What does a newspaper do if one of its regular op-ed contributors has been accused of being of a Cuban spy?

This is the case confronting The Miami Herald over Marifeli Pérez-Stable, a professor at Florida International University who since 2002 has been writing a column every two weeks that focuses mostly on Cuba and Latin America.

The spy charges are old, but have been raised again in online campaigns since the arrest and charging this summer of a former State Department senior intelligence analyst and his wife for being Cuban agents.

In an op-ed column in the Washington Times, Armando Valladares, the former Cuban political prisoner and United States ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission, called on the government to detain and interrogate Pérez-Stable, too.

Last year, a retired Defense Intelligence Agency officer, Chris Simmons, made the rounds of the Miami media and accused Pérez-Stable and others of being Cuban ``agents of influence.''

Is she a spy or a secret Cuban propagandist using her column to influence American opinion? Has she ever been? Does it make any difference?

The Cuban emigré world in South Florida has evolved greatly since the 1960s when pro-Castro suspects were attacked with bombs. Still, exile politics are volatile, and any suspicion of spying is especially sensitive.

Cuban spies do exist; dozens have been convicted over the years. Among them are the ``Cuba Five'' that the Cuban dictators, Fidel and Raúl Castro, demand be released. Two FIU colleagues of Pérez-Stable, Carlos Alvarez and his wife, Elsa Prieto Alvarez, pleaded guilty in 2006.

Until now, there has been no full, clear public response from Pérez-Stable about the charges against her. In Herald stories, Pérez-Stable has dismissed them as ``McCarthyite,'' and she refers people wanting more information to her website, but her responses in both the stories and the site have been allusive and raise as many questions as they answer.

Joe Oglesby, who last year retired as Editorial Page editor, told me that twice he asked her in private if she ever had been a Cuban agent, and she denied it both times. He said that he didn't think the charges were credible enough to pursue further or to say something publicly that, in the hothouse of Miami émigré politics, might further fuel the fire.

After the latest round of accusations, Executive Editor Anders Gyllenhaal and Editorial Page Editor Myriam Marquez asked me to look at the charges and report to readers as I saw fit. Pérez-Stable is not an employee of The Herald, but the newspaper still has responsibility to insure that readers know when an outside columnist has an interested motive -- political or economic -- behind her opinion.

After reviewing the case against Pérez-Stable and speaking with her, I agree with Oglesby: The charges are not sufficiently credible to warrant a full scale investigation by the paper or to stop publishing her. Unless her critics can come up with something firm, their accusations border on paranoia and slander.

Pérez-Stable has long openly admitted to having been pro-Castro earlier in life. Born in Havana, she came to the U.S. at the age of 12 and was raised in Pittsburgh, Pa., where she developed very different thoughts from those prevalent in South Florida. She fell into radical politics and traveled frequently to Cuba. She was a founder in 1978 of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, a pro-Castro organization made up of the children of Cuban exiles and named after a Cuban independence hero. She also was an editor of a pro-Castro magazine, Areíto.

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