Conspicuous white spaces and thick strands of loose picture wire evidence the absence of some of the artworks that usually hang in the high-walled, sunlit living room of Carlos and Rosa de la Cruz’s spacious Key Biscayne home. Two paintings — Star Gazer, by the Mexican modernist Rufino Tamayo, and…
After decades of precarious voyages across the Florida Straits, madcap raids against Cuba, and relentless lobbying in Washington, D.C., Cuban exiles have gradually become known as a people that puts its money where its mouth is. The depth of el exilio’s passion for freedom and a liberated Cuba has cowed…
After ten successful years in the Miami city attorney’s office — first as an assistant city attorney, then as the chief deputy, followed by four years as the city attorney — Jorge Fernandez abruptly quit in 1991. He and his wife pulled their three children out of school, packed up…
On Tuesday, February 7, Miami-Dade Water and Sewer Department director Anthony Clemente will stand before the Dade County Commission and present this good news: County negotiators have settled the nineteen-month-old federal lawsuit concerning Dade’s decrepit sewer system. But before the commissioners leap up, join arms, and dance merrily, they may…
Richard Zeeman is scowling again. He’s been doing that a lot recently. Business is bad. Three days a week (down from six when demand for Zeeman’s services peaked in 1989) he leaves his North Miami office at noon (Zeeman used to leave an hour or two earlier) and piles into…
West Palm Beach-based Prison Connection transports relatives and friends of inmates to many of Florida’s state prisons.
A City of Miami police officer is under investigation following a complaint filed by an assistant city attorney. The charge against the officer: lobbying on behalf of a Miami businessman. No one would have thought twice about it except that the businessman, Orlando Mesa, also happens to be the officer’s…
The U.S. Supreme Court might have had someone like Greg Scharf in mind when it made this observation regarding the First Amendment: “The problem of drawing the line between a purely commercial activity and a religious one will at times be difficult.” Indeed the controversy Scharf brought to Coconut Grove…
Fredgie is colorful and funny like a clown; profound and pure like Chaplin! And as both of them Fredgie is a melancholic character — a poem by Martha Gonzalez, personal assistant to Fredgie Fredgie would like the world to know how the whole Fredgie thing began. This requires slipping a…
Chemical water pollution lowers testosterone levels in male alligators.
This past December 4, the Miami Herald published a front-page story declaring South Florida “America’s Crime Capital.” “Dade County ranked first in total crime among the nation’s large metropolitan areas in 1993, according to FBI statistics released today,” reporters Dan Keating and Charles Strouse noted. Next to the article, a…
Forget about that oceanfront condominium on Collins Avenue your real estate agent assures you is a steal. Toss away the floor plan for that new split-level out west. The true real estate values in Dade lie in a more humble section of the county: Little Haiti. That’s where a select…
Mikey Dread has kept the reggae fires burning for almost 20 years.
If you lived where she lives, you might think the government was all wet, too.
I must have the Freedom Tower!” Don Gilbert is standing next to his dining-room table, which is piled high with the leaflets, photographs, and postcards that give voice to his dream of a campaign to promote peace and freedom. “If I get that tower, then I’ll be somebody, and people…
In August of last year, four Coconut Grove residents sued the City of Miami because they were unable to afford the “affordable” homes in the Grove’s new St. Hugh Oaks housing project. Last month they lost a crucial round in their fight, exposing them to a different sort of financial…
New Year’s Eve, amateur hour in the great pageant of nightlife.
“Good morning, thanks for calling X-isle surf report for Friday morning. Come by the shop, we’re open today, we’re getting lots of new things in, getting ready for the holidays. So don’t forget, make X-isle your place for Christmas shopping. As for the wind and waves, not much is happening…
The wiggy, wiggy world of Sixties surfer celluloid Not long into American International Pictures’ (AIP) 1965 Beach Blanket Bingo, aging silent-film comedian Buster Keaton and an ultrabuxom, bikini-clad beach babe take turns chasing each other back and forth over the sand, Keystone Kops-style, prompting a tanned, blandly handsome surfer boy…
Like a growing number of other young men in the Miami area, Capems Franaois has a taste for jet skis. In fact, police say, he liked one particular jet ski so much he stole it twice. By the time the cops chased him down, his alleged victims and pursuers were…
Aggro: uptight, aggressive Betty: girl Charger: fearless surfer who goes for big waves Epic: great, huge (epic waves) Grommet/gremmie: young or beginning surfer Kook: reckless beginner with wanton disregard for safety of other surfers Ripper/shredder: good surfer Snake: verb — to catch a wave when another person already is riding…
“Third Stone From the Sun,” the mostly instrumental, effects-laden, just-under-seven-minute meditation-from-the-outer-limits miniepic that appears on the Jimi Hendrix Experience’s brilliant 1967 debut, Are You Experienced? Jimi comes up for air after some swirly cosmic fuzz-box tripping to deliver a brief monologue in the voice of a merely-visiting-your-planet alien, capping it…
