Daniel Budin set sail from Miami two weeks ago in his 110-year-old boat, Souqui. In about a month, if all goes according to plan, Budin and his five-man crew will have crossed the Atlantic, stopping over in the Azores before arriving at the picturesque seaside town of La Rochelle, France…

Part-time security guard Conraad Hoever, sitting at a counter inside a small, tile-roof guardhouse on NE 50th Street and Biscayne Boulevard, watches dispassionately as a vintage white Honda turns toward him. The car slows, stops, doubles back toward Biscayne, and then continues northward on the boulevard. There goes another one…

Richard Reckley, a registered nurse at the Turner Guilford Knight Detention Center medical clinic, says he waited three years before he got angry. Then he did something that might be considered traitorous: He started a fight with his labor union, the organization formed to protect his employment interests that survives…

The meeting had a lofty mission: to launch a committee to work on behalf of freedom of the press in Miami. It was early January 2000, and the gathering site was the Coral Gables office of the Community Media Council (CMC). This two-year-old nonprofit corporation has positioned itself as a…

Georges William, a Little Haiti businessman and property owner, received a $500 ticket from the City of Miami this past September. William was being fined, the ticket stated, for illegally dumping trash in front of a building he owned on NE 46th Street in Little Haiti. He was ordered to…

The ancient YAK-42 Cubana de Aviación jet lumbered loudly through heavy gray clouds on its way from Nassau to Havana. Belted into a worn seat in the chilly cabin, Fred Baldasare was already planning the press conference he would call when he arrived in Cuba late one afternoon this past…

It was an oak gone bad. It was going to pay. The dirt-ball tree was going down. Oh, sure, it was beautiful — too beautiful. Unprincipled, unwashed humans gathered beneath its branches at NE 80th Terrace and Third Avenue, behind a strip mall. Lowlifes sought shade under the wide, welcoming…

Che Guevara was not the reason I took the Number 13 train from Havana to Santa Clara, Cuba, though it’s true Guevara is buried in Santa Clara, along with 23 of his comrades in arms, all of whom died 32 years ago in a quest to spread Cuba’s communist revolution…

It’s just another storefront tucked in among the flea market, the wig shops, and the styling salons at Liberty City’s aging Northside Shopping Center on NW 79th Street and 27th Avenue. But the wares at this store, which has been open for about five months, are beauty supplies of a…

The Freedom Tower, Miami’s 75-year-old architectural landmark, is still beautiful. Its sixteen stucco stories, inspired by the Giralda bell tower in Seville, Spain, rise in decrepit elegance over Biscayne Bay. In its time the building, which sits on prime Biscayne Boulevard real estate near the new American Airlines Arena and…

Television Martí, the $9.4 million per year U.S. government station that broadcasts to Cuba, has been fighting for survival since its birth nine years ago. Fidel Castro’s regime has long jammed the signal so intensively that the station barely registers on Cuban viewership surveys. In the United States a congressional…

A lot has changed since the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) embarked on a legal jihad against the City of Miami on behalf of 5000 vagrants in 1988. Senior U.S. District Court Judge C. Clyde Atkins, whose ruling in Pottinger v. Miami created a national stir, has died. So have…

There is a certain type of drug trafficker who doesn’t fit the popular image. These dealers aren’t rich and don’t live large. They’re underground outlaws who usually look more bedraggled than menacing. They are indigent AIDS patients who sell their sophisticated and costly HIV medications on the street for cash…

Francis O’Keefe is educated, erudite, and eloquent. He also has been homeless for the past twenty years. Recently the gray-haired man with questioning blue eyes has found refuge in a park that surrounds the West Miami-Dade Regional Library in Westchester. The library regulars seem to like O’Keefe, who is sober,…

For five hours every Sunday morning, from seven o’clock until noon, Radio Continental broadcasts from a cramped closet at the back of the Acapulco Records and Video shop in Homestead. It’s the only time the city’s large Mexican and Central American populations hear their music on the radio: Los Tigres…

It should come as no surprise that Miami-Dade Commissioner Miriam Alonso has had a few problems lately with the upkeep of one of her many rental properties. Tenants have complained for years about poor conditions at several apartment buildings owned by Alonso and her husband Leonel. This time the Miami-Dade…

For anyone familiar with Caribbean music, the news might have seemed too good to be true: Kassav, the internationally famous band from Guadeloupe and creator of zouk party music, was coming to Miami. Kassav was to have been the headliner at a heavily advertised festival July 25 in Bicentennial Park…

The late-day sun makes the cracked streets and crumbling buildings of Overtown look faded and flattened out in the yellow light and hot dense air. With a deceptively casual glance, Miss Regina reads the groupings of men loitering 50 yards away on front steps and sidewalks along NW Fifteenth Street…

For a few days this month, a letter to Pres. Bill Clinton roused some excitement among those interested in Radio and TV Martí. The June 24 missive from Christopher Coursen, acting chairman of the President’s Advisory Board for Cuba Broadcasting (PAB), followed the release in June of a U.S. State…

At almost one o’clock on the dank, starless early morning of May 18, 1999, a half-dozen people are gathered at the studios of WOCN-AM (1450), a fenced-in box of a building along an unlighted stretch of warehouses on NE 71st Street near Third Avenue. The next four hours will see…

This past January the world’s first all-titanium guns debuted at the annual SHOT (Shooting, Hunting, and Outdoor Trade) show in Atlanta. The dramatic unveiling of the line of ultralightweight snub-nosed revolvers caused something of a sensation. “Jaws dropped across the floor of the exhibit hall,” is how technical editor Dick…

Life and death have played some excellent tricks on Jan Mapou. Of course, in Haiti, Mapou’s homeland, that isn’t so unusual: The trickster spirits of vodou go to and fro among the living, and zombies are dead and alive at the same time. Haitian art and music celebrate the capricious…