They set out in two boats from the mangrove-lined islands near Sugarloaf Key on the morning of May 23, 1996. Two dolphins that had spent years in captivity were lying on layers of foam rubber aboard one of the vessels, shielded from the sun by a tentlike structure and cooled…

Danielle Romer doesn’t normally speak on the air, but this Saturday evening Yves Fontaine, the regular host of the Creole-language talk show she produces on WKAT-AM (1360), is indisposed. So she finds herself sitting at the control board with a mike and a telephone. Her too-big earphones are uncomfortable, and…

A press conference on the steps of Hialeah City Hall. An angry citizen railing against the mayor. Nothing remarkable in a town that has historically raised political intrigue to spectacular heights. But this press conference is unique even for Hialeah. Here under the palms on March 10, a journalist in…

Some people on the Miami River call the Rex Bear the voodoo ship. A 40-year-old steel-hull freighter, it glided up from Cap-Haitien, Haiti, in 1990 and never left. Over the past seven years, it has become a wandering ghost haunting the river, unable to find refuge. Just recently, on the…

One night each week, three Cuban exiles make their way through a tall gate and the cluttered, overgrown yard of a house in Westchester. They file past a long table stacked with pamphlets and papers in what used to be the living room, then down a hallway and into a…

The caller on the phone to the Cuban embassy in Madrid informs the receptionist, in lovely lisping Castilian Spanish, that she’s trying to reach Cuba’s foreign minister, Roberto Robaina, who has been in Spain on a state visit. “I’m calling for the Royal Galician Association of Dwarves,” explains the caller…

Rose Warner, a 34-year-old actress/ model and mother of two young boys, moved to South Florida about a year ago from a town just outside Houston, Texas. Looking for “that big break,” as she puts it, Warner went right to work finding an agent and networking with the glamour-industry elite…

Veteran Cuban exile journalist Agustin Tamargo opens his talk show on Radio Mambi this Monday afternoon as usual, by introducing his guests, who are seated around a long table that takes up most of a small studio. First is Mario Chanes de Armas, a wiry, white-haired man who in 1993…

To scores of other Dade County residents who’ve been fighting on the same fronts, a chronicle of Lucinda’s life for the past eight months sounds like deja vu. They’ve all been battling the AIDS virus; many are single parents, and more are struggling to stay drug- or alcohol-free. On top…

Info: Copping an Excuse Faced with evidence their cop shop is in disarray, town fathers practice some first-rate denial By Kathy Glasgow A ten-page report released Friday by the Dade State Attorney’s Office minces no words: The Surfside Police Department is “in disarray,” has suffered from “years of apparent mismanagement…

Call it the case of the purloined papers — 40 Sunday newspapers, mysteriously waylaid two and a half weeks ago on their way from London to Miami. No one seems to know exactly what happened to them, but dark allegations of a conspiratorial sequestration have elicited all manner of speculation…

What was perhaps the biggest disappointment in all of Diobelys Hurtado’s 24 years came in the spring of 1992, when the coach of Cuba’s powerhouse national boxing team told him he wouldn’t be going to Barcelona to compete in the Olympics. Though the elusive right-hander with the surprising left hook…

The men who wait every morning just east of the Palmetto Expressway know the routine. “Once a month,” says Carlos Sanchez, a broad-faced Managuan in a paint-spattered Calvin Klein T-shirt and sagging jeans, “a team of police come here and pick up a lot of people. They’re not in uniform,…

The half-block stretch on the north side of Bird Road beyond 68th Avenue is known as a gathering place for gay men, mostly young gay men. A windowless and signless bar that closed about six months ago is bounded by an adult bookstore on the west and a funeral home…

Rhaynetta Cheatham, AIDS outreach worker and often-acerbic advocate for victims of AIDS in Miami’s black community, died early this past Wednesday morning in the hospice unit of North Shore Hospital. The 40-year-old Cheatham had been diagnosed with HIV eleven years ago and had suffered from full-blown AIDS for about four…

The August meeting of the Sweetwater City Council has been called to order in the town’s cozy wood-paneled council chambers. TV cameras are trained on the dais, where the seven council members, the city attorney, the city clerk, the mayor, and the mayor’s lawyer sit. The meeting is getting under…

For a rare fifteen minutes, on-stage at the Club Tropigala in Miami Beach, the fabulous Julio Iglesias is actually taking questions by cellular phone. “What is the secret,” one caller inquires, “of your success with so many women?” The tanned and smiling singer pauses, smoothing the lapel of his tux…

Miguel Haddad’s Auto Diesel Service Plaza, way out on West Okeechobee Road in Hialeah Gardens, has been the trucker’s friend for 28 years now. The Citgo fuel pumps are open 24 hours a day. Drivers can take showers and naps, dine at the Mamma Mia restaurant, and have that oil…

The sun bores into your back as you trudge along the winding path to the gorilla cage at Monkey Jungle. Macaques scamper on wire mesh overhead, and the sweaty, almost human odor of gorilla wafts out among the whirling flies and gnats. And then you see three women lined up…

The sunlight this February afternoon is piercing and yellow, and a gusty wind shoves around the crumpled litter on NW Seventeenth Avenue, outside Mount Tabor Missionary Baptist Church. Cars fill the church’s back parking lot and line the rutted streets to the north and south. Men in dark suits and…

You might say Jorge Delara got a wild hair up his ass a few years back. A 35-year-old free-lance graphic artist who lives in Hialeah, Delara self-published a little pamphlet in 1993. Entitled The Book of Ass, it consisted of two dozen cartoon drawings illustrating English phrases that include the…