The premise of the meeting on the evening of January 13 seemed simple enough. Miami officials hoped the gathering on the second floor of the Coconut Grove Convention Center would provide a forum for Grove residents and board members of the Land Trust of Dade County to share information. But…
The saga of Elian Gonzalez, the Cuban boy plucked from the sea at the end of the Twentieth Century, continues to transfix the United States and Cuba. Today, following their honeymoon in Acapulco, Elian and his new bride moved into the married-students’ apartments at UCLA, which has awarded him a…
“Herald Retreats from Spotlight” could have been the headline for a story that appeared on the Miami Herald’s Website February 6, disappeared for a week, then reappeared in the print edition February 13. The lengthy weekend piece by staff writer Tyler Bridges described Miami Mayor Joe Carollo’s “hunkering down” and…
A thin man with a round, weathered face and a pair of gold, oval, wire-rimmed glasses resting precariously on the tip of his nose prepares to speak before the Miami-Dade County Commission. Because he is more than six feet tall, he towers above the microphone, and his words come across…
At the entrance to the Little Havana street where kindergartner Elian Gonzalez currently resides, two Porta Pottis stand ready to accommodate the press and crowds that regularly throng the block. On one an enterprising media member has tacked a sign that reads, “Welcome to Camp Elian.” Almost anyone watching television…
In 1997 the Hialeah Police Department hired as officers a convicted car thief and a man rejected by the City of Miami Police Department as a result of admitted steroid use. Somehow the background checks Hialeah conducted did not uncover this information. In a sworn statement, Hialeah Police Chief Rolando…
Thanks to the Elian Gonzalez saga, things in las dos Havanas are becoming surreal. In Little Havana reporters spend hours waiting for a six-year-old kid to wheel by on a bicycle, and tourists pose for photos in front of the home where he is staying. Across the Florida Straits, Fidel…
Nat Wilcox is the nemesis of gay Miami. He’s shown up regularly at public meetings in recent weeks to badger officials into overturning the county’s gay-rights amendment. And he is the mouthpiece for a homophobic bunch called Families Strengthening Communities for the Good Life. But that’s not all. Wilcox also…
In an obscure corner of the Port of Miami, a floodlight haze surrounds a huge tiki hut, where two men from a faraway land sit at a picnic table and contemplate their so-called lives. Directly before them tennis players swat balls on an illuminated court and nearby, dance music blasts…
After four days of looping around the Caribbean, the Carnival Cruise Lines ship Fascination eased into its berth at Port Canaveral, Florida, on the morning of July 23, 1998. Legions of flushed, sunburned tourists descended the gangplank, luxuriating, no doubt, in the last few hours of their tropical escape before…
In September 1992 Rep. Gene Taylor, a Mississippi Democrat, stepped out of his congressional office. He was on his way to the Capitol to vote for a bill that would restrict so-called cruises to nowhere (gambling trips outside the three-mile limit of American territorial waters) to U.S.-flagged ships. Taylor had…
Here’s a quiz in which both long-time residents and recent arrivals can test their civic knowledge of Miami. What can you call all of the following city-owned properties: a waste dump, a boat ramp, a shopping mall, a sewer plant, and a cemetery? (Hint: If you are a newcomer, remember…
Che Guevara was not the reason I took the Number 13 train from Havana to Santa Clara, Cuba, though it’s true Guevara is buried in Santa Clara, along with 23 of his comrades in arms, all of whom died 32 years ago in a quest to spread Cuba’s communist revolution…
It was an oak gone bad. It was going to pay. The dirt-ball tree was going down. Oh, sure, it was beautiful — too beautiful. Unprincipled, unwashed humans gathered beneath its branches at NE 80th Terrace and Third Avenue, behind a strip mall. Lowlifes sought shade under the wide, welcoming…
Lack of institutional control. The phrase regularly appears on the sports pages, usually to describe a college athletic program run amok. In 1995, after the hammer fell on the rogue University of Miami football program, the NCAA reprimanded school leaders for their “lack of institutional control.” Ditto for Notre Dame…
We always begin with a cheer. The referee, waiting to drop the puck at center ice, refers to it as the rah-rah shit, as in “Go do your rah-rah shit so we can start this game.” The cheer is a relic from the serious, organized, desperately important sporting events we…
On a warm Friday morning in mid-December, the local Work and Gain Economic Self-Sufficiency (WAGES) coalition held its monthly meeting at Miami-Dade Community College’s downtown Wolfson Campus. The troubled agency’s mission is to ease program participants off welfare and into the work force, a transition that has been rocky at…
The scene outside Elian Gonzalez’s Little Havana home was rather subdued this past Saturday afternoon. A few network news crews and photographers staked out the house from a neighbor’s yard, huddled around a television set atop a milk crate, watching the NFL playoff game between the Washington Redskins and the…
The erection of a large, pink, ugly thing in plain view of Miami city offices is provoking disgust and outrage among some neighbors and city officials. “I’m looking at it right now,” exclaims Assistant City Manager John Lindsay, peering out his tenth-story window atop the glimmering Riverside Center. The offending…
Remember Danny Couch, who was creamed in his 1995 run for Miami mayor? Well, he sure is lucky when it comes to cash. On December 5 the City of Miami Beach sent Couch, a midlevel public-works employee and union steward, the following correspondence: “Dear Mr. Couch: An error was made…
Off South Dixie Highway in Naranja, down at the southern end of Miami-Dade County, is the winter home of a low-rent traveling carnival. On a football-size field, amusement rides in spiral shapes and bright colors stand jumbled together in various states of disrepair. A row of buses and the trucks…
Sign of impending apocalypse on the brink of the millennium, or cheery reminder of the redemptive power of incarceration? Interpret this omen how you will, but its significance speaks for itself: At a sidewalk table at Rosinella’s restaurant on Lincoln Road in late November, Miami Beach Commissioner Simon Cruz had…
