For Republic's investigative editor, Michael Braga, the adventure is the pursuit of a story

For Michael Braga, the pursuit of a good story always contains an element of adventure.

He has covered a nationwide clash between labor unions and government forces in Argentina, been interrogated by Ramon Castro's bodyguard, exposed housing fraud in reporting that spurred dozens of indictments in Florida, and co-authored an investigation that won a Pulitzer Prize. 

But for Braga, who joined The Arizona Republic in March as investigative editor, the adventure is just a part of the process. The important stories usually emerge because of a crisis and focus on the people with the bravery to confront it.

"I've always been driven to write about crisis," he said. "Moments of crisis in life, moments of crisis in business, moments of crisis in an economy." 

For Braga, that's a story that began with his own life. His family had once been one of the wealthiest sugar-producing families in Cuba, owning half a million acres and more than half a dozen sugar mills by the time his great-great-uncle took a job at a sugar brokerage in New York.

But Fidel Castro's overthrow of the Cuban government left the family cut off from its history and its business. By the time Braga was growing up in New Jersey, he said, he recognized that he and his relatives were "living in a story that had passed."

Instead of pursuing the sugar business, he found, he and others around him wanted to write. His sister became a poet. He became a journalist. 

"That's what interested me," he said, "telling the story of the sugar business. That's how I got into writing about business."

Living his family's story made him interested in stories of crisis. Researching the family business helped him recognize a new crisis in the making. 

History repeats itself

After working as a community reporter, Braga set out to explore Latin America, working in Spanish-language agricultural publications and later as a staff writer at the Buenos Aires Herald during the economic and political upheaval of labor strikes and land invasions by impoverished squatters. 

He returned to the U.S. for graduate school at the University of Texas, where he earned a master's degree in economics. His colleagues expected he would research current issues such as NAFTA. Instead, he pursued a thesis about the economic crisis of 1930s Cuba.

During World War I, battles on the beet fields of Europe gutted the world's sugar supply, but the Allies' wartime economic policies kept prices artificially stable. After the war, prices shot up. "Everybody around world started planting sugar like mad, building sugar factories like crazy. That's what happened in Cuba," he said.

Then, as Europe rebuilt, the beet fields came back. "Suddenly there was overproduction," he said. Prices plunged, factories closed, and workers faced terrible conditions that led to an uprising. 

Braga said his university colleagues didn't see how getting lost in past could help predict the future. But history repeats itself.

After graduate school, he ended up as a business reporter at newspapers in Florida, ultimately landing as a reporter at the Sarasota Herald-Tribune just as the housing market of the 2000s was booming.

"It wasn’t sugar, but it was real estate," he said. "People were speculating with land instead of sugar. It was an identical situation. People were saying, 'No one knew what was going to happen.' I had seen it before, just in a different market."

Early data-driven stories helped predict the coming market collapse. Later stories revealed how house-flippers were concocting land deals to inflate prices, contributing to the foreclosure crisis and leaving banks and neighbors to clean up the mess. 

The stories resulted in 30 indictments and led to a multi-part investigation into the failure of 68 banks in Florida during the Great Recession. 

Braga became the Herald-Tribune's investigative editor and worked on a series of stories about suffering in Florida’s mental institutions that won a Pulitzer Prize for investigative journalism in 2016, in collaboration with the Tampa Bay Times. "Insane. Invisible. In Danger" revealed how the state government in Tallahassee cut more than $100 million from state hospital budgets, causing them to become dangerously understaffed. 

Braga also edited an investigative series for GateHouse Media — which ran the Herald-Tribune before the company merged with Gannett to become part of the USA TODAY Network — about prejudice in Florida’s criminal justice system. The report "Bias on the Bench" revealed that Black people in Florida are sentenced to far more time behind bars than white people for the same crimes.

Braga joined USA TODAY as a business investigative reporter, but remained in the editing ranks, helping lead the network investigation of abuse inside Florida's child-welfare system. That series, "Torn Apart," was a finalist for the top prize from Investigative Reporters and Editors in 2020. It was also a runner-up for the Scripps Howard Award, the Frank A. Blethen Award and the Taylor Family Award. 

It's always about adventure

Braga's Latin American explorations led to other adventures in journalism.

One trip to Cuba gave him the chance to see the places of his family's origins, but also to report on a tour of the country with a group led by Fidel Castro's older brother, Ramon.

While on tour, his conversations in the country reminded him of the value of journalism and the danger in speaking the truth. People on the tour warned him not to make comments that could be interpreted as criticizing the supreme leader  — "You don't do that in Cuba," he was told. One of Castro's bodyguards later grilled him on exactly who he was and what he was doing in the country. 

In Florida, Braga became an open-ocean swimmer, following the model of his mother — "Probably the most courageous person I've ever met." In Arizona, he said, he's looking forward to biking, hiking and new challenges to overcome, both in the outdoors and in journalism.  

"I guess with me, it’s always about adventure, and the search for the best stories," he said. "Besides Florida, Arizona has got to be the most interesting state in the country."

A return to full-time editing, for a longtime reporter, is a new kind of adventure. "I’m just fascinated by the ideas they come up with," he said of The Republic's eight-person investigative and data team. "I hope I can help make the stories better."