At about noon on Tuesday, April 21, Carlos Rolon tried to wake his mother Vivian, who had been sleeping on a mattress in the kitchen of his Hialeah apartment. Carlos became alarmed when she didn’t open her eyes. He held his ear to her chest and thought he heard a…

You invent a new product, it sells wildly, and you’re a millionaire. It’s the American dream. It’s America Vaughan’s dream. Vaughan is an Orlando housewife and artist who has invented a soft drink called Havana Cola, a key lime-flavor cola now sold in several Miami-area stores and restaurants. After making…

On a recent Saturday afternoon about two dozen people and a well-mannered yellow Lab gathered in a courtyard in Miami’s Design District. Most owned homes in the nearby neighborhood of Buena Vista and they’d come to discuss mundane issues such as trash pickup, beautification, and code compliance. But the underlying…

Since the beginning of this year, Vivian Rolon’s living space has shrunk from a two-bedroom apartment to a motel room to a tiny corner of her son’s kitchen floor. That is where she lives right now: on a doubled mattress in front of a television. On top of the TV…

This past week Inoelia Remy Yautiel, an unassuming woman with implacable resolve, visited Miami to speak about things unheard of by most Americans. Remy periodically travels from her native Dominican Republic to address radio and television audiences, academic workshops, and anyone else who’ll listen. Remy’s life is her story. It’s…

At odd moments faint smells from the streets of Bangkok come back to George Petrie — pollution from gasoline engines, meat roasting on spits, sweat, overripe fruit. Whether the fleeting odors have clung to his clothes and hair or whether they’re purely remembered, Petrie can’t tell. A pervading despair has…

For 40 years Goodwill Industries of South Florida has been earning the community’s goodwill by putting disabled people to work, even those with severe physical, mental, or emotional handicaps. Under a federal vocational rehabilitation program, the agency provided counseling, training, and employment to 2100 impaired Miami-Dade County residents this past…

Miraflores Viejo is just barely a town — no stores or telephones, not much more than about 70 wood-frame houses on either side of a narrow asphalt highway that connects the small farming communities in the northern part of Cuba’s Ciego de Avila province. Traveling to Miraflores Viejo isn’t a…

It was just a few weeks ago that the Clinton administration nominated a new chairman for the board that oversees Radio Marti. The president also announced increased efforts to make the shortwave U.S. government station more widely heard. But the news is not all good. New Times has obtained a…

Ronald Hayes likes to refer to it as “my third war.” There was World War II, Korea, and now there’s Miami Beach’s North Shore Open Space Park. Tall, thin, and slightly stooped, Hayes strides along a paved park trail that winds through sea grapes and pines toward the beachfront dunes…

Saturday nights usually start off low-key at the Elks Lodge on SW Eleventh Avenue in Homestead; members check in a few at a time at the front door, then find seats at cloth-covered tables in the cavernous banquet room. A disc jockey spins soul selections from the Seventies and Eighties,…

The first edition of a new Miami magazine hit the streets in December. Literally. Homeless people are selling the monthly publication, called StreetSmarts, and pocketing 60 cents on the dollar price. The cover features a derelict Santa with a cigarette dangling from his mouth; inside are articles about poverty and…

Tonight’s waning half-moon doesn’t soften the darkness enveloping the warehouses and abandoned factories in Allapattah’s produce district. This darkness is a flat ambient gloom that settles over moldering industrial areas where streetlights are burned out or dismantled by crack addicts in search of metal parts to use or sell. The…

Chris Dundee’s death on November 16 was not a surprise, but it was an event that his family, friends, and admirers fervently wished could have been postponed. Boxing professionals revered Dundee as a symbol of an era they had mourned for years: the sport’s best days, when they caught its…

This past September Florida International University’s International Media Center issued a rather critical evaluation of the programming at Radio Marti. A panel of five journalists associated with the center listened to about twenty hours of taped programs. Two weeks ago New Times published the FIU summary report; it describes widespread…

There’s something about a photograph taken last year in Washington, D.C., that recalls images from the civil rights movement of the Fifties and Sixties. Against the backdrop of the Capitol dome, twenty or so people cluster behind a podium and a bank of microphones. Among them are U.S. Rep. Carrie…

It’s in. The first independent study of Radio Marti programming since a new director started revamping the place about eighteen months ago. And it’s not pretty. American taxpayers are spending $13 million per year on broadcasts that frequently lack professionalism, objectivity, and balance, according to an evaluation by five journalists…

Used-car salesmen are not among the world’s best-loved professionals. But employees of Anthony Auto Sales, a small dealership on Le Jeune Road and East Eighth Street in Hialeah, face a special brand of animosity. Carlos Barroso regularly stands in his yard or on the roof of his house across the…

Coral Gables photographer George Alexander is out of town. His attorney says he’s probably on one of his regular photography expeditions to other continents. But the lights are definitely on at Alexander’s studio on Alhambra Circle, and not the kind of lights that appeal to the leaders of this sedate,…

Night and day a tall white candle flickers like a holy flame on top of the big television and VCR in Maria Gonzalez’s den. A black doll in a lacy white dress — representing la Virgen de la Caridad, the mulatta patroness of Cuba — sits propped between the candle…

The dove-gray Sugar Hill housing complex on NW Fourteenth Court is bordered by tall metal fences. A security guard watches over it 24 hours a day. Yet some of the windows are broken and appliances have been looted from unoccupied apartments. Aluminum railings along walkways are rusted at their joints…

No one expected that Radio Marti’s relocation to Miami from Washington would go smoothly. Since its creation in 1983, the short-wave station, which beams its broadcasts to Cuba, has been a controversial pull toy, tugged at one end by Washington and the other by Miami’s Cuban exile community, principally businessman…