THE MAN WHO FOUND CASTRO ALIVE

...Matthews's candor made it less likely that readers would mistake the guerrillas for something like the League of Women Voters...

...In a July 1959 article, however, Matthews suggested, "This is not a Communist revolution in any sense of the word and there are no Communists in positions of control...

...This was an accurate appraisal of the rebels' program at the time...

...When the truth hurts," Matthews concluded, "it affects a political situation profoundly...

...It is also nationalistic, which generally in Latin America means anti-Yankee...

...They sabotaged an attempted general strike in the spring of 1958, and they stayed aloof from the fighting until the eve of the insurgents' victory...

...The rest of the U.S...

...Based on his journey to the Sierra Maes-tra, Matthews judged the insurgency a "revolutionary movement that calls itself socialistic...

...No guerrilla leader was a party member—not even Guevara or Fidel's brother, Raul, though both styled themselves Marxist-Leninists...

...He was a self-admitted liberal who thought reporters could not be unbiased—and should not pretend they were...

...The accusation was one of at least seven leveled at the writer by AIM since May of that year...

...But in academic journals, lectures, and The Cuban Story, his 1961 book, he tried to explain what was happening in terms of Cuba's history...

...they were the beneficiaries of the government's largesse as well as the victims of its censorship...

...He had plenty of company on this count: the U.S...

...In The Cuban Story, Matthews wrote: "The only monument I want to leave...

...ambassadors to prerevolutionary Havana, charged Matthews with presenting Castro as a latter-day Robin Hood...

...In December 1956, United Press had informed readers around the globe that Castro died during the landing of the yacht Granma on his return from Mexico...

...The Cuban Communist Party had historically collaborated with Batista...

...Matthews decried Castro's course, too...

...Indeed, although Matthews died in 1977 at the age of seventy-seven, he is still denounced for articles he wrote about the revolution a generation ago...

...The published accusations against Matthews are sweeping, though usually brief...

...National Review's editor, William F. Buckley Jr., had a strange bedfellow in pinning the blame on Matthews—Che Guevara, who said in 1959 (quoted in Matthews's 1975 book, Revolution in Cuba) that "the presence of a foreign journalist . . . was more important for us than a military victory...

...Matthews's crime was not promoting communism, but believing—like early Vietnam correspondents Philip Knightley and David Halberstam—that the crude application of American power was counterproductive, driving insurgents into the arms of Moscow...

...The Hispanic American Re-port, a newsletter based at Stanford University, countered that holding a reporter responsible for Cuba's transformation is "as absurd as blaming the meteorologist for a thunderstorm...

...When Matthews retired in 1967, John Oakes of The New York Times called him "a stubborn individualist, gloomy prophet, and dour observer...

...In fact, few battles had occurred...

...He added, however, that The Times had "profoundly altered the course of Cuban history" and played a role "of far greater significance than that of the State Department...

...Resident correspondents were writing on pain of deportation, though, so Matthews, who had planned to examine Cuba's opposition movement, got the assignment...

...It consisted in the legitimate procedure of throwing a spotlight on a situation that the dictatorship has been trying to keep in the dark...

...This was a mixture of straightforward observation and subjective impression...

...They deride his writing style, which by today's standards of daily journalism was highly personal and judgmental...

...The subtleties of his position were lost in the anti-Castro fervor that seized the United States...

...Matthews did fail to predict that the revolution would eventually produce a regime closely aligned with the Soviet Union...

...Fidel Castro was 'made' by Herbert Matthews and The New York Times/' AIM's newsletter, which Irvine edits, declared in 1981...

...Journalism is an imperfect craft at best...

...Such is life for the newspaperman," he concluded, "but since the accusations always cancel out in the course of time, no harm is done...

...They helped make their guesses come true...

...But none claims to consider Matthews a role model...

...media joined the chorus later, when Castro announced moderate agrarian reform that clashed with the interests of American landowners in Cuba...

...State Department, the CIA, the American embassy in Havana, and the bulk of the stateside press...

...interventions, Matthews's example is being exhumed to serve as a talisman against aggressive reporting that embarrasses the U.S...

...His analyses and interviews from later trips to Cuba never made it into The Times: Managing Editor Turner Catledge wrote in his 1971 memoirs, My Life and The Times, that "Matthews had lost credibility as a reporter on Castro...

...Castro commanded fewer than twenty guerrillas against an army backed by the United States...

...Today, in the midst of new U.S...

...The report suited the Batista regime, and the Cuban newspapers refused to retract the false obituary...

...eventually, middle-class liberals joined the opposition...

...However, some accusations—those stemming from three articles Matthews wrote after a 1957 trip to Cuba—never did cancel out...

...Apparently, there was a morale problem that had prompted Castro to seek a public relations victory in the first place...

...Matthews himself, proud of his scoops and mindful of the difference between messenger and message, tried to have it both ways...

...Those who harped on the Communist line later said: T told you so,' " Matthews wrote in The Cuban Story...

...He also wrote of extensive fighting that had given Castro "mastery of the Sierra Maestra...

...But to his detractors, it was all a ruse: The revolution, they say, was a communist conspiracy and he was its number one dupe...

...An editorial in The Wall Street Journal and an article in the Washington Journalism Review stopped short of indulging in AIM's kind of conspiracy-mongering, but both endorsed the conclusion that impressionable young reporters, taking their cues from Matthews, were serving as press agents for the insurgents in El Salvador and for the Sandinistas in Nicaragua...

...Matthews interviewed him...

...journalists Photos of Matthews show a dapper, gaunt, unsmiling man with a wreath of grey hair, a beak-like nose, and dark, soulful eyes...

...Some of the current crop of Central American correspondents—including Alan Riding, Anne Nelson, Karen DeYoung, and John Dinges—say they are, in fact, familiar with Matthews's work...

...journalists who openly criticize authoritarian governments in Latin America while sympathizing with leftists in Nicaragua and El Salvador...

...By then, Castro was no longer the leader of a small guerrilla band trying to depose an entrenched dictator...

...Castro] has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the constitution, to hold elections...

...In India, I was the dupe and probably the tool of the British...

...he had fulfilled his own prediction that history would vindicate his revolt...

...Where Matthews went astray was in seriously misjudging the military balance at that time...

...Controversy was always Matthews's traveling companion...

...is alive and fighting hard," began Matthews's first dispatch from Cuba...

...In short, Matthews took pride in some characteristics th^t others might regard as the attributes of a "dupe...

...The job we did was purely a journalistic one," he wrote in a memo a few months after his controversial articles were published...

...Conservative pamphleteers have kept that charge alive ever since and recently they have renewed their attack on Matthews with fresh vigor...

...The picture is favorable overall, but "fanatic" hardly carries a positive connotation...

...Louis Trager is a staff writer at The Orlando (Florida) Sentinel...

...Matthews and The Times helped Castro deceive the world concerning his program for Cuba," AIM has asserted, adding that "Castro had broken all his major promises" fourteen months after taking power...

...And no mention is made by critics of the fact that Matthews clearly reported Castro's eagerness for an interview...

...The early reforms and the execution of some counterrevolutionaries caused wealthy, conservative Cubans to oppose Castro...

...At first, Matthews was hailed by his colleagues for the scoop he had scored by talking to Castro...

...Civil liberties were gradually restricted, causing many Americans who had sympathized with the revolution to turn against it...

...It was the most important finding of his trip...

...The revolution refused to conform to neat labels...

...In 1949, he was recalled from the wars and became an editorial writer specializing in Latin American issues...

...His career with The Times—the only newspaper he ever worked for—spanned four decades and five continents...

...Throughout 1959 the Cuban Communists and the Castroites were at odds...

...He suffered a steady stream of hate mail, a death threat—the FBI took it seriously—and periodic picketing by Cuban exiles...

...Its members opposed Castro's armed strategy...

...And not even Castro's most bitter enemies could deny that he possessed leadership qualities and charisma...

...Although his job at The Times was apparently never in jeopardy, Matthews was dropped from the executive committee of the Inter American Press Association in 1961 and, he claimed, "pushed out" of the Overseas Press Club...

...is for some student years from now to consult the files of The New York Times about the Spanish Civil War [or] the Cuban Revolution . . . find my by-line, and know that he can trust it...

...Prominent critics of Matthews, such as President Eisenhower, Senator Thomas Dodd, and the last two U.S...

...Cabell, then deputy director of the CIA, told a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary ComHe suffered a steady stream of hate mail, a death threat, and periodic picketing by Cuban exiles mittee in that year that Castro was not a Communist, and the party did not even consider him an ally...

...And Cubans who had fled the Batista regime praised Matthews for the news he brought back from the guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra...

...He attributed unrealistically great numbers of men and weapons to the guerrillas, who had paraded the same ragged band of fighters back and forth to make for an impressive show of strength...

...But by the early 1960s, the reporter stood accused of having played a central role in turning the green island Red...

...The program is vague and couched in generalities, but it amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic and therefore anticommunist...

...When the United States imposed an economic blockade, Castro nationalized his economy and turned to the Soviets for support...

...The Right identifies Matthews as the spiritual godfather to a new generation of U.S...

...Fulgen-cio Batista, the Cuban president whom Castro had brashly promised to overthrow, called the rebel a terrorist and a communist...

...Matthews told the world that Castro appeared to be "invincible...

...He saw Castro as an agent of change who had done more good than harm, but he also said Castro would have to be removed if he helped subvert other Latin American governments on behalf of the Soviet Union...

...He criticized the caudillos, although he took no special interest in Batista until Castro's 1956 announcement that he would return from Mexican exile to do battle...

...Within five months of Castro's victory, CBS and Time were labeling the revolution totalitarian and communist...

...People will say that you told the truth and are telling the truth about the Cuban revolution...

...Unfortunately for Matthews, the truth could hurt an individual as well...

...Late in January 1957, from his base in the Sierra Maestra, Castro dispatched an emissary to arrange an interview with a foreign journalist...

...Government and its clients—the kind of coverage provided by The Times, CBS, and The Washington Postbefore the Sandinistas overthrew the Somoza regime and in the weeks leading up to E4 Salvador's elections last March...

...One got the feeling that he is now invincible...

...Early in 1957, most people who knew Fidel Castro's name at all thought he was dead...

...Here is Matthews's description of the rebel leader: "This was quite a man—a powerful six-footer, olive-skinned, full-faced, with a straggly beard...

...One is not told today that Matthews described the strength of the Cuban economy under Batista, or that he emphasized the broad nature of opposition to government corruption, repression, and subservience to Yankee interests...

...Matthews was never identified as a Soviet agent," AIM reluctantly acknowledged, but "his work was of great value to the Soviets, whether he was a dupe or an agent...

...The task was accomplished through The New York Times bureau in Havana...

...This article appeared in somewhat different form in the Fall 1982 issue ofNieman Reports...

...His prediction that Italy's Ethiopian adventure would succeed "resulted in my being labeled a fascist," he wrote in his 1946 book, The Education of a Correspondent...

...He was in Ethiopia when Mussolini's army tramped through, in Spain during the Civil War, in Italy and France when the Allies turned the tide of World War II, and in India during Gandhi's struggle for national independence...

...In the Spanish War I was a Communist...

...Perhaps he isn't, but that is the feeling he inspires in his followers...

...As the civil war in El Salvador intensified in 1982, more respectable media, themselves often the targets of AIM's broadsides, also rediscovered the ghost of Herbert Matthews...

...But the newspaperman, Herbert Matthews of The New York Times, found little comfort in Castro's forecast about his own fate...

...Instead, his detractors insist that Matthews "resurrected" Castro—and in a peculiar sense, he did...

...To Reed Irvine, AIM's principal spokesman, hell's fullest fury should be reserved for Matthews, who was a student of Dante...

...Even in the early days of the insurgency, Matthews recognized Castro's importance as the only opposition leader unsullied by sordid electoral maneuvering and committed to overthrowing the Batista government...

...Most vociferous in belaboring the "Matthews connection" has been Accuracy in Media, an organization obsessed with sniffing out what it regards as pro-communist pollution of the Establishment media...

...I'm afraid I'll be dead by then," Matthews replied, according to his 1971 book, A World in Revolution...

...The personality of the man is overpowering...

...Matthews, in A World in Revolution, called that one of the nicest tributes he had ever received...

...Furthermore, though the rebels had won most of the scattered encounters with government troops, "it was evident that they could not take the rough going," Che Guevera wrote in his diary...

...Indictments of his articles have rarely quoted from the original stories and have never placed his words in context...

...an educated, dedicated fanatic, a man of ideals, of courage and of remarkable qualities of leadership...

...The Right now identifies Matthews as the spiritual godfather to a new generation of U.S...

...He figured prominently as the villain in Senate hearings regarding "who lost Cuba" between 1960 and 1964, though he was never allowed to testify...

...Matthews confessed that he was susceptible to the charisma of political leaders and the romance of foreign conflict...

...Yet Matthews's carpers have not considered these mistakes, preferring to lambast the reporter for his analysis of Castroism...

...Matthews reported that Castro's insurgency was democratic and anticommunist...

...For the moment, he was right...

...But a closer look at the record reveals that Matthews was much less the disseminator of lies than the victim of them...

...Given its limitations, Herbert Matthews has a better claim than most of its practitioners to the monument he sought...

...Of course, the Cuban revolution was a long way from being a communist plot...

...Did Herbert Matthews bring Castro to power through The New York Times'] A 1960 cartoon in National Review showed Castro sitting on a map of Cuba, mouthing his newspaper's ad slogan, "I got my job through The New York Times...