Pedro Blanco can relate to Anthony T. Rossi, the founder of the Tropicana orange juice company. Rossi immigrated to Florida from Italy, penniless, with a burning desire to succeed in business. Through hard work, his original fruit packing and gift box company grew into the world’s largest producer of fresh…
Winston Noe Curtis always wanted to learn about law enforcement. And for the past seven months the 24-year-old Nicaraguan immigrant, whose goal is to become a police officer, has been getting an education in the vagaries of Dade’s legal system — albeit a very slow one. Last August 2, Curtis…
Some people on the Miami River call the Rex Bear the voodoo ship. A 40-year-old steel-hull freighter, it glided up from Cap-Haitien, Haiti, in 1990 and never left. Over the past seven years, it has become a wandering ghost haunting the river, unable to find refuge. Just recently, on the…
Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton got their manly fill at the Royal Raccoon Lodge (while Alice and Trixie waited in their Brooklyn tenements). Archie Bunker, Barney, and Munson ingratiated themselves at the Knights of Columbus Lodge (while Jefferson went to a club for his “own kind”). Fred Flintstone and Barney…
Two weeks ago the New Times story “They Owe It All to Odio” addressed the issue of the City of Miami’s practice of hiring so-called unclassified and temporary employees. The lion’s share of these workers, who bypassed the city’s civil-service hiring procedures, were brought onboard by Cesar Odio before the…
Info: Dig This Ronald Esserman didn’t want his boat hitting bottom. Now the auto tycoon and his top-flight contractors are going to get spanked. By Sean Rowe After years of hard work and philanthropy, auto dealer and arts patron Ronald Esserman decided to build what could fairly be described as…
Info: Glorious & Notorious Casablanca had Rick’s; Vegas had the Stardust; Miami’s cocaine jazz age had the decadent Mutiny Hotel By Sean Rowe Dig the scene, little sister: Burton Goldberg, owner, standing in the back doorway of the members-only Mutiny Club, canary-yellow kerchief in his breast pocket, eyes scanning the…
Luis Munoz Marin Amphitheater in San Juan, Puerto Rico, has an official capacity of 5000. But more than 6000 fans flooded the house January 30 for the farewell concert of the Cuban group Los Van Van’s first-ever U.S. tour. From the initial clap of the clave rhythm, the fifteen-member band…
Before Israel Sardinas abandoned his bandmates and fled his country in 1983, he sometimes dreamed of what his new life would be like if he were to leave Cuba. He would have his own orchestra, a contemporary charanga band that would play the songs he was always writing in his…
Twenty students hunched over their computer keyboards or slumped at their desks on a recent Saturday afternoon in Brenda Feldman’s newspaper class. They were preparing articles for February’s edition of Highlights, the monthly Coral Gables Senior High School newspaper, which would be published February 27. Staff writer Kurt Panton labored…
Felicia Lopez’s household economy was a matter of simple math. On a good day she could earn $21 picking buckets of tomatoes at a farm in South Dade. Her husband, who works faster and picks green beans, sometimes could bring home as much as $66. Together they made enough to…
Info: They Owe It All to Odio Miami’s infamous ex-city manager hired more than 100 staffers entirely at his own discretion. Guess who’s paying them. By Robert Andrew Powell Ramon Conte prides himself on his toughness. The Cuban exile and Bay of Pigs veteran endured 25 years in Fidel Castro’s…
Nina Betancourt strolls toward the skeleton of an unfinished house in an unfinished development called Jordan Commons, located in a community north of Homestead named Princeton. Once the site of the largest and most ambitious low-income housing project ever undertaken by any chapter of Habitat for Humanity, Jordan Commons now…
Col. Terry L. Rice of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers appears to have — as they say in wildlife documentaries — no natural predators. This is particularly surprising considering that he sits at the center of the complicated and highly politicized Everglades restoration effort. As the commander of the…
If this were a movie, the scene would be enshrouded in a haunting predawn fog, burning cigarettes the brightest source of light. The reality is that the sun is already up and the sky is clear. And nobody happens to be smoking. The atmosphere, however, is not without some Hollywood-style…
For the past ten years Howard Kaufman has devoted his extra time and money to kids in Miami Beach. He taught tennis to children whose parents couldn’t afford private lessons, teenagers who hung out at North Shore Park after school, and recent immigrants moving into the neighborhood near 73rd Street…
Anyone who wants an illustration of the incongruity of human settlement in Miami need only look as far as La Gorce Country Club the day after a heavy rainfall. To see the posh club’s fastidiously manicured eighteen-hole golf course a couple of feet under water is to realize that despite…
Robert Joffee, veteran journalist turned much-quoted pollster and civic activist, was on a tear. Determined to improve the quality of public education, he zeroed in on a school close to home — Miami Springs Middle School. From friends and neighbors he had heard chilling tales of hallway holdups, bathroom muggings,…
In the farming region of Melena del Sur, about 40 miles southeast of Havana, Dionisia grew up in a family of thirteen. Her people lived richly off the land, the livestock, and the hearth. Domestic life, especially cooking, was the order and the joy of the day. It was while…
One night each week, three Cuban exiles make their way through a tall gate and the cluttered, overgrown yard of a house in Westchester. They file past a long table stacked with pamphlets and papers in what used to be the living room, then down a hallway and into a…
The caller on the phone to the Cuban embassy in Madrid informs the receptionist, in lovely lisping Castilian Spanish, that she’s trying to reach Cuba’s foreign minister, Roberto Robaina, who has been in Spain on a state visit. “I’m calling for the Royal Galician Association of Dwarves,” explains the caller…
Not only is Miami a sanctuary for con artists, mobsters, and hit men, it is a well-documented haven for such ne’er-do-wells. For years nonfiction chroniclers like John Rothchild and T.D. Allman, along with innumerable novelists, have vividly detailed the hazards of life on the edge of the Everglades. Miami, as…
