Every spring since 1963, South Florida painters, architects, writers, composers, and photographers of Cuban descent have joined their peers nationwide in bellying up to the Cintas Foundation’s prestigious cash bar. In recent years, eight to ten deserving artists working outside Cuba have been given $10,000 fellowships. Not this year, however…
He competed against bartenders who could pull flowers and live doves from bottles of champagne, toss flaming brandies in the air and catch them with one unscorched hand, concoct four arcane cocktails in 30 seconds, and recite on cue the ingredients of more than 100 blended drinks. Despite the stellar…
Seconds after the anchor chain tumbles into Biscayne Bay, two women on the sun deck strip down to thong bikinis and start lubing their bare breasts with coconut oil. A surfer dude in laser-green swim trunks cuts the air with a rebel yell and somersaults from the top of the…
The Hound of the Baskervilles would love the Old South Dade Dump. The overgrown landscape, hidden from the view of motorists traveling SW 248th Street, its northern boundary, resembles a lumpy, fogbound moor. It’s actually a smoldering, snake-infested bog stuffed with 900,000 tons of buried tires, household garbage, and chemical…
Staff writer Kirk Semple’s cover story “Mistaken Identity” has been chosen as a winner in the 43rd annual Unity Awards in Media contest, sponsored by Lincoln University of Missouri. This national competition recognizes media contributions that reflect issues affecting the rights and well-being of the handicapped and/or minorities. In competition…
Charles Intriago has cultivated his reputation as a crime fighter. Early in his career, as special counsel to then-Florida governor Reubin Askew, the attorney wrote a law that facilitated statewide inquiries into political corruption and organized crime. Later, as a federal prosecutor in Miami, he was responsible for the indictment…
This article was not conceived as a thorough computer-assisted analysis of South Florida wine lists. Thus, while an index of the wine lists compiled appears below, the tables that accompany this story do not single out restaurants by name. Their purpose is merely to illustrate the vast variation one is…
Chip Cassidy, wine director of Crown Wine Merchants and possibly the foremost wine retailer in the Southeast, tilts back in his favorite chair at his favorite table in his favorite restaurant. He raises his glass of 1990 Domaine Trimbach Riesling Cuvee Frederic Emile and swirls it gently, then lets his…
A Coconut Grove restaurateur faces life in the slammer for serving a certain illegal appetizer, one not featured on his menu. A real special. Let’s call it cocaine primavera. And you had to know just how to ask for it. Giovanni Tummolillo owned Cafe Sci Sci, a high-end Italian restaurant…
Ralph Heyndels is sipping an espresso outside the Miami Beach Books & Books on Lincoln Road, trying to explain the unlikely phenomenon occurring at the nearby Alliance Cinema. Largely at Heyndels’s behest, intellectuals from four continents have gathered to debate, discuss, and dissect the idea of gay desire. They have…
The Munchkin — named after Oz’s diminutive residents — is a breeder’s dream. It purrs like a cat, reproduces like a cat, and, best of all, this normal-size stubby-legged feline confection is a brand-meowin’-new gold mine. Only a few thousand exist in the U.S., but it’s not hard to make…
Like many compelling ideas, Love Your Neighbor revealed itself in a vision. In January 1994, Jim Ward and six long-time friends made a pilgrimage to the Super Bowl, as they had done each of the previous thirteen years. In his Atlanta hotel room sometime during the wee hours after the…
As fences go, this one, when it’s completed, will be impressive by any measure: eight feet tall, heavy-duty chainlink with posts securely cemented into the ground, topped with barbed wire, and nearly a mile and a half long. More significant than its length will be the fact that it will…
Last Wednesday a group of South Florida labor unions held a press conference announcing a campaign to urge their brethren to cancel their Miami Herald subscriptions in a show of solidarity with striking newspaper employees at the Detroit Free Press and the Detroit News. The next day, a story on…
One of the few things that all members of Dade County’s contention-ridden AIDS community can agree on is that the AIDS-related service bureaucracy has run amok, propagating organizations, acronyms, and red tape at a rate that rivals the virus’s own spread while impoverished AIDS sufferers spend their days shuttling from…
Steve Smith liked his old job. In fact he loved his old job, and his boss, and his colleagues. An investigator at the Miami office of the state Division of Insurance Fraud, he did his work well, earning consistently good evaluations during his seven-and-a-half-year career. He had no intention of…
The subpoena landed on the judge’s desk with an offensive slap and was quickly whisked away to the office of the county attorney, where it became the object of some consternation. As long as anyone in the office could remember, no lawyer had ever had the temerity to attempt to…
Black and Hispanic environmentalists are scarcer than Florida panthers. If that doesn’t change soon, the whole movement faces extinction. This was the Everglades brain trust, people who cared so much about the dying River of Grass that they were actually doing something about it. Activists, government regulators, scientists, lawyers, engineers,…
Someone called the City of Miami police just after midnight March 5 reporting that a man was crawling toward NW 79th Street from the unlit, trash- and bush-clogged alleyway behind the Edison-Little River Neighborhood Center. An officer who arrived soon afterward found Darryl Butts lying face-down in broken glass and…
On a six-foot-square piece of aluminum that leans against a wall behind Mario Del Castillo’s house in West Hialeah, the words Calle Ocho 96 are spelled out in foot-high letters of lavender, red, yellow, green, and blue, all fashioned from Styrofoam. Along with several other signs stored in the yard,…
For twelve years Charles Felton had not smoked. He’d quit cold. Quit forever, he told himself. Never again would he light up a cigarette and invite demon nicotine into his body. Then in October 1993 he went to work for Dade County, and within a few months of taking over…
Ruth Regina’s Kane Concourse salon sports the kind of glitzy, Hollywood-French Provincial decor that Morris Lapidus designed for the Fontainebleau Hotel lobby in the Fifties. A curved red velvet loveseat and two white leather chairs surround a mirrored coffee table set with a plaster-of-Paris bust of a classical hero –…
