Liz Balmaseda: a voice for Miami's cultural mosaic

by Michael R. Malone

The voice on the message recorder was hoarse, weak, that of a man hanging to life by a thread. "This is your old journalism professor, Liz. I just read your story, and I'm so proud of you. One day you're going to win a Pulitzer." Liz Balmaseda had grown to expect such support from Jose Quevedo, or "Q," as his cowered, yet appreciative students called him. He was her first college journalism teacher, the man who pushed, pleaded and prodded her to embrace her passion: journalism. And she and "Q" shared an uncanny connection: Both were from Puerto Padre, a village in eastern Cuba. "Q" was, Balmaseda remembers fondly, "my angel."

And "Q" was right, though he died in 1992, just months before Miami Herald columnist Liz Balmaseda, a 1982 FIU journalism graduate and winner of the FIU 1996 Outstanding Alumni Achievement award, was selected as a finalist for the most coveted prize in journalism. In 1993, proving that "lightning can strike twice in Hialeah," Balmaseda won the Pulitzer for Commentary for columns that washed the splintered rafts and desperate dreams of Cuban and Haitian immigrants onto the news pages and into the hearts and minds of readers.

"It was a shock to win," Balmaseda says. "Nobody was writing about Cuban-American stuff then, though many are now. There wasn't really that kind of writing back then, that kind of voice, especially from someone young. Nobody had the access, I guess."

Balmaseda breathed human complexity into issues that many refused to see except in black and white. Her writings infuriated many older generation anti-Castroists, and their criticisms - even threats - were fiery.

"It hit like a bomb in certain fringes. A lot was controversial. I'm very sensitive, and in the beginning it hurt me. Some of the things I was hearing penetrated my skin. But I just learned to take that as part of the job. If you`re going to have an opinion, you have to expect that other people are going to have opinions."

The award was "both a blessing and a curse" for Balmaseda. She was instantly transformed from the near anonymity of a journalist to celebrity guest on Oprah Winfrey and The Today Show. The Pulitzer prompted a series of speeches, presentations and other awards. She did her best to rise to the occasion, but her insides were collapsing.

"The award came at a time when my personal life was falling apart. I thought that it was the most horrible time, but I've come to see it now as a great blessing because of all the great people that came into my life at that time," she says, leaning back into an ivory colored sofa, one of the few relics of her previously married life.

Balmaseda, born in Cuba and raised in Hialeah, moved four years ago to an upscale condominium in Miami Beach overlooking the intercoastal waterway. Her nieces, who visit often, say it's like staying at a hotel. The walls are freshly painted in sand and chocolate, colors that most closely resemble those of "palmas" and "tabaco" - Cuba's palms and tobacco - that remind Balmaseda of who she is and where she comes from. An eclectic mix of paintings adorn the walls; one titled "Cultura fracturada (Fragmented Culture"), by Miami artist Carlos Betancourt, fills an entire wall. Another painting, a vista along the Malecon in Havana, captures the view from her now deceased aunt's apartment. Balmaseda stayed there when she returned to Cuba in 1983 for the first time since her birth. She found the painting in the back room of a Miami art shop, and the shop owner ended up giving it to her as a gift.

As the afternoon sun streams in, she serves coffee - steaming, syrupy sweet Cuban cafè - explaining as she laughs: "I've got all these exotic cups and dishes, but I always end up serving in this old glassware from Hialeah. I`ll never get away." Balmaseda was eight months in her mother's womb when "the saints came down from the mountains" - Fidel Castro's revolutionary army triumphed in Cuba. As for many Cubans, the honeymoon was short-lived.

Balmaseda was a 10-month-old infant when her mother and father emigrated from Cuba to a small apartment in Northwest Miami. Her father worked as a bellman, her mother raised Liz, then later her younger brother and sister.

At five, the family moved to Sweetwater, then a Miami rural suburb with overgrown lots and snakes roaming the backyards. The Balmasedas were pioneers, practically the first Cubans in the neighborhood.

Liz spoke no English, but gobbled the coffee cakes and listened with a keen ear to the strange tongue spoken at her neighbors' houses. Within a year, the family moved to East Hialeah, and in first grade, Balmaseda found Roberta Susman, a mini-skirted, modern thinking teacher who encouraged the little girl's enthusiasm.

She hated cartoons, preferring Dick Cavett talk shows instead, and spent her free time with her nose in a book. Though she knew just a handful of words at the start of first grade, by year's end Balmaseda had won her first literary award: a Miami Herald-sponsored spelling bee.

Her mother had a limited education and spoke no English, but sat at Liz's shoulder, ensuring the homework was done thoroughly. Not that she had to: Liz was a superlative student. By fourth grade, the family had moved to West Hialeah. At John G. DePuis Elementary School, students who were able to memorize a poem and recite it before the class could earn a star. In the challenge, Balmaseda generated a love for Robert Frost, an ear for the syncopation and rhythms of the written word, and a trail of stars that ran off the classroom chart.

Balmaseda worked on the school newspaper in high school at Notre Dame Academy but enrolled in music classes at Miami Dade Community College's North Campus. She had played guitar for years, even given lessons, but without any formal training she soon felt outclassed and insecure. Always one to follow an instinct, she had signed up for one journalism class: 101.

"Jose Quevedo was 26, full of attitude and a real S.O.B. He totally challenged us. He was so bad, so hard - `you have to do this and this.' On the first day of class everyone was doubled up in chairs. He came in, laid out the curriculum and said, `Don't worry, by the end of the day there will only be 13 of you left.' By the end of the day, guess what? Thirteen were left," Balmaseda remembers.

"Q" began to notice her writing. He was the advisor for the school's award-winning Falcon Times newspaper and invited her to his office to talk. No, I have to practice my music scales, she told him. He persisted.

"Liz, you love music so much, why not be our Lively Arts editor and review records," he queried.

"That's a really good idea," she thought. "I realized I was being led by something greater than me." She went on to become the editor in chief of the paper and won a fellowship at the Modern Media Institute (today's Poynter Institute).

She managed to get two of her stories placed in the St. Petersburg Times, and, with her ego ballooning, returned to Miami ready to break out on her own and freelance as a journalist.

Are you crazy, do you have any idea how difficult it is out there, "Q" said, bringing her back to earth.

"Who was I going to freelance for? One of the things you learn in journalism is to keep your feet on the ground and your ear there too. I never had to learn that again," Balmaseda says, again thanking her "guru" for his advice.

Balmaseda enrolled in FIU, finding classes and teachers that stimulated her - and much more.

"You can't learn journalism from a book, and one of the things you get from a program like FIU's is the element of real life. You get the possibility for jobs and internships - you get the street that goes into the classroom. And access to the street is key for the young journalist," Balmaseda says.

"The program lends itself to that and to be collaborative with local press, though it's the burden of the teacher to encourage that."

She says even then, in the early 80`s, students were encouraged to look at themselves as if they were reporters for The Miami Herald or The New York Times and act accordingly: to aggressively pursue class assignments the way they would any newspaper story.

"Obviously, Liz's graduation from FIU is one of the things we are very proud of," said Art Heise, dean of the FIU School of Journalism and Mass Communication. "We like the idea that a university as young as FIU has in its ranks a Pulitzer Prize winner."

Heise views Balmaseda's work as encompassing the three critical elements essential to the journalism program: a professional approach to journalism, writing talent, and understanding of a multicultural community.

"One thing is beyond the normal journalist's role with Liz - her opinion is as important as the facts," Heise commented. "Like other columnists, she worked first as a journalist...but a columnist is somebody you remember. They have to have a certain point of view, their own particular way, and that's what makes a columnist somebody you remember."

Liz Balmaseda and Cuba are the conga and tumba of the African drums. Their highs and lows play off each other, their histories are linked, their syncopated duality sound a oneness. Balmaseda was born just a month after the Revolucion triumphed. In March 1980, she was on day one of her internship at The Miami Herald when she was sent to cover the arrival of the first boats bearing Cuban Mariel refugees. That maritime exodus would mark Balmaseda and Miami forever. Her four-day return to the island in 1983 to cover the 25th anniversary of the Revolución, sparked a series of heartfelt writings and connected Balmaseda to her heritage, to su tierra. Like Miami singing sensation Gloria Estefan, Balmaseda's work and her art exalt the values instilled by immigrant families and her talent is woven of the Miami cultural mosaic that has been her life.

Balmaseda has a clear idea of the role of journalists and it doesn't include being a therapist for society or instigating conversations on issues. Nevertheless, she eschews the notion that journalists should just sit on the outside and poke holes in problems. Last year she finished writing the memoirs of Miami activist Joe Greer (Waking Up in America to be published this year) and the experience increased her involvement in the community, notably on several community boards and foundations.

For those that would badmouth Miami - as she encountered in a recent panel on race relations - she has little patience. "Fine, go with your paranoia, go with your hatred somewhere else. You don't represent Miami, we're a far more progressive place than that. Ethnic tension is overblown. It's very incidental, and it depends on something that happens. It may be a little under the surface, but we're (journalists) not therapists."

While columnists by definition will develop a following that applauds their viewpoint and a group that rejects it, even readers that don't accept her perspective recognize Balmaseda's writing as heartfelt, down-to-earth and genuine. The writing is void of the cynical tone that, increasingly, seems to pervade journalism.

"It's the life you live. I have celebrity friends, but my world is not celebrity," she explains. "The reason they're my friends is that they're real people. But my daily world is my family, my really good friends, and they're very genuine. I feel very close to Miami, I have a personal relationship with the city as if it were a person. It's not like I'm writing about something that I'm not."