Maybe you know somebody like Danny Donovan. A nice guy, an overgrown kid, really, with an ingratiating personality and an unfortunate tendency to run with the wrong crowd. Somebody who always seems to get into trouble, somebody who has a knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong…
This past summer Elio Rojas had a little problem: two cars and only one driveway. It was possible, of course, to park both cars in the same driveway, but that was an inconvenience, an inconvenience Rojas figured he could do without. So Rojas, president of Miami’s influential Latin Quarter Association,…
Nowhere is the vitriol between Cuban exiles in Miami and supporters of Fidel Castro on the island more palpable than in the Spanish-language media. Radio stations and newspapers here regularly refer to Castro as “El Verdugo,” the executioner. Granma, the official Communist Party daily newspaper, refers to exiles as “the…
The wrinkled Puerto Rican men sucking on their Budweiser longnecks stare over from the crumbling stoop, wondering what planet this group dropped in from: a red sports car with two guys who look more West Kendall than Wynwood, two mutts scrambling out of the back seat. The dogs slow, stop,…
Carmen Caldwell didn’t flinch when acting Hialeah Mayor Julio Martinez fired her in January as the city police department’s coordinator for community relations and Citizens Crime Watch. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll do the job for free.” But donating up to twelve hours of her time each day apparently made his…
Six years ago, when Bill Barrere and other dedicated volleyball players went looking for a game on Miami Beach, they had just one choice: 85th Street. The location at the northern edge of the city was inconvenient, and the meager facilities (just two courts) often meant long waits for a…
At the northeast corner of Grand Avenue and Douglas Road stands the hulking, vacant Tikki Club bar, in its heyday the scene of shootings, stabbings, and frequent drug busts. After a half-dozen years of disputes and delays, plans are under way to turn the site into “Goombay Plaza,” an open-air,…
Mary Dixon didn’t think much about it when her brother, Hosea Wilcox, wandered off after they’d argued in front of her neatly kept Allapattah home. He’ll be back in a little while, she thought. After all, the 73-year-old Wilcox had a habit of coming and going from the pink, two-bedroom…
At the northeast corner of Grand Avenue and Douglas Road stands the hulking, vacant Tikki Club bar, in its heyday the scene of shootings, stabbings, and frequent drug busts. After a half-dozen years of disputes and delays, plans are under way to turn the site into “Goombay Plaza,” an open-air,…
Blue-black clouds rumbled overhead as Leonardo Selis and Ricardo de Jongh sifted through the tattered sheets of canvas, torn burlap sacks, half-filled inner tubes, and rusted iron pipe strewn about the front yard of a house in a working-class West Dade neighborhood. Against the side of the small house, three…
Chris, a 33-year-old transvestite hooker with drowsy hazel eyes and a coiffed copper hairdo, looks up from his game of solitaire. “Why am I here?” he asks. “This is where I like it best.” Chris’s possessions – clothing, shoes, a silk robe, a purse, plates, cooking pans, several teddy bears…
Do you have what it takes to embark on a new career in the highly skilled field of zoning administration? You might possess the special aptitude required to decipher zoning codes and blueprints, to distinguish a C-1 from an R-1 at a glance, to rule on whether a project requires…
“Some of his decisions are not popular, but they are correct. Others are simply wrong. But he must have been given the authority to make those decisions or he wouldn’t be making them. Obviously he’s doing what someone higher wants done, or someone else would be in his position.” An…
“We nuked it, is what happened,” says Capt. Jim Ratican, gesturing from the wood-paneled pilothouse of the Miami River tug Big Al toward the SW Second Avenue bridge. The battered southern span of the bridge, out of commission since December, when it was struck by the Panamanian freighter Rio Miami…
As any political satirist knows, an impressive array of enemies is at least as important for success as legions of supporters. Alberto Gonzalez revels in his enemies’ list. Not everyone in his hall of shame is a politician, even though Gonzalez asserts, “With very few exceptions, all the politicians I…
TITO HERNANDEZ: This is Tito Hernandez speaking. These are the headlines of today’s most important news, which we offer you in this edition of El Noticiero La Mogolla, the hottest radio news program in Miami, the capital of el exilio. ORLANDO RAMOS: The public is astonished by the scandal of…
Often confused with “pirate” radio stations, which are usually music oriented, clandestine broadcasts differ considerably, both in content and purpose. In Clandestine Radio Broadcasting, published in 1987 and considered by students and hobbyists to be the Bible of the business, authors Lawrence Soley and John Nichols define clandestine radio as…
Alert! Alert! Look well at the rainbow. The fish will rise very soon. Chico is in the house. Visit him…. The fish is red. Radio Swan, a clandestine CIA radio station, broadcasting to Cuba on April 17, 1961, the day of the Bay of Pigs invasion Doctor Diego Medina knew…
The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations. Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities On the red-brick sidewalks of Flagler Street, that downtown paradise of low-cost plunder, shoppers -…
Blue-black clouds rumbled overhead as Leonardo Selis and Ricardo de Jongh sifted through the tattered sheets of canvas, torn burlap sacks, half-filled inner tubes, and rusted iron pipe strewn about the front yard of a house in a working-class West Dade neighborhood. Against the side of the small house, three…
