Oscar Corral and the Divine Finger

No man, at age 32, suddenly "discovers" prostitutes. This has probably been Oscar Corral's preferred sexual outlet for a long time, and if Miami were a two-newspaper town, we would be reading now about his sexual escapades with prostitutes going back at least a decade, maybe even to his Belén days. Perhaps others knew about his propensities and used that information to blackmail him into doing their bidding. That would explain why Oscar's indifference turned into vindictive rage almost overnight last year when he libelled his fellow Cuban-American journalists at The Miami Herald and elsewhere, and it would explain, also, his refusal to condemn Castro in his recent interview with the Sun Post's Rebecca Wakefield. If such is the case then his arrest for solicitation may be the best thing that ever happened to Oscar Corral, because it has broken the blackmailer's hold on him, supposing such exists. Now is the time for him to come clean if he wishes to salvage what remains of his professional reputation (not much). His personal reputation is beyond repair.

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Oscar's friend and erstwhile protector Tom Fiedler, who lost his job ("retired" it was called) at The Herald in part because of the fallout from his fanatical support for Corral — Fiedler went so far as to accuse Corral's critics of being "chihuahuas" guilty of a "blood libel" — was himself famous for peeking inside another man's drawers, specifically, Gary Hart's, whose tryst in Bimini Fiedler exposed, putting an end to Hart's presidential aspirations even though Hart was a bachelor and had every right to do whatever he pleased with whomever he pleased. I can't help but wonder what Fiedler's advice would have been in this case to his ace reporter, who, in effect, "Biminied" himself.

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I do not think that it was The Herald that delayed the news of Corral's arrest three days, as some have suggested. More likely it was Corral himself who didn't come clean with The Herald for two days. Perhaps he thought that he might be able to elude detection; certainly men in a desperate situation have an infinite capacity for self-delusion. Or perhaps he was just afraid; so much about him points in that direction. It must not have been easy for him to accept his fate. One day he's the poster boy for manly resistance to the Cuban-American establishment in Miami and the next day the poster boy is wagging his wiener at what he thinks is some of recepticle of pestilence that turns out to be instead the establishment itself.

We might almost feel pity for his warped nature if he had himself ever shown any to those whose lives he attempted to destroy and whose clean reputations he tarnished. It is impossible not to think that the Divine Finger has balanced the scales of justice in time for the upcoming anniversary of his September 8, 2006 hatchet job on the Miami Moonlighters. But the Divine Finger had nothing to do with it. Some other appendage did Corral in and he has sole control of it.