The book sits quietly, battling long odds. Hundreds of other titles line the shelves of Books & Books in Coral Gables. Meditations on politics. Memoirs and biographies. First novels by the graduates of elite writing workshops. Some 60,000 new books are released in America every year. Most disappear quickly, with...
It all begins with a touch on the forearm -- two fingers gently reminding me that I'm not alone tonight. Electricity shoots up my spine. She is a short, plump woman inching into her thirties. Her belly pushes out from beneath her red halter top. Chubby legs fill her skin-tight...
Usually Sebastian Ordoñez is a racecar driver only when he's pushing toy cars across his bedroom floor. The eight-year-old will sputter engine noises between his lips as he maneuvers imaginary Formula One racetracks all over the globe. "In like Brazil, Australia, lots of places," he says. He'll be a star...
One hour before screenings begin on the final day of the 2003 Miami International Film Festival, Nicole Guillemet -- tailored, coiffed, and uncharacteristically agitated -- sits huddled over a tiny cocktail table at the back of the dim balcony lounge at the National Hotel. Leaning forward and locking her eyes...
Cop's-Eye View Miami-Dade Det. Kenny Veloz took a call from a buddy cop, Kendall District Sgt. Carlos Dominguez, in December of 2000. Dominguez's parents and grandparents lived in an apartment complex on SW 96th Street and SW 142nd Avenue in Veloz's own Hammocks District. Dominguez told Veloz that his folks...
Yes, Haiti Is a Dreadful Place But that doesn't mean Miami has to go down the toilet with it: Regarding Rebecca Wakefield's article about Cheryl Little, who heads the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center ("Little Goes a Long Way," November 7), when the Haitians landed on Rickenbacker Causeway I just happened...
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Lawsuits Galore The Miami Index Miami's Brain Matter Last week Miami Mayor Manny Diaz unveiled an assortment of proposals he hopes will reduce poverty in his city. Not end poverty, just reduce it. This wasn't exactly a rousing declaration of war, and it was 30 years...
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Lawsuits Galore The Miami Index Miami's Brain Matter It's the women who keep ramshackle, decaying Overtown held together as it waits (and waits) for the revitalization promised almost since the day it was destroyed. And nobody works harder or longer than the grandmothers, the elders who...
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Lawsuits Galore The Miami Index Miami's Brain Matter Yes, Miami is a trash-strewn city of desperate extremes, plagued by inadequate educational opportunities, job prospects, and public services. It's a city fragmented by racism, corruption, and apathy. But Miami is also a city of endless reinvention, a...
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Lawsuits Galore The Miami Index Miami's Brain Matter Miami underwent significant change between 1990 and 2000, not least of which was the city's poverty rate: It grew with such exuberance that Miami climbed from fourth to first place among the nation's most impoverished big cities. That's...
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Lawsuits Galore The Miami Index Miami's Brain Matter Surely by now someone somewhere in Miami's bureaucracy must have drafted a war plan to attack the city's outrageous poverty, right? In fact the Community Development Department (CDD) did just that several years before the 2000 U.S. Census...
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Lawsuits Galore The Miami Index Miami's Brain Matter A small misunderstanding about Medicaid and Medicare coverage touched off a crisis in Ofelia Garcia's world. The money involved (less than $100 per month) would have elicited no more than a shrug from some people. But it was...
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Lawsuits Galore The Miami Index Miami's Brain Matter Ted Lucas grew up in Carol City, a black neighborhood close to the Broward County line. His family was poor but his athletic talent helped him win a scholarship to Chaminade-Madonna College Preparatory School in Hollywood, though his...
Charts Miami Neighborhood Map Lawsuits Galore The Miami Index Miami's Brain Matter Naomi wouldn't be quite so desperate now if she hadn't spent her rent money to bury her mother. But what choice did she have? Naomi is sure her 85-year-old mother, Rosalia, could have lived longer if she'd been...
He's our skinny one, and he has no idea what he's in for. That's part of what makes it hard. Seeing him looking so healthy, watching him swing on the monkey bars. He gets his legs going like a crooked pendulum, lets go with one hand and stretches forward, skips...
In an ongoing endeavor to develop, understand, and communicate "art," our definitions are constantly morphing. At the speed that we identify and recognize, we deny and re-create, each time pushing the walls of the "white box" to a point of distension. Since the advent of modernity -- when artists decided...
The birthday dinner's entrée had been prepared especially at the request of the honoree, a tri-coastal sophisticate who divided his time among Toronto, Miami, and the French Riviera. But all six guests plus the host qualified as educated and experienced international eaters, vera cucina italiana on top of most everyone's...
If Sax on the Beach fails, the newly opened music bar will be just another Miami jazz dream deferred, like Arthur's (which featured big names in the Eighties) and the cozy, if empty, Champagnes on 79th Street that closed months ago. This gin joint in the lobby of the Bay...
Photography is a great medium for social documentation. Think of nineteenth-century French photographer Eugène Atget, who produced thousands of photographs of Paris with direct, novel, and poetic renditions of everything imaginable: people in the streets, shop fronts, buildings, wheeled vehicles of all kinds, decorative details, et cetera. Cuban photo documentaries...
Close to HomeThey met at Victory Hospital back in August 1962. My mother had just given birth to me, but owing to problems during the delivery, she needed to be hospitalized for more than a week after I was born. One of her roommates was Rita Grady, who was expecting...
This past April 11, a heart attack took the life of 74-year-old Mary Ellen Bethel Hanna. Her children, Larry and Jacqueline, wanted a simple burial for their mother, whom they affectionately describe as old-fashioned. Mary Ellen had not remarried after losing her husband, World War II veteran Wilbert Hanna, in...
NW 36th Street in Miami. Action Muffler, El Patio Body Shop, an old warehouse transformed into En Espiritu y En Verdad evangelical ministry. Jackson High School stands secure behind an imposing iron fence. Across the street, protected by its own fence, Ebenezer United Methodist Church looms over all, the church's...
