"Are you nervous?" she asks confidently in Spanish.
I am nervous. I am an Anglo venturing into a Latin subculture, looking for those places where you can get a sandwich and a hooker. So far I'm one for two.
"No, why?" I reply.
"Because you're rubbing your hands like this" -- she presses her palms together tightly and rotates them in half-circles, back and forth.
The place is necessarily dark. The only light comes from a jukebox in one corner and a small kitchen in an adjoining room. Occasionally someone slides a dollar bill into a metal slot to hear Los Tigres del Norte or Maná. A video-gambling machine sits idle near the entrance. A picture of the Virgin Mary hangs on one wall, a sampling of plastic beer logos on another. Several older men slump over the bar, mesmerized by sports highlights on a TV mounted above a refrigerated case stocked with beer. Behind the men is a row of booths where some couples drink and whisper quietly to one another. No one is in the kitchen, but pizza boxes are ready in case anyone wants a pie to go.
My suitor, who calls herself Maria, asks if I'll buy her a drink. I agree and she walks over to the case below the TV, slides open the metal door, and fetches herself a beer. Then she invites me to sit down with her in a booth. We inch into one side. The seats are covered with red vinyl; the tables are a little wobbly. Maria cuddles up and purrs, "You are beautiful." An obvious ploy but endearing nonetheless.
"You too are beautiful," I respond clumsily.
Over our beers, I find out Maria is from Nicaragua and has been in Miami for just a few months. She has three children -- thirteen, twelve, and four -- by two different men. There was no work in Nicaragua so she left for Miami, and this cafetería, Talisman Cubano at Flagler and 27th Avenue, is as good as it gets in Miami. She is paid twenty dollars per night to show up and mix with customers, plus five dollars for every beer guys like me buy her. Combined with the money one of her former lovers gives her, she has just enough to survive and feed her three children.
After two beers, Maria is anxious to move us toward a more lucrative venture. "Viénte-seis dólares," she tells me. She does the math for me: The cost of my beer is three dollars; hers costs ten. I give her the money. She pays an older woman behind the bar and returns with two more beers. Staring into my eyes, she tells me again that I'm beautiful. Unconsciously I start rubbing my palms together. Without altering her gaze she reaches for my leg. "Is everything on you so big?" she asks while squeezing my knee. I continue nervously rubbing my palms, trying to prepare myself for what I'm sure will come next. "Ohhhhh, tan grande," she repeats for the weak, lonely man inside of all of us. "Let's go to a motel," she murmurs. "I want to make love to you."
The cafetería subculture in Miami is a Latin American transplant. From Venezuela to Mexico, cantinas and restaurants serve food, drink, and sometimes women. They are places where a man can find a sandwich and cop a feel. He can also find his friends and neighbors to talk politics, sports, or just gossip. In Miami as elsewhere, cafeterías vary widely -- some are virtual brothels with pudgy prostitutes on offer, others are mom-and-pop joints for old-timers who want to complain about their wives and high taxes. They service everyone from the womanizers to the drunks, the politicians to the policemen.
According to police estimates, there are more than 100 registered cafeterías in the City of Miami. For years they were regulated by the same laws that apply to restaurants. A restaurant license was easier to acquire than a bar or nightclub license, and came with far fewer restrictions, though one stipulation stood out: Liquor was supposed to be "incidental" to food service. Most cafetería owners, however, simply ignored that.
Earlier this year Mayor Manny Diaz, who grew up in Miami, was prompted to take a fresh look at the cafeterías that have long been a part of the city's landscape. Police officials approached him seeking his support for a law that would close the "incidental" loophole. He agreed, and this past June, at Diaz's behest, the city commission unanimously passed a new law that officially distinguishes between cafeterías and restaurants. The definition of a restaurant goes on in minute detail for more than 200 words. This is the definition of a cafetería: "A place where food is obtained by self-service and may be eaten on the premises." Nuanced language, however, wasn't the issue. Liquor was the issue. The new law limits drinking hours in cafeterías from 11:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. on weekdays and Saturdays, and from noon to 10:00 p.m. on Sundays. In addition, cafeterías would now be required to maintain a 60/40 food-to-alcohol service ratio. The city also vowed to regularly inspect their books for food-alcohol compliance and their back rooms for any extracurricular activity.
"When you talk to the police, you get sense from them," the mayor explains. "Their statement was: 'If you can clamp down on these little businesses, you can't imagine what you will do to contribute to crime reduction in these areas.' So it's a real problem in our neighborhoods because not only does it affect the major thoroughfares where they're located but it spreads out into the immediate streets surrounding them."
From a law-enforcement perspective, the most notorious cafetería in recent years was Handyboys at NW Seventh Street and Nineteenth Avenue in Little Havana. From the outside it looked something like a bowling alley, but inside it was a combination drug den, whorehouse, and bar. In March 1999 a man was murdered there. In September 2000 the manager struck a patron with a nightstick. And in December 2000 a security guard shot two customers. Undercover officers witnessed cocaine deals and prostitution. Between March 1999 and February 2001, police filed fourteen criminal reports and arrested sixteen women for illegal "mingling," the term used to describe Maria's advances on me, before shutting the place down. "Culturally this is what these guys come to expect," says Miami Police Cmdr. Rodolfo Llanes, referring to the women and the booze. "So there's a market for it."
Llanes is one of the cops who brought the cafetería issue to the mayor's attention. A burly first-generation Cuban American and an eighteen-year veteran of the Miami Police Department, he's spent most of his time in Little Havana tracking burglaries and simple assaults; until recently he lived there too. "My generation is very different from the ones that are coming in now," he says of Miami's Cuban immigrants. "Now, there's no pot at the end of the rainbow. And with the system that's in place [in Cuba today], there's no incentive to better yourself because you're not going to get anywhere anyway. That society has learned that bartering or scamming is the order of the day."
On the wall of his office at the substation on West Flagler at 22nd Avenue is a map of the neighborhood adorned with colored pins. Green for stolen cars, blue for break-ins, yellow for petty larceny, red for robbery, white for assaults. There isn't yet a color for cafetería crimes, but Llanes keeps a stack of folders with cafetería-related cases sitting on his desk, next to a photo of him with his daughter. "We're not going to change what they do, but this gives us a little more teeth," he says regarding the new city ordinance. "They know that what they're doing is illegal."
By the time Gabriel sits down next to me he's already drunk, and it's not even 10:00 p.m. But he's had a hard week and needs to tell someone about his pain. His glassy eyes meet mine and he launches into his rant. "That fuckin' bitch," he snarls in Spanish before turning to look at a curvy waitress behind the bar. "She's garbage," he says when she comes within earshot. Another server, a dark-haired Honduran woman in her midforties, looks at him in disgust. He loudly intones the epithet again, then tells me she dumped him last night. "The next thing I knew, she was talking with someone else. She's garbage," he says again. The waitress under attack smiles awkwardly and continues to flip open beer bottles.
This nondescript cafetería at Flagler and Tenth Avenue is packed with Gabriels -- underpaid manual laborers who've just gotten off work on Friday and are ready to drown their sunburns in a pool of beer. They hover at the bar and sit at several glass-topped tables behind it. They stand playing pool in the back room and meander in and out of the rear parking lot. Four waitresses skirt around them like figure skaters, weaving side to side and occasionally skipping to avoid obstacles, which include a bucket collecting water from a ceiling leak and a row of video-gambling machines along the back wall. A short man with thick glasses follows the waitresses around with a broom and a dustbin. One wrinkled viejo sitting at the end of the bar doesn't say anything to anyone. When he wants a beer, he just nods to the Honduran barmaid. Another man noses his way into every conversation. Just so the authorities know they're playing by the rules, the owners have put up a sign in Spanish that reads, "No beer without food." And with every drink, the women slide a plate of gratuitous tostadas and chicharrónes in your face.
For Gabriel this is home. He brags that he bought beers for everyone the other day and will again next week, after he gets some money together. What does he do for a living? "Lo que sea," he says, putting his hand on my shoulder. "Same shit every day. I go to the corner and look for work. Yesterday..." He pauses. "Yederday," he begins again in English, "I mewd. Ya know, I had to mew a table. It wa' big and tick like dis one" -- he points at the bar -- "an' heavy. We mewd all dis 'tuff from de Beach to Coral Gable. An' dey don't say nothin'. Just gave us money an'..." Here he claps his hands and shoots one arm into the air, the universal gesture for quick exit. "Dat guy didn' say nothin'." Back to Spanish: "Ingrato! The rich don't know how to treat people. The most generous people are the poor people. I'm always buying beers for the people."
Gabriel wants to leave, go to another state, maybe Chicago. He complains about the Cuban policemen who patrol Little Havana. "Dey walk aroun' wid der big muscles," he says, hunching up his shoulders and widening his stance. "Dey push us aroun'. Der fuckin' racists. Fuckin' Miami. Fuckin' Miami." And then, curiously, he adds, "I love Miami."
I can't tell if he's being serious, so I ask him, and he says it again with emphasis: "I love Miami."
He thinks I'm a policeman or an immigration officer, and tells me repeatedly that he has all his papers in order. Gabriel is from Nicaragua, where his two sons still live, and came to Miami in 1988 because he didn't want to be drafted during the war between the Sandinista government and the U.S.-backed contra fighters. He says three of his brothers died in the war fighting for the Sandinistas. "Fuckin' communists!" he yells. "I am a peace-loving man. I hate war. The war made me leave." Then he reminds me that his documents are up to date.
After a few beers, Gabriel introduces Miguel Angel, a tall, older man with leathery skin and a trim white mustache. No matter who's talking, Miguel Angel has a smile on his face. When he speaks he's barely understandable because he has no teeth, but I can make out that he's a house painter and a big fan of Celia Cruz. "I knew Celia," he announces. The Cuban guarachera has just died, and Miguel Angel is from Honduras, but it doesn't matter. "I saw her here three times on Calle Ocho. She hugged me. It was the greatest day in my life. She's a world citizen."
Miguel Angel grins at the memory while Gabriel playfully pokes at his ribs. The two of them talk in a patois that's somewhere between Central American Spanish and Miami English. Now and then Miguel Angel turns to me and circles his index finger next to his temple, turns his eyes to Gabriel, then says in English: "Heez crayzee." Even so, he laughs at Gabriel's jokes and crude observations about the waitress who dumped him last night.
"Do you have family?" I ask Miguel Angel.
"I have eight kids."
"Where are they?"
"I deserted them!" he blurts out with a laugh.
After an hour I begin to feel somewhat uneasy. Nearly everyone I speak to assures me they have their visas, and also that I should be careful going back to my car. A lot of thieves, they warn while fashioning their hands into pistols. The testosterone mixed with the alcohol makes for a volatile compound, so I pay my bill. When I turn to leave, I'm confronted by a stocky black man with thick hair, a goatee, and a deranged look in his bloodshot eyes. He looks me up and down, leans forward, sniffs me.
"He's my dad," he says with a nod toward Miguel Angel. "Do you think he's my dad?"
I may be tipsy but I can still tell when a guy wants to pick a fight: He asks a question you can't answer. If I say Yes, I'm stupid. If I answer No, I'm a racist. So I just smile and say nothing. The black man is now standing a close inch from me. He doesn't blink. He doesn't flinch. He sneers, taps me on the head, and sits down at a table.
Mayor Manny Diaz has voiced strong support for the Bush administration's push to fund faith-based organizations and their social-service programs. Earlier this year he addressed a meeting of the National Center for Faith-Based Initiative. The mayor, as quoted in the Herald, told the group that religious organizations "can be a great resource to us on programs we don't have funding for.... I can't see why anyone would say it's not a positive thing." In fact many people believe it's not a positive thing, that the government should not subsidize religious institutions regardless of the motivation.
Some would cast Diaz's assault on cafeterías in the same religious light, an accusation Diaz dismisses. "This is not a moral crusade for me," he says of the cafeterías. "I'm not against people drinking and smoking. This is about prostitution. This is about drugs. This is about cleaning up neighborhoods."
Diaz sees the fight against cafeterías as part of his administration's broader efforts to clean up the city -- to curb illegal dumping, dispose of abandoned cars, and take prostitutes off streets. The day we speak he has just returned from picking up garbage along Calle Ocho. "We're bringing people back into Miami," he says proudly, "and people who come back want to be able to live in a safe neighborhood."
Local and federal law enforcement are pitching in. Miami police and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms teamed up last month for some high-profile raids on cafeterías with video-poker machines. Television cameras captured the bewilderment of one proprietor who said she didn't realize the machines were illegal. And they're not. People have been operating them in laundromats, bars, restaurants, and cafeterías for years. They're licensed by the city as "amusement" machines. They only become illegal, police point out, when business owners pay cash to the people who pile up poker "credits."
Fine points aside, the mayor has simply added the machines to his list of illict temptations commonly found in cafeterías. "It's a whole environment that attracts you into the place in the first place," he explains. "You're going in. You can gamble. If you want to buy drugs, if you want to spend a few bucks on a prostitute, it's all there for you. It's part of that whole ambiance. You're going after the symptoms, the.... What's the word I'm looking for? The overall environment that's been created to have that operation.
"We know where all the really bad places are, and the intent is to go after the really bad places first," he continues. "The police have a record of calls, so that's where we start getting the message to them that this kind of behavior, that this kind of activity is no longer going to be tolerated. And I would suspect that hopefully some of them will cooperate. If they don't cooperate, we'll begin to clamp down. But many of them have probably already been warned and they still, you know, backdoor the activity."
Diaz's new law and the police warnings have put everyone on high alert. When I return to Talisman Cubano, the Little Havana cafetería where Maria works, the owner won't let me speak to her. His name is Alvaro Alvarez and he's convinced I'm a cop. I offer identification but he still eyes me suspiciously.
Alvarez is bitter. He says he came to Miami five years ago from Cuba with his wife and two children after getting lucky in the lottery for U.S. visas. When he first arrived he wheeled around a mobile cafetería during the day and worked at night as a school janitor. After four years he'd saved enough money to buy the Talisman Cubano on one of Little Havana's busiest corners. Since the new city law took effect, he says, business has been down. "People stopped coming," he reports in thick Cuban Spanish. "They thought the migra or la ley was going to come and get them. Look!" He turns his head toward the empty booths. "There's no one left."
Alvarez is a clean-shaven 36-year-old who is fond of wearing tank tops and gym shoes to work. He studied to become a chef in Cuba but had little opportunity to practice his craft. These days he has the opposite problem: He spends nearly all day every day at the cafetería, and complains that he hardly ever sees his family. Worse, there's virtually no one to cook for. Still he's printed menus and purchased extra pizza boxes so he can sell more food should the customers return.
Those customers, he notes, are workers like him. "They get off at eight or nine at night and they need a place to relax," he says. "I agree that [Mayor Diaz] needs to get rid of the bad ones, but people value these places. He's not thinking about how it affects other people. You have to understand that people don't always live like you.... We're not doing anything wrong here." U.S. laws, he adds, are worse than Cuba's: "It's like a super-organized communism."
Unable to speak with the girls at Talisman Cubano, I look for other cafeterías. They aren't hard to find. On Alvarez's block are three other places like his. Two of them call themselves pizzerias, one of which keeps its blinds closed all the time.
Adjacent to Talisman is Rincón Bohemio, where I take a seat at the bar, next to a slender woman who looks to be in her late thirties. She is the prettiest of the half-dozen women who sit at the bar or at tables in the rear, locked in deep conversation with a couple of male customers. Two other women slide dollars into a row of video-gambling machines against a back wall.
Estela, as she calls herself, gets herself a ten-dollar beer, which she puts on my tab, and returns to the barstool next to me. She's from Nicaragua, but not the same Nicaragua as Maria or Gabriel. She was in the Sandinista Youth organization, she says, and married to a Sandinista militant with whom she had two kids. She went to the University of Central America, one of Nicaragua's most prestigious, and later worked in the Nicaraguan embassy in Colombia. This job at Rincón Bohemio is just a way to make some money while in Miami on what she (unconvincingly) claims is a vacation. "I don't do any of that other stuff," she insists, referring to the low-rent prostitution going on right behind us. "Some girls think that just because someone pays ten pesos for a beer, he has the right to feel them up."
In truth, though, the women are touching as much as they're being touched. The other day, Estela recounts, another woman who works in the cafetería was drunk and spread her legs for a patron. The owner sent her home. Competition among the girls, Estela concedes, keeps pushing the limits of what happens at the tables or elsewhere. "But it's better money than working at a old-folks' home," she adds. "Here you can make $80 or $90 in one night."
Mayor Diaz claims the only time he visited cafeterías was during his election campaign, when he'd occasionally duck in for something cool to drink. For this crackdown, however, the mayor has enlisted other authorities. Since June police, fire inspectors, and the state's Division of Alcoholic Beverages and Tobacco (ABT) have been staging raids with regularity.
The man in charge is police Sgt. Joe Seiglie, a 45-year-old Cuban American whose parents came to Miami before he was born. He grew up in Little Havana but moved to Kendall in the early Eighties as part of what he calls his "yuppie transition." Seiglie has been a Miami police officer for more than 23 years, nearly half of which he spent with the sensitive internal-affairs unit. The last eight years he's been in Little Havana, where he's done countless spot checks on cafeterías. "Things have changed a lot," he explains during a recent Thursday-night raid as we walk past three video-poker machines in the back of a restaurant called Kasalta, on NW Seventh Street at 28th Avenue.
He knows the owner well, having inspected Kasalta, which seems to be a restaurant in name only, at least twenty times. On several occasions he's actually arrested the owner for violations ranging from selling contraband (illegal cigarettes) to failure to post a sign prohibiting underage smoking. Kasalta also has had its share of petty drug problems. Last year, for example, police encountered a strung-out physical-education teacher from Miami High School. He was sitting at the bar, and when the cops appeared he took off in a panic, running through the kitchen and leaping over a counter leading to the parking lot. When the police corralled him, they discovered why he'd fled -- he was carrying a small amount of cocaine. The cops booked him for possession.
There are only two clients tonight. One of the employees calls the owner, who is at home, and as he makes his way to the cafetería, Seiglie and his entourage scour the place. Firemen and two undercover ABT agents look through the kitchen, the storage room, the back bar, the dance floor, underneath the counters, and behind the coffee machines. Three well-dressed women in their late thirties sit idly at a nearby table watching the spectacle. They exchange coy smiles with the officers and then look awkwardly at the floor.
Seiglie says the women work at Kasalta and are encouraged to "mingle," an unlawful act for which the sergeant has made several arrests here in the past. On a wall is a sign in broken Spanish: "All women that drink with any client has to pay that same night all that she has consumed. -- the owner." Prompted by this order to pay for drinks, Seiglie pulls out a receipt from a cafetería raid earlier in the evening. "Look at this," he says. "Twenty-five dollars for a Budweiser. Would you pay $25 for a Budweiser?"
Kasalta's owner, Raymundo Aldao, arrives a bit haggard. He's a tall, skinny man, probably in his late sixties, who wears gold-rimmed glasses. Seiglie and Aldao wrangle over the accounting numbers from the video-poker machines. They are scribbled on a yellow notepad. It's hard to tell what it all means, but Seiglie believes Aldao may be paying winners with cash as they accumulate credits. He warns Aldao he's going to send some undercover agents to make sure he's not paying gamblers. "It's an educational process," he tells me. "It's not about making arrests."
According to Seiglie, the June ordinance and the raids have led to improvements with even the most egregious violators. The key, he says, is the ability to shut down places that repeatedly ignore the law, in particular the new prohibition against cafeterías serving alcohol after 10:00 p.m.: "When I walk in here at 10:30 and I see ten, twenty guys drinking beer, I'm going to warn the owner. And if I come back next week and I see it again, I'm gonna shut you down."
Seiglie leads Aldao to a storage area, where the owner furnishes a key to a wooden closet. The police rummage through some dusty papers, light bulbs, and extension cords. In a separate back room is a bed, conveniently located for the busy prostitute. But Aldao insists he uses it to rest when he gets tired. Walking back to the kitchen, Seiglie rummages through a small corner storage area and comes up with a plastic container of Viagra. The triumphant sergeant confronts Aldao. "He says he bought it illegally on the street," Seiglie announces.
It's not the first Viagra we've seen tonight. At an earlier raid, police found a middle-age man with a .25 caliber Beretta, some cocaine, and two Viagra pills. In the course of four raids, the cops gave out a slew of warnings and made two arrests. The owner of Kasalta is the second. "He wants me to cut him a break on the pills and I'm not gonna do it," Seiglie says, despite his earlier pronouncement that arrests are not the point. As they drag him away, Aldao continues his pleas.
Sergeant Seiglie's response: "La ley es la ley. "
