TIME Magazine, Paradise Lost, Nov.23, 1981:
Anglos tend to work the marijuana trade, while the cocaine market is controlled by Colombians and Cubans. No matter what their specialty, the illegal entrepreneurs can be easily spotted. Young Anglos wearing scruffy Levi's and T shirts, gold Rolex watches and ropes of gold chain sit around the marinas waiting for the next call from a mother ship. Current pay for one night's work piloting a "cigarette" averages $50,000, while the wages for unloading the bales are $5,000 to $10,000 a night.
Cuban dealers favor Mercedes Benzes and bodyguards dressed in dark suits and carrying two guns (one under the coat and one strapped to the ankle). José Medrano Alvero Cruz, nicknamed El Padrino, always travels in a Rolls-Royce protected by cars full of bodyguards. Alvero, who is fond of listening to the theme song from The Godfather on his car stereo, never talks on the telephone and keeps himself insulated from any drug deal through relatives and friends. Nevertheless, he was recently convicted for tax evasion.
The Colombians are the most secretive of all, preferring to keep the business in the family. Officials estimate that there are from 50 to 150 top Colombian traffickers in South Florida, with another 200 or so middle-level managers. Wives, brothers, sisters and children all help out. That is one reason why narcotics agents have failed to break any of the big coke rings in the area. "Say I have 75 pounds of coke that has just come in," explains "Bena-vides," a Colombian-born drug dealer who lives in Miami. "Who am I going to trust better than my brother? I take it to his place. After all, I am paying the rent."
A clip from the classic documentary, "Cocaine Cowboys," by Billy Corben and Alfred Spellman.
....
TIME Magazine, Monday, Nov. 23, 1981.
Trouble in Paradise
November. The days grow short, the nights cold. Time to reach for
that travel brochure for, where else, South Florida, America’s favorite
winter playground. Hmmm, let’s see now. Here is a picture of palm trees
swaying gently under a cottony blue sky while a family frolics in the
foamy surf. Here is a snowy white heron flitting along a river of sea
grass in the Everglades, the mangrove and palmetto serene as a Sunday
morning. There is a creamy stucco Palm Beach mansion, its red tile roof
glinting fiercely in the sun and bougainvillea rioting, colorfully in
the yard. And, of course, a couple of sunburned senior citizens of Miami
Beach, he in a Hawaiian shirt and she in purple culottes, waiting their
turn on the shuffleboard court.
Those snapshots of life in
South Florida are as accurate today as they were a generation ago. But
they are being crowded out by some altogether different scenes, a
collection of photos not found in any Chamber of Commerce travel
brochure. Here is a picture of a policeman leaning over the body of a
Miamian whose throat has been slit and wallet emptied. There is a sleek
V-planed speedboat, stripped of galleys and bunks and loaded with a
half-ton of marijuana, skimming across the waters of Biscayne Bay. Here
are a handful of ragged Cuban refugees, living in a tent pitched beneath
a highway overpass.
South Florida—that postcard corner of the
Sunshine State, that lush strip of hibiscus and condominiums stretching
roughly from Palm Beach south to Key West—is a region in trouble. An
epidemic of violent crime, a plague of illicit drugs and a tidal wave of
refugees have slammed into South Florida with the destructive power of a
hurricane. Those three forces, and a number of lesser ills, threaten to
turn one of the nation’s most prosperous, congenial and naturally
gorgeous regions into a paradise lost.
Consider what South Florida is up against:
>
When the FBI issued its annual list of the ten most crime-ridden cities
in the nation last September, three of them were in South Florida:
Miami (pop. 347,000) was in first place, West Palm Beach (pop. 63,000)
was fifth and Fort Lauderdale (pop. 153,000) was eighth. Miami last year
had the nation’s highest murder rate, 70 per 100,000 residents, and
this year’s pace has been even higher.
> An estimated 70% of
all marijuana and cocaine imported into the U.S. passes through South
Florida. Drug smuggling could be the region’s major industry, worth
anywhere from $7 billion to $12 billion a year (vs. $12 billion for real
estate and $9 billion for tourism, the area’s two biggest legitimate
businesses). Miami’s Federal Reserve branch has a currency surplus of $5
billion, mostly in drug-generated $50 and $100 bills, or more than the
nation’s twelve Federal Reserve banks combined. Drug money has corrupted
banking, real estate, law enforcement and even the fishing industry,
whose practitioners are abandoning the pursuit of snapper and grouper
for the transport of bales of marijuana (“square grouper,” as fishermen
call it) from freighters at sea to the mainland. About one-third of the
region’s murders are drug-related.
> Since the spring of
1980, when Cuban President Fidel Castro opened the port of Mariel to
those who wanted to leave, about 125,000 “Marielitos” have landed in
South Florida. In addition, 25,000 refugees have arrived from Haiti;
boatloads of half-starved Haitians are washing up on the area’s beaches
every week. The wave of illegal immigrants has pushed up unemployment,
taxed social services, irritated racial tensions and helped send the
crime rate to staggering heights. Marielitos are believed to be
responsible for half of all violent crime in Miami.
To a
visitor. South Florida still looks like the Sunbelt’s shiniest jewel.
New hotels and office towers are rising in Miami, and once sleepy towns
near by are growing skylines of their own. The Rolls-Royces still roll
royally along Palm Beach’s Worth Avenue, and Fort Lauderdale is, as
ever, where boy meets girl every Easter vacation.
Over the past
two decades, South Florida in general, and Miami in particular, lave
undergone a Latin-flavored business boom that is putting much of the
glitter back into the Gold Coast. Some 12.6 mildon foreigners, most of
them Spanish speaking, visited the Miami area last year. At least 100
multinational companies now maintain their Latin American headquarters
in South Florida. Though economic and political woes in Latin America
are expected to slow the influx of tourists from the south, Miami will
no doubt remain, as the late President Jaime Roldós of Ecuador put it,
the “capital of Latin America.”
The Latins are gradually turning
the region into their own colony. Of the 1.7 million residents of Dade
County (Miami and environs), 39% are Hispanic (vs. 44% white and 17%
black). It is estimated that by 1985 the Latins will become a majority
in Dade, outnumbering non-Latin whites 43% to 42%. The Latin influence
is so strong that the mayoral run-off election in Miami last week was a
hard-fought battle between two Hispanics, Puerto Rican-born Incumbent
Maurice Ferré and Challenger Manolo Reboso, a Cuban-born former city
commissioner. Ferré was re-elected for a fifth two-year term.
Yet
to many Anglos and Hispanics, South Florida is becoming a nice place to
visit—but. Indeed, some of the would-be visitors are staying home.
Though revenues from tourism are expected to rise by 1¼% this year,
hotel occupancy rates in Dade County are down by as much as 25% from
last year, and only by raising room prices by an average of 20% have
many resorts managed to stay in business. The area’s real estate boom,
which doubled the price of an average one-family house between 1978 and
1980, has virtually stopped dead. Even the environment, long the
region’s most attractive asset, is showing signs of wear. Decades of
economic growth threaten to outstrip the water supply; water is
occasionally rationed in some parts of the area. “We’re at a
crossroads,” says Jane Cousins, a leading Miami real estate agent. “No
city in the world has ever had happen to it what has happened to us.”
What
did happen? The answer lies partly in the region’s geography and partly
in its history. The area is a natural Ellis Island for all those
coming, for whatever reason, from the Caribbean and points south. The
region’s benign climate and studied informality have long made it prime
destination for Americans on the make, on the lam or on a pension. With
it hundreds of miles of coves and inlets, the area is also an ideal port
of entry for boat laden with drugs, or any other cargo wor thy of the
smuggler’s interest.
When Ponce de León first sighted the shores
of what he believed was an island on a balmy March day in 1513, he
named it Florida (full of flowers), in honor of the Easter season. The
region was settled slowly, even reluctantly. South Florida, in
particular, was terra incognita. The Florida land commission described
it in 1823 as a place “of half-deluged plains, deep morasses, and almost
inaccessible forests … a home only for beasts, or for men little
elevated above beasts.”
One of those a bit more elevated was a
young Cleveland widow by the name of Julia Tuttle, who moved to Miami in
the 1870s. The city then was a makeshift village of shacks and sand
trails hacked out of palmetto groves. When a freeze destroyed the citrus
crop of central Florida in 1894, Tuttle picked a bouquet of orange
blossoms untouched by the frost and sent it to Financier Henry Flagler
as proof that South Florida was worth a look. Flagler, who was already
building up St. Augustine, came, saw and was conquered; he built a
railway to Miami and beyond, all the way to Key West.* During World War
I, the Government put a number of training camps in Florida, and after
the war ended, some of the doughboys returned. The first great Florida
land boom was under way.
Hundreds of thousands streamed into the
state, some 2.5 million people in 1925 alone, to stake out their lot in
the sun. Many bought their land sight unseen, and some found themselves
proud owners of swamps and tidal marshes. The boom went bust in 1926
when Northern banks stopped writing mortgages on Florida lots and a
savage hurricane lashed Miami, killing several hundred people. Florida’s
fortunes ballooned again after World War II, in part because a new wave
of doughboys hit its beaches. From 1950 to 1960 the population of South
Florida doubled to 1.5 million, and during the 1960s swelled to 2.2
million. The wave has yet to crest. South Florida grew at an annual rate
of 44% during the 1970s, four times the national average, to its
present 3.3 million.
South Florida has perhaps grown too fast
ever to grow up. “We are still longing for maturity,” says Miami
Historian Arva Parks. “We have always been vulnerable to certain kinds
of people, so that when opportunity knocked, exploitation answered.”
Even today, most of those who live in the area grew up somewhere else,
and their sense of community may extend only as far as the K mart down
the street. “You can’t compare us to Boston or Denver,” says Mayor
Ferre. “Our people’s roots are always somewhere else.”
By far
the most visible problem in this rootless region is crime. South
Floridians talk about crime the way people elsewhere talk about sports
or politics. Listen, for example, to Carole Masington, the wife of an
attorney, who lives in a well-to-do suburb of South Miami: “We had two
manhunts in my neighborhood in one week. One friend was mugged, another
was assaulted and raped. My favorite storekeeper was beaten and
hospitalized, and my mother was robbed twice. And I am just one person.”
Or hear the Rev. Paul MacVittie, pastor of the First Presbyterian
Church in downtown Miami: “My car has been broken into three times, my
house has been robbed once, and my 15-year-old son was mugged.” His
wife, Robin, was mugged, shot and severely wounded in a Coconut Grove
shopping center.
The three Gibb brothers, known as the Bee Gees,
live in a wealthy enclave in Miami Beach. Barry Gibb’s wife Lynda had
her purse snatched. The trio’s father Hugh Gibb was mugged. “No woman
should be alone in this city,” says Barry. “Or man,” adds Bee Gee
Brother Robin. Residents of nearby Golden Beach obviously agree: the
city council voted last month to close six of the seven streets leading
into town, and place a gate and a guard at the seventh.
The
bloodiest crimes tend to be committed by drug dealers and refugees, and
often that warfare is intramural. One man was shot as he walked from his
apartment building in Miami; injured, he was taken to Miami’s Mercy
Hospital where he was again shot, this time fatally, in his bed. As Elio
Gonzalez and his twelve-year-old son Eric were getting out of their car
in front of their home in North Miami, another car raced by spraying
machine-gun fire; both father and son were killed. (Twenty-three percent
of Miami’s murders last year were committed with machine guns, a
favorite weapon of drug dealers.) So many bodies now fill the Miami
morgue that Dade County Medical Examiner Joe Davis has rented a
refrigerated hamburger van to house the overflow. “If you stay here, you
arm yourself to the teeth, put bars on the windows and stay at home at
all times,” says Arthur Patten, a Miami insurance executive. “I’ve been
through two wars and no combat zone is as dangerous as Dade County.”
As
terrified residents search for protection, the region is beginning to
be as armed as a military base. In the past five years, 220,000 guns
have been sold in Dade County—an average of more than seven guns for
every new household. So far this year, gun sales in the county have
risen 46% over 1980, to a record 66,198. It is easier to buy a pistol
than an automobile in Florida, where the gun lobby has frustrated
virtually all attempts at handgun controls. Even the Rev. MacVittie has
purchased a revolver to keep in his home. “That is one hell of a way to
live,” he says. Adds Janet Cooper, a legal researcher who lives in
Miami: “I see people walking down the streets openly carrying guns, some
in their hands, others in their holsters. You don’t dare honk your horn
at anybody; you could end up dead.”
Besides buying such
standard gear as pistols and window grates, residents are purchasing
attack dogs, alarms that scream out “Burglar! burglar!” and even
armor-plated cars usually made for export to the war zones of Central
America. George Wackenhut, who heads a giant Coral Gables-based security
firm that bears his name, has watched his business in South Florida
grow by 22% this year. “When I was growing up, a murder story used to be
good for ten days in the papers,” says Wackenhut, a onetime FBI agent.
“Here a morning kill may not even make the afternoon news.”
South
Florida is just beginning to be the crime capital of the nation, but it
has been the drug capital for a decade. Smuggling dope into the region
is about as difficult as buying a souvenir in Miami Beach. “They land it
in everything but a bathtub,” marvels Patrolman Doug Morris of the Dade
County public safety marine patrol, whose dozen men and six boats help
patrol the 550 sq. mi. of county waterways. “Hell, they even fly coke in
from a ship in one of those remote-controlled toy planes and land it on
a bayshore condo.”
A favorite strategy of marijuana smugglers
is for a drug-laden “mother ship,” usually an aging freighter, to sail
from Colombia or the Caribbean and then stay bobbing 50 miles or so off
the Florida coast. On long hauls, drug runners motor out to the mother
ship in yachts and fishing boats to pick up the cargo and then shuttle
back to the mainland, docking anywhere along some 3,000 miles of South
Florida coastline; on shorter hauls, they roar out in souped-up racing
speedboats, called “cigarette” boats after the tobacco-bootlegging
vessels of the 1930s. Costing as much as $250,000 and able to reach
speeds of up to 70 m.p.h., many of the cigarette boats are outfitted
with such sophisticated equipment as radar scanners and infra-red
night-vision scopes. Cocaine, however, is usually flown into the U.S. by
airplane. Customs officials estimate that some 80 planes secretly land
in the U.S. every night carrying cargos of white powder, most of them
landing in South Florida.
Battling the dope runners are the
combined forces of the U.S. Customs Service the Coast Guard and the Drug
Enforcement Administration, as well as local lawmen. But they all are
fighting a losing battle. Last year law enforcement officials seized 3.2
million Ibs. of marijuana, with a street value of $ 1.3 billion, and
2,353 Ibs. of cocaine worth $5.8 billion, in and around South Florida.
So much dope was seized that the police began trucking it to the Florida
Power and Light Co. to burn in its generators (732 Ibs. of marijuana
equal 1 bbl. of oil, one of the odder statistics to emerge from the
region). Yet officials estimate that perhaps as much as ten times the
amount seized was smuggled into the region. At the moment, Bade County
police have a stash of 162,000 Ibs. of marijuana waiting to be entered
as evidence in court cases. The Customs Service has 200 seized cigarette
boats and 50 airplanes, including a World War II-era A26 bomber that
was, ironically, used by Customs agents on drug cases before it was
bought by a marijuana ring.
Anglos tend to work the marijuana
trade, while the cocaine market is controlled by Colombians and Cubans.
No matter what their specialty, the illegal entrepreneurs can be easily
spotted. Young Anglos wearing scruffy Levi’s and T shirts, gold Rolex
watches and ropes of gold chain sit around the marinas waiting for the
next call from a mother ship. Current pay for one night’s work piloting a
“cigarette” averages $50,000, while the wages for unloading the bales
are $5,000 to $10,000 a night.
Cuban dealers favor Mercedes
Benzes and bodyguards dressed in dark suits and carrying two guns (one
under the coat and one strapped to the ankle). José Medrano Alvero Cruz,
nicknamed El Padrino, always travels in a Rolls-Royce protected by cars
full of bodyguards. Alvero, who is fond of listening to the theme song
from The Godfather on his car stereo, never talks on the telephone and
keeps himself insulated from any drug deal through relatives and
friends. Nevertheless, he was recently convicted for tax evasion.
The
Colombians are the most secretive of all, preferring to keep the
business in the family. Officials estimate that there are from 50 to 150
top Colombian traffickers in South Florida, with another 200 or so
middle-level managers. Wives, brothers, sisters and children all help
out. That is one reason why narcotics agents have failed to break any of
the big coke rings in the area. “Say I have 75 pounds of coke that has
just come in,” explains “Bena-vides,” a Colombian-born drug dealer who
lives in Miami. “Who am I going to trust better than my brother? I take
it to his place. After all, I am paying the rent.”
Beyond the ties of kinship lurks the threat of death, and revenge killings among the cocaine traders certainly contribute to South
Florida’s crime rate. Drug shootouts are becoming a frequent sight in
certain parts of Miami. At a busy intersection in Coral Gables last
month, for example, a Mercedes Benz was suddenly surrounded and its
30-year-old Colombian driver killed in a burst of machine-gun fire.
The
billions in narco-bucks, as police have dubbed the drug money, allow its
recipients to buy, in cash, $1 million waterfront homes, $50,000
Mercedes and $400 bottles of wine. One drug kingpin alone has bought up
some $20 million worth of prime Miami real estate. Says Miami Financial
Analyst Charles Kimball: “Criminals have become conspicuous buyers of
some of the best properties in South Florida.”
Most, if not all,
of Miami’s 250 banks have drug money in their accounts. As many as 40
banks still neglect to report cash deposits of $10,000 or more, as
required by law. And at least four banks, according to law enforcement
officials, are controlled by drug dealers. Treasury Department
investigators have long suspected that some smaller banks, known as
Coin-o-Washes among both cops and criminals, were founded primarily to
launder money for the drug trade.
Perhaps the most
valuable commodity bought by all that cash is freedom. Once caught,
suspected drug dealers are often released on bail of $1 million or more.
They typically pay it within hours, sometimes in cash, and skip town.
Dealers regard the forfeited bail as merely a cost of doing business. If
a prosecutor’s case is airtight, money can sometimes pry it open. “We
pay for what we need as we need it,” one lawyer bragged to TIME. “If we
can’t bribe the cop, we try to bribe the prosecutor and, if we can’t get
the prosecutor, we try to buy the judge.”
Next to crime and
drugs, South Florida’s most pressing problem is refugees. The 125,000
Marielitos who fled Cuba last year have strained the area’s economy and
aggravated its racial tensions, perhaps irretrievably. Nothing
infuriates South Floridians as much as the deeds of the convicts and
mental patients Castro sent along with the rest of the fleeing Cubans.
Officials estimate that as many as 5,000 Marielitos are hard-core
criminals. This year 53 refugees have been arrested in Miami for murder,
and many more have been jailed for rapes and robberies. Fifty-one
Marielitos themselves have been killed in Miami this year, most of them
by other Marielitos. More than a quarter of those in Dade County jails
are refugees.
The innocent Marielitos constitute a different
kind of burden to South Florida. Some 25% are without work: their
numbers helped raise unemployment in Dade County from 5.7% to an
estimated 13%, though they are not included in the official figure of
7.4%. Welfare rolls have jumped by a third, while some 16,000 refugee
children have crowded into the classrooms of Dade County public schools.
Yet the budget cuts planned by the Reagan Administration are expected
to shave refugee aid to Florida in this fiscal year, leaving the county
with an added tab of $30 million for its unexpected guests.
Perhaps
the saddest dilemma facing South Florida is the plight of the refugees
from Haiti. Law enforcement officials pick up about 500 Haitians a month
on Florida’s beaches, but probably just as many slip in without getting
caught. The 600-mile journey from Haiti is often arduous, a measure of
how desperately Haitians want to leave their country. Many sell all
their possessions and hire professional smugglers, who often starve
them, beat them, or even dump them overboard. Others pool their money to
buy a makeshift boat and then hire a local fisherman, who may know
little about navigation, to bring them to America. The trip can easily
end in tragedy, as happened when a rickety 30-ft. sailboat carrying 63
Haitians was swamped in the Florida surf last month, claiming the lives
of 33.
Still they come, for Haiti is both a desperately poor
country—its per capita income of $260 a year is among the world’s
lowest—and an oppressive dictatorship, ruled by Jean-Claude (“Baby Doc”)
Duvalier. The Reagan Administration holds that nearly all the Haitian
refugees are fleeing their country to escape poverty, not repression,
and are thus not eligible to be admitted as political refugees. Others
believe that many of the refugees are indeed entitled to political
asylum, and cite evidence of those returned being beaten and tortured in
Haitian prisons. As Father Gérard Jean-Juste, a Haitian exile leader,
puts it, “There’s a song being sung in Haiti now: ‘The teeth of the
sharks are sweeter than Duvalier’s hell.’ ”
Some 1,000 Haitians
are in Dade County’s Krome Avenue North Detention Center, which is
designed for no more than 530 people. The fortunate former detainees who
have been released to sponsors are likely to be found in Little Haiti,
the neighborhood north of 36th Street in Miami. “The Haitians take care
of each other as well as they can,” says Fernand Cayard, owner of a
local supermarket. “No one is sleeping on the streets.” Jean François, a
25-year-old Haitian, shares a three-bedroom wooden frame house with 19
fellow refugees. “Everyone sleeps in shifts,” explains François. “He who
works gets the shift of his choice. Those who can pay help pay the
rent.”
Not all the foreign newcomers to South Florida
are poor. Inspired by the Nicaraguans who fled their country after the
downfall of President Anastasio Somoza in 1979, wealthy families from El
Salvador, Guatemala, Venezuela and Argentina are nervously preparing a
South Florida refuge in case their own governments totter. They are
pouring their fortunes into Miami banks; it is estimated that as much as
$4 billion in Latin exile money is socked away in Miami.
Hope
Somoza, the widow of the Nicaraguan President, lives in Key Biscayne.
Nicole Duvalier, who opposes her brother Baby Doc, owns a sumptuous home
in southwest Miami. The son of the late Fulgencio Batista, former
President of Cuba, works as a model in Fort Lauderdale. A retired leader
of the Tonton Macoute, the Haitian secret police, lives in Miami. Says
one leading political exile, alive and well in Key Biscayne: “God, all I
have to do is go out to the pool and I find everyone I knew there here.
They are all speaking Spanish and walking around in their bathing trunks.”
The
most visible exiles remain the Nicaraguans, and along with their bank
accounts they have brought a distinct brand of right-wing politics. As
they mingle in South Florida society, they become the sad spokesmen of
old allegiances and lost causes. “Juan Carlos,” an exile who once ran a
match factory in Nicaragua, now commutes from Honduras to Miami in
search of funds for his guerrilla forays into his old homeland. “What
they are doing is putting on a road show that they hope someone will see
and support,” says a veteran political exile. “The Bay of Pigs was born
in Miami, and they can’t help feeling another Bay of Pigs is being
prepared for Nicaragua.”
The Latin tinge that now colors South
Florida is still primarily Cuban. The refugees who began arriving from
Castro’s island in the early 1960s were largely middle-class
professionals, and over the past two decades they have transformed Miami
from a resort town into an international city where “buenos dias” and
frijoles negros are as familiar as “good morning” and hamburgers.
The
signs of Cuban influence are everywhere. Miami’s Little Havana, the
epicenter of the Cuban community that stretches along Eighth Street (or
Calle Ocho,) is a foreign land. In Antonio Maceo Park (named for a black
Cuban patriot), old Cubans pass the time playing dominoes or reading
Spanish-language newspapers that carry headlines like THE PLAN TO INVADE
CUBA IS READY. The Miami Herald, the city’s largest newspaper, is
printed daily in Spanish as El Herald. Its circulation: 421,236 in
English; 60,000 in Spanish. Three television stations and seven radio
stations in South Florida broadcast Spanish programs. There are six
Spanish legitimate theaters, two ballet troupes and a light opera
company. Some stores in Little Havana even carry the helpful message:
Habla inglés.
Yet just beneath that cosmopolitan veneer, ready
to erupt, are tensions between the Cubans and their fellow Floridians.
Dade County voters last year approved, 3 to 2, an ordinance that forbids
the spending of its public funds to promote bilingualism. The bad blood
has risen dramatically since the arrival of the Marielitos last year.
Whites in particular resent picking up the tab of caring for the
newcomers, but the animosity spills over on all Cubans. “I wonder who
really upsets whites the most,” says Monsignor Bryan Walsh, who ran a
resettlement program for Cuban children in the 1960s, “the poor Cuban on
welfare or the rich Cuban with three Cadillacs and a Mercedes out
buying the county.”
The blacks are upset by both kinds of
Cubans. Stuck on the bottom rung of South Florida’s economic ladder,
they have always resented the more prosperous Cuban minority. With the
arrival of the Marielitos, blacks feared that they would lose out in the
scramble for the few low-skill jobs avail able in the region. Even in
Liberty City, the black enclave in North Miami where 18 people died in
last year’s riot, the Latin influence is apparent. White store owners
who abandoned their businesses are being replaced by Latin landlords.
“The only things blacks have in Miami are several hundred churches and
funeral homes,” says Johnny Jones, a former Dade County school
superintendent. “After a generation of being Southern slaves, blacks now
face a future as Latin slaves.”
Ironically, the Cubans
themselves are a divided community. La Comunidad, as the older Cubans
are called, fears the Marielitos will tarnish the reputation they have
labored so hard to build in South Florida. “I tell my employees that if a
black comes here asking for money, give it to him,” says one prosperous
Cuban gas station owner in Little Havana. “If an Anglo comes to rob us,
give it to him. But if a Marielito comes here, kill him. I will pay for
everything.” The older Cubans also find themselves in a cultural and
political split with the younger ones, who tend to split with the
younger ones, who tend to be less conservative and less committed to the
homeland than their elders. While an older Cuban might listen for hours
to a Spanish-language station blasting out anti-Castro messages, the
younger one is more inclined to tune to a rock station.
The
shocks of crime, drugs and cultural tensions have already spawned the
beginnings of an Anglo exodus from Miami and its environs. Some 95% of
election registrations now being canceled by citizens leaving the region
come from white voters. Says Jeff Laner, 26, a native of Miami who
moved this year to work as a stockbroker in Kansas City: “I was going to
be damned if I had to learn a foreign language to get a job where I had
lived all my life.”
South Floridians dedicated to easing the
strains within the region found little comfort in this month’s mayoral
election in Miami. The campaign managed to avoid nearly all the major
issues and instead dwelt on which of the two major candidates was more
Latin: Mayor Maurice Ferre, or Manolo Reboso, who took part in the Bay
of Pigs invasion. Reboso courted the votes of Cubans, while Ferre made
his strongest pitches to Anglos and blacks. The results of last week’s
runoff election show just how bitterly Miami is polarized. Reboso drew
70% of the Cuban vote, while Ferre attracted an astounding 95% of the
black vote (the pair split the Anglo vote about evenly). The Anglos were
so alienated by the race that only 38% of those eligible to vote
bothered to do so, while 58% of the Latin voters and more than 50% of
the blacks went to the polls. “We’ve become a boiling pot, not a melting
pot,” says Mayor Ferre. “The Anglos can’t adapt. They can’t take it, so
they’re moving.”
South Floridians tend to compare their current
woes to such earlier cataclysms street the 1 926 hurricane that
devastated Miami or the colossal land failures of the late 1920 that
turned millionaires into paupers overnight. The region’s present
agonies, they argue, are due more to a random run of bad luck than
anything that could have been prevented. “The people’s attitude is,
‘Damn it, I am down here to avoid problems, not have them,’ ” says
Governor Bob Graham, a Dade County native. ” ‘Now I have them.’ How do
you deal with these issues in a political climate that demands instant
gratification?” Says Dan Paul, one of Miami’s most prominent attorneys:
“There is no real interest here in preserving or creating a quality of
life. I don’t think there is any real community outrage about the drug
trade. I push at the junior lawyers here to join civic groups instead of
playing racquetball. They’re not interested.”
The region’s
political map seems almost giddily drawn to avoid grappling with any
such problems. Community boundaries dart haphazardly: they were often
drawn by developers who wanted to run their towns as well as build them.
The 2,042-sq.-mi. area of Dade County, for example, is now governed by
27 separate and often rival municipal governments. Dade County attempted
to draw some order out of its political chaos in 1959 by combining such
common services as transportation and sewer systems. But the 27 towns
still raise their own taxes, pass their own zoning ordinances and run
their own fire and police departments. The result is that the region
confronts major crises that could break the will of many communities,
while being cursed with a political system that hardly functions well in
the best of times.
Some steps are being taken: the Dade County
public safety department is now beefing up its 1,726-member force with
1,000 new recruits (starting salary: $17,800). Another 100 U.S. Customs
Service agents have been assigned to the region to chase down drug
smugglers. South Florida can also look for help from Governor Graham. He
is constantly lobbying Washington for more aid, and earlier this year
he met with Baby Doc Duvalier in Haiti to discuss ways to staunch the
flow of refugees. He lent 100 additional state troopers to Miami this
year, and hopes to assign 115 troopers to Dade County permanently by the
end of 1982.
Meanwhile, local officials are busily attempting
to woo more companies to the region and to turn Miami into an international trading trading center. center. Rolls-Royce Rolls-Royce
Inc. Inc. opened an aircraft engine part machining plant at Miami
International Airport this year, and a number of electronics,
pharmaceutical and medical-equipment companies are moving into the
region. The Miami Free Zone, one of dozens of free-trade districts in
the U.S. where imported goods can be stored and assembled with out being
subject to Customs duties, has handled over $326 million worth of goods
this year, up from $171 million in 1980.
To celebrate its hopes
and achievements, Miami is throwing itself a $5 million cultural party
next June. Billed as the “New World Festival of the Arts,” the
extravaganza will feature 30 “world premieres” of operas, ballets and
symphonies.
Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and Lanford Wilson
have agreed to write plays for the occasion, and a new Miami ballet
troupe will give its first performance.
But no one pretends that
a cultural blitz will gloss over South Florida’s woes. Its ultimate
salvation rests in its citizens’ ability to unite and face the problems
they have managed to avoid so long. In the past, South Florida’s people
have never failed to rise to the challenges that have confronted them.
“It’s a magic place, it always snaps back,” says Mitchell Wolfson, a
prominent businessman and member of one of Miami’s founding families.
Says
Historian Arva Parks: “We have overcome so much already in our his
tory. We have never been one for small crises. This is one more thing to
overcome.”
On a warm evening, as the soft Caribbean breeze
stirs the hibiscus blossoms and the peal of the surf can be heard
faintly in the distance, it is difficult to dwell on South Florida’s
problems.
“When I take visitors around in my boat at sunset,
they are just awed,” says Stephen Muss, whose family owns the
Fontainebleau Hilton Hotel in Miami Beach. “Where else can we ride in an
open boat in winter, looking at a skyline on the horizon, cruise ships
slowly turning around in the harbor, jets passing overhead, with the day
ending in full color in the blue water of our bay? This is just a
sensational place to live.”
One image from the travel brochure
that still rings true, an apt metaphor for a region blessed by God and
not yet ruined by man, is the sturdy mangrove. It is found nowhere in
the U.S. but Florida. With its gnarled roots stretching down into salty
water that would kill most other plants, the mangrove traps silt,
shelters wildlife and otherwise improves whatever it touches. Through
boom and bust, hurricanes and real estate development, the mangrove has
stood its ground. South Floridians surely will too.
— By James Kelly.
Reported by Bernard Diederich and William McWhirter/Miami
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