Marián Prío, a reader from Key Biscayne, was upset. She had just read a column in El Nuevo Herald, the newspaper of record for the substantial segment of South Florida that is Spanish dominant.

''Are you aware of the dishonest article by regular columnist Adolfo Rivero Caro titled National Suicide?'' she wrote. ``It is chock-full of the very smears all serious newspapers have condemned.''

The Oct. 24 column was about candidate Barack Obama, and her complaint struck at the heart of an explosive issue since Cuban refugees began an exodus of Latin Americans to Miami 48 years ago. What is their civic culture, and how can The Miami Herald help integrate that with the culture of the United States?

El Nuevo Herald was founded as an answer. The Spanish and English papers share some content, but are so editorially independent that many English readers have little idea of what is being said on the other side.

El Nuevo Herald in fact has been successful as a bridge to help waves of Spanish-speaking immigrants adapt to their new country, while leaving their mark on it. The Rivero columns reflect how we still haven't all arrived at common ground.

''Obama is the least American of all the candidates who have aspired for the presidency of this country,'' Rivero wrote. ``To begin with, even though he has converted to Christianity, he was raised as a Muslim.''

The 73-year old Cuban refugee, who said he came to this country 20 years ago, violates a national consensus about what being an American is, but he doesn't see it. He writes that Obama is a ''radical leftist activist,'' adding: ``All of the U.S. radical left is housed in the Democratic Party.''

There is more: ``It is a fact that his entire political career has been exceptionally linked to radical Muslims.''

''Obama insists he is a great unifier,'' writes Rivero. ``By the way, haven't you noticed that the extreme left is always underscoring the importance of unity? I don't think it's coincidental. It seems to me the roots of that emphasis, apparently trivial, are found in the Marxist concept of class struggle.''

Meanwhile, the American press is ''mostly socialist.'' And ''journalists, historians and teachers have received an essentially Marxist formation in which the United States is always at fault.'' There is baseless conspiracy theory here, even though some anti-Obama readers in English would surely agree with Rivero. But he admits that his opinions are based on his Cuban experience. ''I lived all my life in Cuba and know what it means,'' he told me of a slide toward communism that he so fears.

Rivero, who is an intellectually interesting libertarian writer, loves America, or his idea of it. Still, whatever his personal motives, to classify American liberals as ''socialists'' and ''radical leftists'' is inflammatory and patently wrong. As a result, he is not building his new country that we now share together; he is tearing it down.

As Prío, the reader from Key Biscayne, wrote: ``Such columnists, who do not distinguish between opinions and facts, violate your newspaper's integrity.''

How, then, do you draw the line between muzzling opinion and correcting facts?

''I do not accept racism or lies'' said Andrés Hernández Alende, coordinator of El Nuevo Herald's opinion pages. He said he checks facts he is not sure of. But a problem is that a segment of Cubans in Miami have shared Rivero's life experience and mix liberals and socialists together, almost as a reality. ''If I don't publish those columns, I am missing a way of thinking among my readers,'' he said.

His is a tough issue. But I think that El Nuevo Herald needs to encourage ideological accuracy in our community, not just for the sake of accuracy, but to prevent misdirected passions and wild misadventures. For those Cuban readers who might think this means going soft on real communists and the Castro brothers, it does not. The English Herald grapples with similar issues. Joe Oglesby, editor of the editorial pages, noted that a recent column by Patrick Buchanan asserted that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, which there weren't.

Oglesby was concerned about propagating a myth among people who continue to believe that there were such weapons. In the end, he decided the phrase was ambiguous enough to let Buchanan's wording stand.

Columnists are given ``leeway to express their point of view even when they stretch the facts.T.T.T We let them have their say. But we also try to have balance by publishing comments from both sides.''

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