Biting operating losses, the Miami Herald will close its award-winning and much-loved Sunday magazine, Tropic, after 31 years. For the final issue next month, executive editor Tom Shroder chose a simple but classy idea: Commission some of the stars of Tropic-past like Carl Hiaasen, Madeleine Blais, and Gene Weingarten to…
In a sterile white conference room on the second floor of the Department of Justice building in downtown Miami, about 80 Opa-locka residents are gathered: old ladies in floral-print dresses, pastors in suits, and police officers in short-sleeve, midnight-blue uniforms. A serious-looking black man in a dark suit, white shirt,…
It is a humid fall afternoon when close to 5000 Cuban Americans gather for the 1998 march of patriotic intransigence. Toward the front of the procession is a flatbed truck carrying a bell, a replica of the one Cubans struck 130 years ago on the very same date, October 10,…
In October a Miami Beach code compliance officer cited the chamber of commerce for a problem with its buildings. “I went out and looked at what he was talking about,” says chamber president Bruce Singer. “It had to do with peeling paint, a small spot that could be fixed with…
Every autumn those plumed, pink-pated carpetbaggers known as turkey vultures dutifully return to the steely ziggurat atop the Miami-Dade County Courthouse in downtown Miami. And every year the Miami Herald dutifully announces their return, usually in flourishes of florid prose. But this year the vultures came and the Herald didn’t…
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…
Five miles west of the ocean, 2,000 vendors show up long before sunrise to sell everything from pig snouts to home mortgages.
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…
By the time Black Cherry has persuaded the manager of Coco’s strip club to give her a two-hour break, hopped in a limo, and zoomed the few miles to the WEDR studios, she is nearly twenty minutes late. “Black Cherry, where you been?” growls radio talk show host Luther Campbell,…
On the kind of glorious Saturday afternoon that makes absolute sense out of living in South Florida, the riverside tables at Big Fish Mayaimi are filled with lazy diners relishing sunshine and fried fish. Despite the fine weather, the restaurant’s tin-roof indoor dining room is buzzing with activity. Miami’s cultural…
On a cloudy, gusty July afternoon the trawler Calanus is plowing eastward through a light chop in the Gulf Stream about five miles east of Key Biscayne. In shorts, white T-shirt, orange life jacket, and blue helmet, Jim Post stands astern, bare feet against the wooden planks of the deck…
In the golden glow of an October evening, several dozen opera aficionados chat politely as they queue for a much-heralded engagement. These connoisseurs of Gesamtkunstwerk, “the total art form,” as Richard Wagner called opera, have traveled great distances to see a radical new staging of Cavalleria Rusticana (Rustic Chivalry), the…
How could a baseball team in a major media market win the World Series and lose $34 million? The owner of the Florida Marlins, H. Wayne Huizenga, claims that’s just what his team did last year. He hoped that his proclamation of penury would shame Broward and Miami-Dade counties into…
This is a story about a baseball man. His name is Lou Haneles. He’s 82 years old, lives along a canal in Kendale Lakes, and is married to a lovely woman named Evelyn. Back in the old days he possessed strong arms and reflexes so quick he could hit a…
All those in favor of A-4 say ‘Aye,'” drawled Miami-Dade County School Board Chairman Solomon Stinson. “Aye,” chorused six of the seven board members present at the April 15 school board meeting. “Those who oppose have the same right,” Stinson said. “Aye,” piped up Betsy Kaplan. “A-4 is passed,” Stinson…
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…
This is the main reason I haven’t been able to sell the house, this room here,” Ardell Morton explains as she enters the master bathroom of her house at 168 NE 44th St. in Miami. It looks bombed out. Rough concrete reveals where a sink used to be. Wire from…
In the art galleries and studios of Havana this past summer, “ASU” was the word on just about every artist’s lips. They weren’t parsing it out in three crisp letters, says a recent visitor to Cuba. They were exhaling it in a whoosh that sounded like a sneeze: Ah-soo! Ah-soo!…
The electronic message that flashed across staff computers at the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald on the morning of Tuesday, August 4, created an instant stir throughout the papers’ bayside headquarters. The tersely worded missive announced a meeting for all employees of the Miami Herald Publishing Company, set for…
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…
One afternoon last June, Monica Arana picked up her six-year-old son Clark from kindergarten at Palm Springs North Elementary School in north Miami-Dade. The boy showed her a coloring book, which he said a teacher had given him. The title was I Survived the Divorce Monster. Arana, who at the…
Four teenagers are gathered around a table in the north Miami-Dade studio of WAXY-AM (720). Each perches before a fuzzy black microphone as the music of Big Pun fades from overhead speakers. An illuminated “ON AIR” sign announces that a broadcast is under way. “Welcome to Teen Live Wire,” host…
