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Fired cartoonist paralyzes Miami paper for hours

By TAMARA LUSH and DAVID ADAMS
Published November 25, 2006

MIAMI - A well-known local cartoonist surrendered to police Friday after walking into Florida's largest Spanish-language newspaper with what appeared to be a MAC 11 submachine gun and announcing he was taking over.

Shortly before noon, Jose Varela - dressed in an FBI T-shirt and toting what turned out to be a toy gun - strode into the building that houses the Miami Herald and its Spanish-language sister paper, El Nuevo Herald, and demanded to see El Nuevo Herald editor Humberto Castello.

He also was armed with a hunting knife with a 6-inch blade. He was arrested and faces three charges of aggravated assault.

Varela had told friends by phone that he was going "to take over the management of El Nuevo Herald." They thought he was joking until news came that he had entered the building, armed. "I am the boss now," he told people on the phone.

Varela was apparently upset with the way El Nuevo Herald was being run.

"He said he was tired of the way it treated the Cuban exiles," said El Nuevo Herald opinion editor Ramon Mestre, who spoke to Varela by phone. "If we wanted a real paper for exiles we had to do it ourselves," he said.

Mestre said it wasn't about personal revenge, but a general sense of frustration about the management of the paper.

Varela was also in divorce proceedings with his wife who reportedly had a restraining order against him. Friends say he was upset that he was prevented from seeing his children, a son and a daughter.

Employees inside the newspaper were evacuated; Castello, the editor, wasn't there at the time. Police set up a perimeter around the building, which is in downtown Miami near Biscayne Bay.

Varela was corralled on the building's sixth floor, where he trashed the office of Castello, the editor. He made several phone calls, to other reporters and at least one to a lawyer. He surrendered peacefully just before 3 p.m.

"He had a problem with an editor; he believed that there was an effort to censor his work," said Miami police spokesman Delrish Moss.

According to Varela's biography posted on the El Nuevo Herald Web site, Varela was born in Cuba, where he was kicked out of school for drawing caricatures of the teachers. He came to Miami during the 1980 Mariel boat lift and had boyhood dreams of becoming an astronaut. His sharp political cartoons got the attention of newspaper editors in Miami and he was soon published in the city's Spanish-language media.

In his online biography, Varela writes that he is more than 40 years old, but adds that he cannot remember the date of his birth because of amnesia caused by the stress of credit cards.

Despite being fired in February, Varela still contributed freelance cartoons for the paper. The staff said he would deliver them to the paper each week, usually dressed in military-style garb.

"The guy is very talented, but like many creative people it comes with a temperament," said Claudio Castillo, a Cuban-American artist who has worked with Varela in the past.

This is the second time in the past year and a half that a person brought a gun into the Herald building. In July 2005, former City Commissioner Arthur Teele Jr. fatally shot himself in the Herald lobby after asking to speak with a columnist from the paper. Teele had been under investigation for corruption and was just indicted by a federal grand jury on fraud charges.

Information from the Miami Herald was used in this report. Tamara Lush can be reached at lush@sptimes.com.

[Last modified November 25, 2006, 00:04:00]