Three months ago Riptide reported that the Starlite Hotel on Ocean Drive was under investigation for bilking its employees. Now ex-Starlite employees say the hotel has finally coughed up the cash.”We got paid,” says Noah Bassham, who worked at the hotel’s restaurant for six months…
Anyone who has ever insured anything — a car, a house, or, if you’re J.Lo, a sumptuously rotund rump — knows that insurance companies are about as trustworthy as automobile salesmen: You had better read the fine print lest the deal come back to kick you in the junk. As…
They are all but nameless, at least for now. Of the 27 Haitians deported to Port-au-Prince late last month by the Obama administration, only one’s name has been publicly released — and that was because he died shortly after arriving back in Haiti.Nonetheless, the January 22 death of 34-year-old Wildrick…
Between sobs, Haitian-American Claudine Magloire accused the U.S. government of responsibility in the death of her late fiancé, Wildrick Guerrier.Guerrier was deported to Haiti on January 20 despite complaining of stomach pains. He died two days later.”They are the cause of my husband’s death,” Magloire said during a press conference…
Trinity Church smells like a high school locker room: all sweat and perfume. It’s Tuesday night and at least 1,000 young Miamians — Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans, African-Americans, and Caucasians — are packed into a low-slung concert hall for a weekly event called “The Rendezvous,” or simply “The Vous.” The scene…
Jaime Bayly’s Mega TV studio is a sparse, alien world. A pair of solitary white chairs sits on a slightly elevated stage. Two freshly poured glasses of water, sweating under the spotlights, are placed on a tiny table. The talk show star’s last name is spelled out in giant, glowing…
Roughly a week before Florida was set to exhaust all funding for its life-saving AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP), non-profit pharmacy Welvista has agreed to help the cash-strapped state by providing poor Floridians with free anti-retroviral medications.As we wrote last week, the funding snafu threatened to disrupt treatment for over…
Every time Peruvian talk show host Jaime Bayly’s life starts to settle down, things go haywire.When he made it big in Peru, Alberto Fujimori staged an autogolpe. As soon as he moved to Colombia, secret police warned him Hugo Chávez had allegedly hired assassins to kill him. And last fall,…
So you go to church every Christmas and Easter, do you? Or perhaps you dress up in your Sunday best and tag along with grandma once a month. Maybe you even go every week, although the fact that you’re reading Riptide suggests otherwise.Well, sorry to break it you but your…
Florida’s AIDS Drug Assistance Program (ADAP) runs out in two weeks. The problem is, new funding doesn’t kick-in until April. That shortfall has left legislators and activists scrambling to secure extra funds to keep anti-retroviral medication flowing to the Sunshine State’s 10,600 ADAP recipients.But even if Florida plugs the funding…
The scene behind Casablanca Hotel on Collins Avenue at 63rd Street seems normal enough at first. South American tourists meander from the patio to the beach, smoking cigarettes. An octogenarian wheezes while asking for help retrieving a nose plug from the bottom of the pool. But something is amiss. Suddenly,…
According to his agents, 18-year-old Cuban baseball prodigy Yasiel Balaguer will have his second tryout with a Major League Team this week when scouts for the Seattle Mariners watch the right-handed pelotero in action here in Miami.”I was on the Cuban youth national team, but I realized that once I…
By now, it’s well established that the New World Center is a pretty kick-ass piece of architecture. Frank Gehry’s latest work has enchanted critics the world over with its restrained exterior and bizarrely beautiful, white-washed interior.But are we the only ones who think the concert hall itself is… um… a…
After several years of construction and more than a few public spats over the project, the New World Center is now officially open for business in Miami Beach. The futuristic building will house the New World Symphony, headed by conductor Michael Tilson Thomas.Thomas’ former babysitter, famed architect Frank Gehry, was…
Since when did Miami become the Guantánamo Bay Prison of the animal kingdom? First there were puppy mills in Liberty City, then outrage over questionable conditions at Miami-Dade Animal Services. Now even the formerly pet-friendly streets of Miami Beach are looking menacing for anything on four legs. According to animal…
Yesterday, Rick Scott fired up the ol’ Interwebs and announced his first inaugural “Twitter Town Hall.” Surprise, surprise! He’s just as evasive 140 characters at a time as he is in real time.Even still, the event was going just fine for the fledgling governor until one Tweeter called him a…
George N. Gibson has a dream. That one day all Miamians — gay and straight, HIV-positive and -negative, black and white — will attend church together in old timey clothes, speak directly to the Lord, wash one another’s feet during Communion, and play music on wooden washboards.Now that dream has…
John “Jack” B. Thompson, the Coral Gables attorney disbarred in 2008 for — among other things — sending swastikas, gay porn, and pictures of gavel-wielding kangaroos to the state supreme court, is now changing careers.Thompson, who once scrapped with Miami rap group 2 Live Crew over its lyrics and campaigned…
Sometimes Riptide feels as if it’s talking to itself. Like Brad Pitt in 12 Monkeys, we yell at people about all the crazy crap going on around us but to little avail.So imagine our surprise when we flipped open this morning’s New York Times to find the Gray Lady opining…
On a sweltering June afternoon, the sun beats down on a dingy faux-Frank Lloyd Wright house in upscale Pinecrest. A jungle of untrimmed trees and plants chokes the yard. Inside, half-packed boxes clog the rooms and hallways. Ancient Etruscan statues and Greek artifacts that once lined the walls are gone…
At 4:53 p.m. this afternoon, the church bells of St. Mary’s Cathedral will ring out over Little Haiti and the rest of Miami. Sadly, the occasion won’t be a wedding but the remembrance of the deadly 7.0 earthquake that killed 300,000 Haitians exactly one year ago.As part of the commemoration,…
For 44 years, Jack Horkheimer was the face of the Miami Museum of Science and Planetarium. With his quirky five-minute Star Gazer spots on WPBT2, he was also an avuncular TV host beloved by children across the country.But this week’s metro reveals a side of the late astronomer never before…
