Senior staff members of the Dade County Aviation Department, which
manages the airport, instructed their subcontractor to keep the 282-page
June edition off the shelves of all 18 newsstands, airport spokesman
Hernando Vergara said Friday.
It is the first time the airport is banning a specific edition of a
publication, said Lauren Stover, an airport spokeswoman.
The latest issue of the high-gloss magazine features photos of Castro
and President Clinton on the cover along with the headline, ``Cuba: Is it
time to end the embargo?''
Its cover price is $4.95 in the United States, $5.95 in Canada, 5
pounds sterling in the United Kingdom and $6 in Cuba.
The June issue features an extensive travel guide for tourism around
the island where, under U.S. economic sanctions against Cuba, most
Americans are prohibited from spending dollars. It also urges a
re-examination of the sanctions -- and features pro- and con- guest
columns on the value of the embargo by Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of
North Carolina and Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut.
But Vergara said it was not the topic of the embargo, but the tone of
the edition that caused airport authority managers to instruct their
subcontractor, Sirgany Century Inc., to exclude it from their
newsstands.
Stover said ``senior staff' made the decision in a meeting Thursday and
that Aviation Director Gary J. Dellapa supported it.
``I don't think it flatters Fidel,'' countered an angry Gordon Mott,
managing editor of the Manhattan-based magazine when reached at his home
Friday evening.
``To me it's very clear the airport authority is committing the same
crime, if you will, that they accuse Fidel of: They are not permitting the
free exchange of ideas,'' Mott said. ``That is a principle that is not
only ingrained in our history, but it is one of the basic constitutional
protections that all Americans have.''
In fact, he said, Cuba banned its previous edition, whose cover
featured Orlando ``El Duque'' Hernandez -- a multimillion-dollar New York
Yankee pitcher who defected from Cuba in December 1997. He fled Cuba by
raft.
Mott described the situation as a sort of surreal symmetry across the
Florida Straits:
``Fidel is not permitting El Duque in -- and the airport authority is
not allowing this edition to be sold. It's so fitting.''
Mott said the frequently flamboyant magazine bent over backward to
include portrayals about life in Cuba in the June edition that both
Communist Party cadres on the island and exile activists in Miami would
find distasteful.
Stover, the airport spokeswoman, said that the county was not censoring
the magazine.
If Cigar Aficionado decided to give it away free, she said, they would
be granted a distribution zone.
But, ``it's in bad taste. And we feel if someone wants to read this
particular magazine, they can go to any other outlet that distributes this
magazine and buy it. But not in our airport.
``We're not censoring them,'' she added. ``We're just censoring a
profit-making venture off a product we don't condone.''
The 7-year-old magazine has been frequently provocative throughout the
years, peddling a flashy, pricey lifestyle along with Caribbean cigar
culture behind eye-catching covers of celebrities smoking stogies. Besides
Castro, cover smokers sporting cigars have included Demi Moore, Claudia
Schiffer, Jack Nicholson and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
e-mail: crosenberg@herald.comSale of cigar magazine's Cuba issue banned at MIA
Issue flatters Fidel, Dade officials
say