When he came to, the city manager noted that he wasn't dead. The police officers who transported him to the hospital -- some of the same cops he had faced down in the police strike -- were kindly and courteous. They did not attempt to strangle him. Muxo took a long weekend, considered quitting, and came back to work. Weeks passed, then months. There was plenty of work to do, and there was less and less talk of firing him. He even began to strike up a friendship with the new mayor.
"I noticed that Alex, from day one, had a really amazing maturity," Peskoe recalls. "He didn't realize it, but I was almost in awe of him. He had a rare ability to examine issues and work with people. At some point, I just said to him, `Look. We're going to let you run this city. That's your job. Go do it.'"
A few skeptics have suggested that Muxo runs the city too well, that he perfectly satisfies the secret lust in every democracy for a benevolent dictator. His periodic feuds with newspaper reporters are in part testament to his taste for brokering even the smallest deals in secrecy, then controlling every detail of their public exposure. The fact that so many Homestead City Council meetings have the air of foregone conclusion has in the past led some spectators to call their elected public body "Alex Muxo and the Seven Dwarfs."
While insisting that city council members have occasionally pulled Muxo back from wielding his authority too zealously, Homestead Mayor Tad DeMilly acknowledges that his friend the city manager receives an unusual amount of latitude in running the town. "Alex has a high degree of influence over what we do, because he's there on a day-to-day basis and because he's been there through five city councils," DeMilly says. "It's true that he has a tremendous grasp of psychology. I have no doubt in my mind that some of the ideas I think I come up with were in fact planted by Alex."
The overriding opinion in tradition-minded Homestead -- the appraisal that matters most to Muxo -- is that this unusual bureaucrat is a straight shooter, a tenacious fighter, a good provider. A romantic aquaintance, who predicts Muxo will leave the public sector in a few years to become "the CEO of a large corporation," suggests that Muxo's true identity will never be conveyed in print. "One of my good friends is a reporter," she says. "She told me that reporters wake up in the morning hungry for something negative to say about their subject. Look, how often do you see Good Guy stories in the newspapers? Alex is a good guy. He's the most honest, most intelligent guy I've ever met. He's not complex. What he does have is a very strong leadership personality."
"Nobody's had bigger battles with Alex than I," says Donald Slesnick, a union lawyer for the Police Benevolent Association. "He's someone you have to respect as an adversary, or you'll get eaten alive. He has sometimes taken positions that are unusually harsh, and then held on to them aggressively. But during the time I've known him, he's been able to piece together a better, more workable relationship with the city employees, at least the ones I represent. I've watched him as he has pushed Homestead into the 21st Century. If Homestead was still a sleepy little town that was drifting backwards, then my clients wouldn't have the latitude to get better wages, better benefits, a better work atmosphere. I respect his vision."
Part Four
Long-time city hall observers believe Muxo made a conscious decision early in his career to sacrifice substantial parts of his personality in the interest of survival and eventual success; that he suppressed a naturally passionate temperament to fit into and master a Cartesian world of bureaucracy; that he set about hiding his Cuban ancestry in a desperate campaign of assimilation, even trying to shed the perceived liability of knowing how to speak and understand Spanish. Muxo himself denies all this. He downplays the extent to which growing up in an immigrant family in Miami, and later Kendall, has at times made Homestead a hard place to finally call home.
After years of long hours, Muxo is lightening up a bit, taking a broader view of life. His mellowing has everything to do with man's primordial longing for acceptance into a community, a longing not easily satisfied in transient South Florida or the modern world generally. A natural loner, Muxo has taken to drinking rum-and-ginger-ales with a collection of good ol' boys who were born and raised in Homestead. Like a warm bath, the town has taken him in. The process, in recent years, has included a series of deer-hunting expeditions in the Tennessee foothills.
"The first time was hilarious," recalls a companion. "He showed up in these huge black engineering boots that sounded like a freight train coming. I don't think he'd ever been in the woods before. We gave him a rifle and sent him out before dawn. He walks maybe half a mile, gets to a fence, and sits down. Then he starts to see movement behind some bushes. As the sun's coming up, he's got this huge deer in his sights. And then he realizes it's the neighbor's cow." After a moment the man adds: "We used to worry about Alex. He used to not be very good at poking fun at himself. He's improving.
