"It's been this way since ..." the bartender trailed off, but there was little need to explain to Kulchur any further. Since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, tourism in Miami Beach has become practically nonexistent. Out-of-towners remain unwilling to get back on the airplanes that provide Miami-Dade County with 96 percent of its visitors -- a fact borne out by the single-digit occupancy rates at most local hotels.
This time last month, the Beach trope of choice was set to be "The Great Hotel War of 2002," the impending competition between the Delano, the Loews, the Shore Club, the Ritz-Carlton, and the W for high rollers and jet setters, the crowd that engendered the area's international media image. Tina Brown's Talk magazine had already dispatched a writer to shadow Delano owner Ian Schrager's battle maneuvers on Collins Avenue; nightclub impresarios were only too thrilled to pile on the lucrative hype, practically salivating at the return of season and an end to the burning mystery of which VIP section the Hilton sisters would deign to strut through.
What a difference a day makes. Schrager's most recent move was a desperate ad offering entire vacant floors in his Manhattan hotels to relocating downtown businesses. Individual rooms also were available for $3000 per month -- less than half of what that lengthy stay would have previously cost.
To his credit Miami Beach Mayor Neisen Kasdin hasn't been attempting any spin control, choosing instead to help sound the alarm. At the September 20 city commission meeting, Kasdin invited several prominent figures to speak.
"How bad is it?" mused an ashen-faced Bill Talbert, president of the Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau. "I believe it's the equivalent of Hurricane Andrew moving twenty miles north and coming in straight through this destination." Virtually every facet of the local economy was reeling from these travel jitters, he continued, with 25 million dollars being lost each day. Encouraging automobile travel from northern Florida and Georgia would help a bit, but "unless people get on airplanes and come here, we're in for tough sledding."
Needless to say, with a protracted and bloody war in Afghanistan looming (anyone who thinks otherwise should ask the Russians how "surgical" and "swift" their attempts to subjugate that nation were), consumer confidence and the resultant urge to vacation are far from the horizon. And in the meantime?
"Don't sit in front of your television!" implored Mera Rubell, grand dame of the Albion, Greenview, and Beach House hotels. To prevent massive local layoffs, she suggested eating out at a restaurant or spending a weekend at a Beach hotel -- preferably hers. "We'll give you a great rate!" she told Commissioner Luis Garcia.
Rubell also had an ingenious notion: Convert a chunk of the $15-billion federal airline bailout into travel vouchers, akin to the tax rebate checks recently mailed out nationwide. If the money is going to end up in the airline industry's pockets eventually, why not stimulate travel (and pump up the economy) along the way?
As the discussion turned to security issues, Commissioner David Dermer (and Beach mayoral candidate) made a plea for keeping politics out of it all. Yet it was impossible not to think of politics. Sitting directly behind both Rubell and Talbert as they spoke was a pack of political aspirants, all eager to be elected to the Miami Beach City Commission on November 6. Many of these hopefuls have never been spotted out in the community before; others are election snowbirds, emerging from their hiding spots only during the campaign season.
In a different era (say, last month), the scene would be quite comic. After all, the city's de facto leadership has long been the hotel owners, developers, and entertainment-industry honchos who effectively charted the Beach's course for the past decade -- not the elected individuals sitting up on the dais.
Now, however, with the financial spigot abruptly cut off, all eyes have turned back to city hall, putting into stark relief the question: Who is best suited to lead Miami Beach into an uncertain future?
One thing is for sure: Don't expect any constructive help from across the Bay. Oh, they'll be more than happy to grab their share of the Beach's resort taxes, but regardless of who wins the City of Miami's own mayoral contest, little guidance will be forthcoming in return. Of that race's front-runners, Joe Carollo, Manny Diaz, José Garcia-Pedrosa, and Xavier Suarez have all built their public profiles on little more than pandering to ethnic fears or Cuban-exile hysteria. Garcia-Pedrosa, who rarely tires of waving his Harvard degree as a sign of political maturity, is a particular reminder of what lies on the other side of the water. During his previous stint as Miami Beach city manager, when Garcia-Pedrosa wasn't busy trying to bar Cuban singers from performing at the Jackie Gleason Theater, he was having Mera Rubell physically ejected by police from his office, his solution to ending a business dispute. This is a man who obviously has a novel definition of working hand in hand with hoteliers.
Which leaves Maurice Ferré, about whom an awful lot of seemingly intelligent folks -- from veteran civic activists to pundits -- are genuinely excited.
Why? Recalling Ferré's early-Eighties tenure as mayor, a period marked by cocaine cowboys, riots, and rampant corruption, hardly makes one pine for the "good old days." Moreover Ferré seems just as eager to pimp himself out to the lowest common denominator as any of his rivals. A review of his administration would be incomplete without recollecting his moral condemnation of the award-winning play Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All for You, or his nearly two-year crusade to "protect" Miami by keeping the Playboy Channel off the city's cable TV system -- even vowing to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court.
Less humorous is Ferré's long-time support of the notorious exile "patriot" Orlando Bosch; he even traveled to Venezuela to visit him in prison there in 1983. The Justice Department considers Bosch the mastermind behind numerous bomb attacks in Panama and Puerto Rico, a bazooka attack in Florida, as well as the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner -- an act that killed all 73 passengers onboard. Still, the midair death of the Cuban national fencing team is apparently a valiant blow against Castro in the eyes of el exilio, and singing Bosch's praises is a solid way to shore up exile votes. As the New York Times editorialized upon Bosch's release from a Miami prison in 1990, "in the name of fighting terrorism, the United States sent the Air Force to bomb Libya and the Army to invade Panama. Yet now the Bush administration coddles one of the hemisphere's most notorious terrorists. And for what reason? The only one evident is currying favor in South Florida." It's a lesson in shameless politicking Ferré knows well.
Given all this, one continues to wonder why so many otherwise progressive-minded people have pledged their support to Ferré. Take these boosters aside and, after looking over their shoulders, they'll quietly tell you Ferré doesn't really believe all the things he says. When he declared he was "morally offended" by Prince's songs, he was just being a realist -- moral outrage goes down well with the voters. Most important, Ferré's fans add, he's the only candidate who's not literally insane. And isn't it about time the city had a mayor who wasn't nuts?
That's a hard point to argue with. But it's also a telling comment on the future of Miami that a clean bill of mental health is the chief qualification for holding its highest office. Clearly, as Miami Beach prepares for life during wartime, it's on its own.