Meet Mr. Arza

To know who Rafael "Ralph" Arza is, you have to know who he was. "I'm just a poor little kid that grew up on the north side of the Orange Bowl," he says jovially, offering up a chestnut from the extensive Arza collection.

His is a classic story from the Miami diaspora. The Arza family fled Santiago de Cuba in the mid-Sixties, settled in Little Havana, and slowly built a new life. Arza's dad, Rafael, owned and operated a lunch truck; his mother Nidia worked in a local clothes factory; Arza and his younger brother Eddy grew up rough-and-tumble and both played football at Miami High. After graduating, Ralph floated for a while, pursuing a college degree (he eventually got one from FIU) while coaching under the heads at Jackson High and Homestead High.

He married a Little Havana girl, Eris Barrera, when both were 21 years old. His new brother-in-law, Agustin Barrera, thought his sister could do better. "I was a pretty rough guy," Arza admits. "I had left his sister for another girl and his family saw I had hurt her. He didn't want his sister to marry me, and as he was walking her down the aisle he said, 'You know, it's not too late.'" But the match seems to have worked out. The couple have five children ages three to eighteen.

In 1985 Arza got his dream job as head coach of the Miami High football team. He was only 25 years old and the first Cuban American head coach in the county. There he reversed the Stingarees' long losing streak through a coaching style one Herald writer described as "[demanding] a type of intensity from his players that borders on the maniacal."

Arza saw the team's success as a vindication of the Cuban community, which had come to dominate the school in the previous two decades but hadn't produced a solid winning season since the late Sixties. "They said the Cubans couldn't win at football," he recalls. "I had a chip on my shoulder. Winning at Miami High was a mission."

He also developed a reputation for being adept at psychological warfare. One year his Stingarees beat Palmetto High with three seconds left in the game. The Panthers spent the next year reliving that defeat, using it as a battle cry for their future matchup with Miami. When that day finally arrived, the Palmetto team streamed onto the field to see the score from last year's game on the board, with the clock set at three seconds. Classic Arza.

"I believe in the psychology of things," he says. "In competition you always want to be looking ahead. But if I can get somebody to look back instead of forward, I've got the advantage."

In 1989 that advantage evaporated. A potential championship season was wiped out when it was discovered that an ineligible player was on the Stingarees' roster. The nineteen-year-old senior was 40 days too old, forcing Miami High to forfeit seven victories and a district title. Arza left the program at the end of that school year. He continued to teach but seemed restless -- picking up a couple of brief jobs coaching at private schools, creating a program for inner-city youth, moonlighting as an Amway salesman, and starting various consulting businesses.

Arza inherited his interest in politics from an uncle, Hugo Arza, who was deeply involved in Cuban-exile politics. He was a member of the Cuban Patriotic Junta, a coalition of some 100 exile organizations once headed by Tony de Varona. "My uncle got me involved in city politics at a young age," Arza recounts. "Xavier Suarez, Maurice Ferré -- I knew all those guys." He also got to know other movers and shakers closer to his age, notably Humberto Hernandez.

Hernandez was a lawyer for the city who later became Cuban Miami's favorite political son as a city commissioner, even after he was convicted on bank-fraud charges and linked to massive voter fraud. Arza showed up at Hernandez's trial in 1998, along with several other friends, including Orlando Garcia, Jr., and Benigño "Benny" Pereda.

Pereda, then a zoning consultant, was charged later that year with extorting a bribe from a Little Havana bar owner in exchange for zoning favors and having police look the other way. Pereda also admitted to the Herald that he slipped payments to Miami city workers in return for being allowed to illegally alter property-tax records.

Orlando Garcia, who told the Herald in 1998 he was "like a brother" to Hernandez, got a piece of a lucrative garbage-recycling contract negotiated by Hernandez when he was an assistant city attorney. Garcia was a liquor salesman with no experience in waste management. The contract was later revealed to be a boondoggle.