say, a quarter of a second. The charge is so silly that we would just assume it came from a nut. Every news organization encounters these routinely.

In fact, that is why it is a little too easy to shrug off the assault on the Herald and the efforts to throttle its local news coverage. You also may conclude that not many people could really believe the charges. How could they? All you have to do is read one day's Herald or its Spanish-language El Nuevo Herald and be more or less cognizant of what communism is and is not.

But this conflict is worthy of broader attention because, in fact, some of the Herald's principal assailants are powerful and influential.

In general, Cuban Americans in Miami reject all of this, and for some of them it has taken real courage to speak out against it. Again, the parallel of courage in the South during the days of racial extremism comes to mind. It was not so long ago that people in that part of the country, black and white, felt pressure to the point of intimidation in opposing efforts to enforce monolithic thought. Miami may not have reached that point, but the efforts are familiar.

Happily, so is the integrity of the two main targets at the Herald: David Lawrence Jr., the publisher, and Roberto Suarez, the president, who fled Cuba early in the Castro days because of his disgust with the dictatorship and started his Herald career by working in the mailroom. Jorge Mas Canosa, chairman of the influential Cuban American National Foundation, has accused them of "conducting a systematic campaign against Cuban Americans."

Here is another sample of his words on Spanish-language radio:

"The Miami Herald and Messrs. David Lawrence and Roberto Suarez have assumed the same postures that Fidel Castro has assumed for 33 years. Castro attacks, he destroys men, the integrity of whole families and, after all is said and done, presents himself as a victim of the United States. David Lawrence and Roberto Suarez do the same thing. They insult, misinform, distort, destroy men and institutions. . . ."

That's on top of being pro-communist. Right there at the newspaper of those wild-eyed insurgents, the Knights and the Ridders. l