If you come to Miami in November,
this is what you will see

Compiled by M.G.

After spending a few months in the city, Cuban poet, Heberto Podilla, summarized his impressions of Miami in a few poignant words:

You have to live in Miami, sleep in it each day, to really know how it is and how it has forged the profile it has. It isn't easy without a long historical recounting to understand the root of so much incomprehension.

A Tale of Two Cities

In the national mentality, Miami conjures many seemingly contradictory images. On the one hand, Miami is a playpen for the rich and famous. There are rows of lavish estates on the beach, huge yachts, exotic cars, and extravagant celebrity parties. For many Americans, it is the top warm weather vacation getaway for golf, nightclubs, chic culture and white sand beaches. Globally, its location and demographics have also established it as the major financial center for large Latin American capital, and it has become the shopping mall of the Latin American elite. At the same time, Miami is home to an incredibly exploited working class, a large number of which are recent immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean. In fact, the city has proportionately more foreign-born residents than any other major city in the country. Squeezed into this scenario are Miami's almost forgotten African-American working class and poor neighborhoods. In the 80's alone, these utterly devastated communities were the center of three major urban rebellions. The result is a landscape of extreme decadence amongst utter depression.

The unique history of the city has shaped this landscape. It is also the source of the largely misunderstood and rarely addressed contradictions of Miami. Miami is situated in the southern most part of the South, and Florida is definitively Southern in its state politics, conservatism, and pace. At the same time, Miami stands out in stark relief from this Southern context; it is a very new city, celebrating its 100^th anniversary in 1996. It is also an immigrant city. Most of the immigrant population came after the 1960's, and unlike most other cities throughout the entire country, much of Miami's city politics is actually dominated and controlled by powerful factions of these same immigrant communities. Whereas in other cities this would infer a progressive mode, both politically and economically, many of Miami's immigrant leaders represent far right elite sectors of their homelands, particularly from Cuba. They brought with them deeply anti-worker attitudes that have found form in their public policies. Therefore, although the masses are poor and their leaders are of their homelands, this has not resulted in any fundamental improvement in their condition. Quite the opposite, those leaders have acted to further the gap between rich and poor by pursuing their own class interests and intensifying exploitation. Due to this, Miami is much closer to a colonial city in the developing world than a traditional American city. Again, trapped in this framework are African-Americans who themselves have migrated from the rest of the South but have been largely eclipsed by the political and economic developments of the city.

The class dynamics have also been determined by the lack of organized struggle in the city's history. The city founders never began with an industrial foundation. Rather, Miami has always been a service economy based on tourism and increasingly the retail trade with agriculture at its edges. What this means for the working class is that there has been very little tradition of worker organizing. Due to its newness and lack of an industrial foundation, Miami was not involved in the great industrial union efforts of the early 1900's that set the tone and tradition for struggles in many areas. The result is a very low consciousness and experience amongst the working class. It has also meant a free forum for employers to exploit, which they do with impunity - often taking advantage of the modest expectations of the largely immigrant workforce. The historical impact has been the deterioration of workers' lives and working conditions, which in turn has affected everything from race/ethnic relations to public policy to culture and the arts.

Backstory: Miami as cultural mosaic

The arrival of tens of thousands of immigrants, legal and otherwise, in Dade County since 1960 has greatly impacted South Florida. Diverse, vibrant cultures and immigrant populations define modern Miami. The Cuban influx began in earnest in the 1960's and has been followed by waves of other immigrants and refugees ever since. Most significant of these has been immigration from Haiti and the Caribbean Basin. No brief detailing of the city would be complete without an exploration of the history of the key groups that have helped shape the Miami of today.

Cubans: 1960

The migration of Cubans to Miami began in 1960. Fleeing the Cuban Revolution, most of the early arrivals came from Cuba's upper and middle classes. Accustomed to regularly visiting Miami on day trips or having the means to visit at least once a year, this initial group of Cubans was professional, entrepreneurial and well connected to Latin America. Even the segment of working class Cubans arriving during this period were, for the most part, from urban areas and better educated than the rural populations. It is estimated that from 1959 to 1961, 135,000 Cubans fled to South Florida. In 1962, the new federal Cuban Refugee Center helped strengthen the dispersal effort by making resettlement away from South Florida a common requisite for public assistance. By 1973, more than half a million would arrive. Despite the Cuban Refugee Center's efforts, by 1979, close to 80 percent of Cubans in the U.S. were living in Miami.

The surge of economic activity that followed the first wave of Cubans is not surprising given their largely professional and entrepreneurial stature. Further, the working class element that had joined in the exodus tended to share the historic willingness of other immigrants to take on lower-order jobs. The rapid advance of Cubans, however, was not due entirely to their business acumen and community solidarity. U.S. government agencies looked with sympathy on the exiles' fledging businesses and favored them disproportionately to more established groups, such as the African-American population. This tendency is important because it points to the social acceptability enjoyed by the initial Cuban refugees as well as their detachment, as a whole, from the societal conflict into which they arrived in the 1960's. At this time, Miami was in the throes of the civil rights era. There were still "colored" beaches and "white" beaches and other such delineations across civic and social life. The Cubans had no interest in embroiling themselves in this struggle. In fact, while African-American communities across the U.S. were beginning to see some benefits from the civil rights era, in Miami, the African-American community was effectively pushed aside by the arriving exiles.

As this first wave of Cuban exiles solidified, Little Havana, a Cuban enclave in southwest Miami, was established, and the "moral community" was born. The moral community is said to stand for the values of old Cuba and against the new order imposed by Castroism. Little Havana is no mere immigrant neighborhood, not even a lively business hub, but a moral community with its own distinct outlook on the world. If from the outside the exiles' political discourse appeared as raving intolerance, from the inside, it helped define who was and who was not a true member of the community. To be a Miami Cuban, it does not suffice to have escaped from the island; one must also espouse points of view repeated ceaselessly by editorialists in Miami's Spanish radio and press - the same voices that take care to denounce any member of the community who strays too far from the fold.

Cubans: 1980

Another wave of Cuban migration hit Miami in early 1980. In the spring of that year, a bus driver rammed his min-bus through the gates of the Peruvian embassy in Havana seeking to gain political asylum. In the melee that ensued, police protection was removed from the embassy and over 10,000 Cubans from all parts of the island flocked to the embassy in search of refuge. The Cuban government dealt with this embarrassing incident by opening the port of Mariel to all who wished to emigrate to the U.S. A massive flotilla organized by Cuban-Americans ferried Cuban refugees from Mariel to Key West in astonishing numbers - approximately 125,000 in 6 months (roughly 70,000 of which would permanently reside in Miami or Dade County).

"Those that are leaving from Mariel are the scum of the country - antisocials, homosexuals, drug addicts, and gamblers, who are welcome to leave Cuba if any country will have them," declared Fidel Castro in his 1980 May Day address. For once, Castro's enemies in Miami did not disagree. The presence of many "undesirables" deliberately placed aboard the departing boats by the Cuban government created a rift in the Cuban exile community. Seriously disturbed mental patients roamed the streets of Little Havana, overwhelming the local mental health system; former convicts survived by preying on the Jewish retirees in South Miami Beach; Mariel drug gangs peppered each other with gunfire in neighborhood shopping centers. Although hardened criminals and mental patients represented a minority of the new arrivals (about 10 percent) their presence stigmatized the entire exodus and adversely affected not only the reputation of Cubans in the U.S., but that of Miami as well. Locally, the Miami Herald, as the voice of the Anglo establishment, contributed greatly to this effort, launching a defamation campaign that sought initially to prevent the new wave of Cuban immigration from taking place and, when that failed, to discredit the new arrivals.

Until 1980, the self-image of Cuban exiles had been a happy mix: they were not only U.S. allies in the global anticommunist struggle, but also a "model" minority. With Mariel, this positive image faded quickly; Cuban-Americans now found themselves classed with the most downtrodden and discriminated against minorities. Like other ethnic groups before them, the exiles responded to strong outside prejudice by undergoing a process of reactive formation: they worked to redefine the situation in terms more favorable to their own self-image and their role in the community. In this alternative perspective, the exile community itself represented the solution to Miami's problems and the builder of it's future. Instead of subduing the Cubans, the hegemonic discourse of the Herald and its allies transformed the exile community into a self-conscious ethnic group, one that effectively organized and mobilized an impressive array of resources for local political competition. The exiles responded by laying claim to the city.

Haitians

Trying to leave the poorest country with one of the most corrupt regimes in the hemisphere is a rational course of action. Indeed, for several decades Haitians of all classes had been streaming out. During the 1960's and 1970's, their main destination was New York City. As with other immigrants, New York simply absorbed the newcomers. Middle-class professionals escaping Duvaliers' oppression were followed by artisans and workers, who simply overstayed their temporary visas. No matter: New York took them in, adding them to its global mix.

Miami, however, was different. Between 1977 and 1981, approximately 60,000 Haitians arrived by boat in South Florida. The number was only about one-fifth the size of New York's Haitian population, but the impact that these "boat people" had in the receiving city was immeasurably greater.

In 1980, the Third World laid claim to Miami. The Haitian boat flow peaked right at the time of the Cuban flotilla, the two becoming one in the same in the public mind. Yet despite this conflation, the two refugee streams were very different. Mariel had been sponsored from Miami. Haitians were not sponsored, nor did they have any solid ethnic network on which to rely. Few people in South Florida understood their Haitian Creole or the abysmal conditions that the would-be refugees were leaving behind. Haitians were not so much at the bottom of the labor market as outside it; they were neglected by the public welfare agencies and looked down on by all other segments of the local community, including African-Americans. The Anglo reaction was to reject the new arrivals and try to stop their entry. Unlike Mariel, this effort met with greater success.

In 1979, in response to appeals by Miami leaders and the local staff of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), federal officials in Washington initiated the "Haitian Program." The core of the program involved accelerating deportation proceedings and making a concerted effort to discourage Haitians from applying for political asylum. The INS would either fail to advise Haitians of their right to a lawyer or else tell them that a lawyer would only get them into trouble. The culmination of this campaign came not in government offices, but on the high seas. During the Reagan administration, Coast Guard cutters were ordered to patrol Haitian waters around the clock so that Miami-bound boats could be intercepted at sea before reaching U.S. jurisdiction (all the while towing and escorting Cuban boats to Key West). Among those who did manage to slip through, many were detained in the Krome detention center, described by some as an INS concentration camp in isolated west Dade County. At one point more that two thousand Haitians were incarcerated at Krome, some for more than a year.

The U.S. government's justification for the differential treatment hinged on the distinction between "political" refugees and "economic" migrants. (Since Haitians were not recognized as refugees, they did not receive welfare in its various forms; nor were they given work permits, which would have enabled them to support themselves.) The argument was not convincing. Many Mariel refugees had left in search of better opportunities, while many Haitians had experienced genuine persecution. The difference between the Cubans and Haitians streaming into Miami had less to do with individual motivations than with the country they left behind, the community that received them, and their color. This last realization mobilized the African-American political establishment in defense of the Haitians and elicited public compassion and the concern of churches and philanthropic organizations. In 1974 the National Council of Churches founded what would eventually become the Haitian Refugee Center. The handful of young attorneys who worked pro bono at the center in effect interposed the U.S. legal system between the powerless newcomers and the governments efforts to be rid of them.

Haitians gradually won enough class action suits, and sufficient numbers gained permanent or temporary reprieve from deportation, to consolidate a small ethnic community. The Ford Foundation and other philanthropic organizations stepped in with support for the Haitian Refugee Center and the newly founded Haitian Task Force, created to stimulate small businesses in the model of nearby Little Havana. Middle-class Haitians came from New York to join the entrants released from INS custody and those who managed to slip in undetected. Together they forged a new neighborhood - Little Haiti - occupying about nine census tracts in Miami's northwest. A small strip of brightly painted shops emerged in this section, "gypsy" cabs began to make the rounds, and the slow cadences of Creole came to be heard over local radio. City and county governments eventually threw their support behind a new organization, the Haitian American Community Agency of Dade, established to provide social services to the new immigrant neighborhood.

Impacts of Immigration: An Overview

In 1960, 80 percent of Dade County's population was comprised of non-Latin whites; whereas less than 5 percent were Hispanic and about 15 percent blacks. Thirty years later, in 1990, Hispanics constituted almost half of metropolitan Miami's population, followed by non-Latin whites who accounted for one-third and blacks who provided slightly over one-fifth of the area's total population. No large metropolitan area in the U.S. has ever experienced such a rapid and complete alteration of its population in such a short period of time. One aspect of this sudden ethnic transformation is the way Miami's ethnic groups have shared, or avoided, common residential space, resulting in one of the most highly segregated cities in the U.S. (Liberty City, the largest African-American area of Miami, and Little Havana are scarcely two miles apart; socially they could be in two different countries.)

As more and more refugees arrived between 1960 and the mid-1980's, competition among immigrants and Dade County's poor for dwindling local human services was intensified. The result was inter-group friction for public facilities such as hospitals, health clinics, schools, public housing, emergency relief support and general welfare services. African-Americans, comprising a disproportionate number of the area's poor, were especially affected. The increased shortage of suitable, affordable rental properties as a result of immigration again put recent arrivals in direct competition with African-Americans, who were over-represented among those living under crowded conditions. All these factors increased inter-ethnic tensions in Miami, as native residents, African-Americans and Anglos alike, resented having to carrying the economic burden of providing services to immigrants.

Another impact of immigration has been to initiate and prolong racial and ethnic tensions among various groups of residents who identify to some degree with one or another of the groups of immigrants and refugees. The favorable treatment of Cuban refugees, who were considered to be fleeing political circumstances, and the detention procedures applied to the Haitians, who were considered to be motivated by economic turmoil, antagonized many African-Americans, who viewed such a policy as racist. This tension still exists today. For though both Haitians and Cubans intercepted at sea are repatriated, Cubans who happen to make it to dry land are immediately processed and released, while their Haitian counterparts who arrive are indefinitely detained by the INS at Krome detention center.

Impacts of Immigration: A Closer Look - 1980 and the subversion of Miami

In 1980, the Miami Herald's anti-Mariel campaign contributed greatly to increasing the mood of tension in the city. Not only Mariel Cubans but also Haitians were coming (sometimes washing) ashore, and the sense of being under invasion by the Third World fused with the unresolved racial tensions of this southern city. Even as the local establishment battled the Cubans in its effort to fend off new waves of immigrants, it persisted in its old ways with regard to the native ethnic proletariat - the Blacks. These ways involved relegating Blacks to a permanently subservient status and then, when civil rights legislation made this impossible, simply ignoring them.

When the first Cuban exiles began arriving in the early sixties, they confronted the unfamiliar spectacle of Blacks queuing up to seek and be refused admittance into whites-only movie theaters. This was just the tip of the iceberg. Blacks could not eat at white restaurants, they paid their taxes at a separate window in the Dade County courthouse, and they did not even have access to Miami's famous beaches. The early middle-class exiles may have deplored this reality, but when it came to jobs they, too, brushed the Blacks aside, taking over positions that might have been the ticket to economic advancement for the native minority. As Cubans began to consolidate their hold in certain area of Miami and Hialeah, they forgot about the Black community as well.

For Black Miami, the 1960's and 1970's were tough years in which they had to contend not only with the Deep South legacy, but also with the Cuban-inspired transformation of their city. During the sixty-odd years prior to the arrival of the first Cubans, Blacks had been the traditional source of manual labor in Miami, simultaneously needed and rejected by the city that they were building. Although Blacks struggled as best they could, it was only in the 1960's with the upsurge of the civil rights movement that they began to make significant headway toward racial equality. The sixties were also the years in which the first Cuban exiles arrived.

In 1966, Martin Luther King, Jr., noted Miami's emerging racial triangle and warned against the pitting of refugees against Blacks in competition for jobs. By the mid-seventies, the Cuban presence had become too large for anyone to ignore. If the Anglo establishment found it difficult to fathom what was happening to their city, for Blacks the Cuban presence and its consequences was a social cataclysm. While there was no one-to-one substitution of Blacks by Cubans in the labor market, nor was there direct exploitation of one minority by the other, there was, however, a new urban economy in which the immigrants raced past other groups, leaving the native minority behind. Hence, after decades of striving for a measure of equality with whites, Miami Blacks found that the game had drastically changed. Anglos were leaving, and other whites who spoke a foreign language were occupying their positions. Perhaps most devastating to the Black community was the apparent ease with which the Cubans ensconced themselves in the local economy, all the while claiming that their stay was temporary for they would soon return to their island. In 1977, only eighteen years after the Cuban Revolution, Cuban-owned firms in Dade County exceed eight thousand in number; or four times as may as were owned by Blacks. Such patent inequalities sharpened the sense of double subordination felt by Miami Blacks. After all, it was they who had fought the civil rights battles to gain access to public and private facilities. Affirmative Action and other programs had been designed to rectify the years of abuse that they had suffered, not help a recently arrived group of white immigrants. As far as the Cubans were concerned, however, Miami's race problem was not theirs and they were certainly not about to make it so. Their history and concerns were different; hence, they took no responsibility for the racial inequalities that they encountered in Miami.

By 1980, the situation of double marginalization had not yet been articulated into a coherent Black discourse, although the reality of powerlessness was there for all to see. At the street level, powerlessness was reflected in the traditional police practice of treating Blacks with relative impunity. Seen by respectable white citizens as the vice-ridden "bad" parts of town, Liberty City and other economically depressed areas were places where the police were given a freer hand. People living in these areas had to fear not only violence from crime, but also violence from their would-be protectors.

"McDuffie," as the case was known locally, represented the culmination of this hostile trend. In March 1980, a thirty-three-year-old Black insurance agent named Arthur McDuffie died in Miami's Jackson Memorial Hospital from injuries sustained after being chased by city and county police units. The cause of the chase was a rolling stop at a red light plus an obscene gesture toward a nearby officer. Police claimed that McDuffie had died as a result of accidental injuries during the chase. Black Miami knew better. On March 31^st, four white Dade County Public Safety Department officers were charged with playing some role in the beating of McDuffie and subsequent attempts to cover up the cause of his death. Sensing the mood of tension in the city, a local judge granted a change of venue to Tampa. As he put it, the case was "a time bomb."

Mariel had not yet begun at the time of the March indictment, but by mid-May, when the jury's verdict came in, some fifty thousand new refugees were camped in Orange Bowl stadium and in public land under I-95, the city's main north-south thoroughfare. Their visibility was compounded by dire forebodings in the press about their presence. Just a week before, the Miami Herald had published its survey of significant negative reactions to the new refugees and the "potentially dangerous disagreements" among native whites, Blacks, and Latins. As the Cuban exiles and native whites focused their attention on the comings and goings in the Straits of Florida, Black Miami remained fixed on that Tampa courtroom. For Miami native whites, the city was under siege from the outside; as Blacks saw things, their city had long been under siege by the forces of the local establishment.

The verdict, reached in less than three hours of deliberation by an all-white jury, was broadcast by the Miami media on a clear Saturday afternoon. All four white officers were acquitted of all charges. Less than three hours later, the first rocks and bottles were flying in Liberty City. The ensuing three days of rampage left eighteen dead, hundreds injured, more than 1000 jailed and nearly 250 businesses indiscriminately battered or destroyed. "Anyone who had any understanding of the ramifications of dehumanization and social isolation could understand the riots," noted the local head of the Urban League. The 1980 uprising expressed in actions what words had not been able to. "McDuffie" was, without doubt, the trigger of the rebellion, but the resentment of being always left out, of remaining invisible and forgotten as other groups marched forward, was the background against which the actions of May took place.

Mariel and the Black uprising had this in common: they galvanized the two ethnic communities and provided the basis for a vigorous effort at reinterpretation. The stigma of Mariel compelled the Cubans to invent a "new Miami" in which their own role was both central and positive. Similarly, the deaths and deliberate destruction during the May rebellion forced Black leaders to rethink the city in terms not bounded by the standard urban-minority frame.

By the late summer of 1980: Mariel had added some ninety thousand to Dade County's Cuban population. The exile community had gotten away with the boatlift, but Fidel Castro had succeeded in stigmatizing the rescue effort. Meanwhile, much of the Black northwest section of Miami lay in shambles following an assault by its own citizens, an eruption against a city that immigrant newcomers were overcoming all obstacles to reach. Next to these poor and now largely razed neighborhoods, immigrants of the same color but a different mind-set had begun building a community of their own. Anglos, meanwhile, responded by voting solidly for the primacy of English. In an effort initiated by the group Citizens of Dade United, the measure prohibited "the expenditure of any county funds for the purpose of utilizing any language other than English or any culture other than that of the United States" and provided that "all county government meetings, hearings, and publications shall be in the English language only." By now, the Miami Herald columnists had run out of expressions to describe the new events, each one a blow to the city as they had known it. Miami was a very different place eight months into the year. The remarkable happenings beforehand had fundamentally altered its ethnic makeup and, in the process, subverted an entire social order.

Nelson Mandela - June 1990

Some three hundred anti-Communists, mostly Cuban-Americans, were bunched in front of the

Miami Beach Convention Center. Many held placards proclaiming such things as, "Arafat, Gadhafi, and Castro are Terrorists" and "Mr. Mandela, do you know how many people your friend Castro has killed just for asking the right to speak as you do here?" Opposing the anti-Communists only fifty yards away were three thousand Nelson Mandela supporters, mostly African-American, whose placards declared: "Mandela, Welcome to Miami, Home of Apartheid, and "Miami City Council = Pretoria." Planes continuously circled a few thousand feet above, alternately dragging pro- and anti-Mandela banners. Jews against Mandela paraded down the street, followed a few minutes later by Jews for Mandela. A few white supremacists carried racist signs. The main focus of attention, though, was the confrontation between Miami's two largest ethnic groups: Cuban-Americans and African-Americans. Mandela, in the midst of his triumphal tour of the United States, was in town to deliver a speech at the Miami Beach Convention Center before the international convention of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME). He had already been to New York City, Washington, D.C., and Atlanta, where he had been greeted and warmly welcomed by those cities and by the nation's top elected officials and celebrities.

But things were different in Miami. The hero's welcome planned for the South African leader quickly turned into indifference and then opposition following acknowledgment of his friendship with Fidel Castro, who had supported the African National Congress since it was banned in South Africa in 1960, during an ABC television interview. Over the strenuous objections of African-American community leaders, the Cuban-American mayors of Hialeah Gardens, Sweetwater, West Miami, Hialeah, and Miami signed a letter unwelcoming Nelson Mandela. Although the South African came to Miami only for a brief speech and never accepted any local invitation, the mayors' action profoundly hurt the sensitivities of Miami's African-American community.

"Miami may go down in infamy as the only city in America that denounced, criticized, castigated, and threw its 'welcome mat' in the face of Nelson Mandela," H.T. Smith, chairman of the Miami Coalition for a Free South Africa, wrote to Miami's Cuban Mayor Xavier Suarez. In the wake of Mandela's visit, Smith and the Black Lawyers Association brought African-American frustration into focus by organizing a boycott of their own city, asking outside conventioneers not to come to Miami until the mayors formally apologized to Mandela. None of them did. To do so would have been tantamount to losing the next election. Political power in these cities rested with Cuban, not African-American voters, and the exile community was monolithic in its repudiation of anyone having anything to do with Fidel Castro. Although the African-American boycott could easily have been prevented with a minor gesture of conciliation, elected Cuban-American politicians were unable to take that step. Any sign of an apology would have been immediately denounced by Spanish radio stations as un-Cuban and a sign of weakness in the face of the enemy. Over the next four months, at least thirteen national organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the National Organization of Women (NOW), canceled their conventions in Miami, resulting in an estimated loss of over $10 million to the local economy. The boycott lasted three years.

In July of 2003, at the NAACP national convention at the Miami Beach Convention Center, Miami-Dade mayor Alex Penelas, in the midst of a run for Democratic Senator Bob Graham's vacant Senate seat, formally apologized for the 1990 snubbing of Nelson Mandela. H.T. Smith accused Penelas of trying to curry favor with African-American voters and questioned the timing of his public atonement. "Nobody in the black community right now is asking for an apology. Nobody in the black community thinks there needs to be an apology,’’ Smith said. "For the mayor to open that wound, possibly causing renewed hurt as opposed to bringing about healing, is in my judgment irresponsible.’’

Elián González - November 1999

On Thanksgiving Day 1999, a six-year-old boy, Elián González, was found floating on an inner tube three miles off the Florida coast. He was reportedly surrounded by dolphins and, more surprisingly, in spite of being in the water for three days, he was not sunburned at all. The U.S. Coast Guard spotted the boy, along with the two other survivors of a vessel that had been carrying fourteen passengers from Cuba. The other eleven, including the boy's mother, had apparently drowned. The Coast Guard immediately transferred Elián to Joe DiMaggio Children's Hospital. The two other survivors were rescued after they swam to Key Biscayne, a few miles from downtown Miami.

Two days after the boy was found, Elián's father in Cuba declared that he wanted his son back. Under normal circumstances, the sole surviving parent's wishes are the last word on such matters. However, there is nothing normal about dealing with Cuba or Cuban-Americans. Miami Cubans passionately argued that Elián's mother had died to give the boy freedom from Castro's dictatorship and that he should be permitted to stay in Miami with his great uncle, Lázaro González. After a considerable delay and interviews in Cuba with the boy's father, on January 6, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno announced, "This little boy, who has been through so much, belongs with his father." The drama preceding and following this decision cemented, in

the eyes of the nation and the world, Miami's reputation as a city deeply divided along ethnic lines. Elián's saga served as a magnifying glass, highlighting and at the same time kindling the tensions that have been building up over the past forty years of mass immigration into Miami.

The story of Elián González brought even the most peripheral citizens of the region face-to-face with profound issues of identity, power, and prejudice. After Reno announced the Justice Department's decision, Miami's Cuban community declared that it would unleash massive protests. "Let's take action immediately with the objective of paralyzing Miami and paralyzing the airport," urged Alberto Hernandez, a director of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), speaking to other leaders of the Cuban exile community at a meeting following the

announcement. On January 6, hundreds of Miami's Cubans blocked intersections throughout the urban center and cut off access to the Port of Miami and the airport. The "political correctness" of Miami's Cuban community in demanding that Elián stay in the United States was transmitted throughout the world by Miami-Dade County mayor Alex Penelas, who proclaimed at a press conference that county law enforcement officers would not cooperate with the federal authorities

in reuniting Elián with his father. If violence broke out, he warned the Clinton administration, "We hold you responsible." The county mayor's comments particularly alienated Miami's non-Cuban communities. At a Town Hall Meeting organized by ABC-TV's "Nightline" on the campus of Florida International University, a non-Cuban speaker from the audience chastised Mayor Penelas for his comments by reminding him that "he was elected to represent all of

the citizens of Dade County."

Ultimately, the issue was resolved by force. Before the sun rose on Saturday, April 22, the day before Easter, INS agents stormed the house of Lázaro González to retrieve Elián. The small number of observers on the scene gave only token resistance to the well-armed strike

force. Pictures of the raid circumnavigated the globe via internet, television, and newspapers. A few hours later, Elián was reunited with his father.

The Miami Cuban community vilified the U.S. government. Even moderate, broad-based organizations like the Cuban-American National Council, criticized the government's strong-arm tactics in a public statement: "We know no precedent for such an extraordinary operation, and cannot understand why the Justice Department deployed a commando tactical force, armed with semiautomatic weapons, face masks, and tear gas, that broke into the home of an innocent American family, the same family that the Justice Department itself had previously entrusted with Elián's care." Seventy Cuban-American leaders of twenty-one exile organizations called for

a citywide strike on the following Tuesday to "send a message of pain to the federal government and the nation about Elián's seizure." They sought to turn Miami into a "dead city."

Throughout the Latino sections of Miami, they had a dramatic effect. In the heart of Little Havana, along Calle Ocho, nearly all businesses were closed as they were in Hialeah, the most heavily Latino municipality in Miami-Dade County (and the United States). Crowds gathered on the sidewalks, and long convoys of vehicles slowed traffic, especially at key intersections. Vitriolic anti-government placards condemned the raid, calling Clinton a communist and Reno a lesbian. Cuban flags were everywhere; many also displayed the U.S. flag but flew it upside down. About one-third of the students in public schools stayed home in a district that is over fifty percent Latino. At Florida International University, the local campus of the state university system, which has a student body that is more than fifty percent Latino, about seven hundred administrative and support workers participated in the stoppage–including President Modesto Maidique, a Cuban-American. At least a few businesses closed out of fear after receiving threats of bombs or boycotts.

Miami's Cuban-Americans had believed that the United States supported them in their efforts to defeat Castro's communist regime. They viewed themselves as the most stalwart of all Americans in opposing communism and thus supporting U.S. interests. They further viewed themselves as strongly contributing to U.S. society both by being successful economically and through their intense civic engagement, as reflected in their high rates of naturalization and their

ability to elect Cuban-American officials locally. Moreover, they strongly believed that living in the United States away from one's parents was preferable to being in Cuba, even with one's parent(s). They pointed to the "successes" of the Pedro (Peter) Pan project, sponsored by the Catholic Church in the 1960s, in which Cuban parents voluntarily sent their unaccompanied children to the United States because they feared that the Cuban government would take

them away and "brainwash" them. They claimed that Elián's father was under duress when he asserted that he had freely decided that he wanted Elián to return to Cuba. Given the widely documented human rights abuses of Cuba's Castro regime, they had been confident that the U.S. government would not force Elián to return to his father, and they were shocked when the INS forcibly removed Elián from his Miami relatives' home. For all these reasons, they saw the U.S.

actions as a "betrayal," a breaking of the implicit contract in which they not only were staunch anti-Communists but also had successfully integrated economically and politically.

The mayor of the City of Miami, Joe Carollo, condemned the INS raid and in its wake succeeded in obtaining the resignation of the non-Latino white city manager along with the police chief. Cuban-Americans replaced both. The mayor of Hialeah, Raul Martinez, announced that Cubans should not allow themselves to be stepped on by other minorities and that they should consider forming their own political party. He asserted that Cubans had worked hard to build the community and they had nothing to apologize about. He went on to demand that the mayor of Miami-Dade County, Penelas, stand up to the African-American community. "The

time has come to say: It's like this. How many federal programs have been put in place, how many state programs have been put in place, to help the blacks and the blacks haven't done anything. And the so-called black leaders have taken the money."

In contrast, non-Cubans viewed the Cubans as ungrateful immigrants who had been allowed to enjoy the freedoms of the United States and then attacked it by flying the U.S. flag upside down and condemning U.S. authorities that only wanted to reunite a small boy with his one surviving parent. Others in immigrant communities took the opportunity to highlight that the INS behaves similarly in hundreds of immigration cases every year and no one takes a second look–until the victims are Cubans.

Accordingly, the strike following the raid had little economic impact outside of the Latino neighborhoods. The county's two major economic engines, Miami International Airport and the Port of Miami-Dade, remained open. While the airport saw no signs of the strike, the port slowed down, as hundreds of truck drivers stayed home. County transit buses and Metrorail operated regularly but carried fewer passengers than usual. Reportedly, only one out of ten

Miami-Dade County employees stayed home.

Nevertheless, the strike upset many non-Cubans. The following weekend counter-demonstrations emerged in non-Latino neighborhoods. These counter-demonstrations brought

together an unlikely alliance of good ole boys waving confederate flags and proudly holding signs exhorting authorities to "send them all" back, next to African American families reminding Mayor Penelas that "you represent us too, mayor." Within a week, flag stores in Miami claimed they were running out of both American and Cuban flags, especially the small ones that people mount on their cars. The Miami Cubans were chastised across the board by non-Latinos as

ungrateful, unforgiving, and unpatriotic.

Interested and disinterested observers watching these events must have asked themselves, and any who would listen: What's with Miami? What's with these Miami Cubans, perhaps America's most successful immigrant group, certainly the most successful Latinos, complaining about the U.S. government betraying them? Are they a bunch of ingrates? Some interpreted the behavior of Cubans as par for the course, the arrogance that has characterized the most successful Latino immigrant group since the beginning of its mass arrival in the United States in 1959. Cubans, as equal citizens of this country, should be respectful, if not accepting, of its laws. Others, more mercifully, expressed respect for the position of those who, even after forty years of exile, refuse to negotiate principles for popularity.

Haitians Refugees revisited - October 2002

On Tuesday afternoon, October 29, 2002, a large boatload of Haitians ran aground near Key Biscayne. But unlike many others in years past, this precarious vessel, filled with over 200 desperate souls, seemed to have timed its entrance into Miami -- and onto the national scene -- perfectly.

It happened on a slow news afternoon precisely one week before a gubernatorial election considered by many to be a referendum on America's president. Television cameras swooped in to capture the spectacle of sunburned and exhausted refugees, including pregnant women and children, jumping, swimming, and running (down the streets and for their lives) - trying to stop cars on the Rickenbacker Causeway.

National news programs ran periodic updates on the drama, and talking heads outside Miami boiled it all down to two main themes -- the gaping hole a rickety Haitian boat had just torn in America's post-September 11 border, and the inexplicably harsh policy of detention and nearly certain deportation the Bush administration has imposed on Haitian asylum-seekers. Much more generous interpretations of federal policies are applied to nearly every other group of nationals who can establish a credible claim of political persecution in their home countries. Under the U.S. government's "wet foot/dry foot" policy, people who make it to shore can ask for asylum, whereas those caught at sea are detained and most often deported without a hearing. Most refugees who make it to land and pass a "credible fear" interview are released from detention so they can meet with attorneys and prepare their asylum cases. Cubans, thanks to the idiosyncrasies of the Cold War, are in an even more rarefied category. They are given automatic asylum.

"Our government claims that they're indefinitely detaining the Haitian asylum-seekers in order to save their lives [by discouraging dangerous sea crossings]," said Cheryl Little, director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. "But I really believe this policy is about keeping Haitians out, not about saving their lives." Despite the fact that most of them made it to dry land, the INS balked at directly paroling detainees for bond hearings.

A similar incident occurred in December 2001, when a boat carrying 187 refugees was escorted to Miami by the Coast Guard. Twenty people jumped overboard; two drowned and eighteen made it to shore. The rest (167) were detained for up to ten months, during which advocates discovered the Bush administration's secret policy of indefinitely detaining Haitians to discourage mass migrations. Most were sent back, several dozen just four days before the most recent boat grounding.

Because of the election, Democrats like Jeb Bush challenger Bill McBride were using the Haitian crisis to hammer the Bush brothers and rally the African-American Democratic base to the polls. At a McBride rally at Miami-Dade Community College featuring former President Bill Clinton, several top Democrats took their shots at alleged Bush indifference to the Haitians. State senator and soon-to-be congressman Kendrick Meek contended that McBride is "willing to make the phone call," a reference to earlier in the week, when Meek's mom Carrie confronted Bush at a rally and asked him to call his brother in the White House to free the Haitians. (He declined.) Jeb insisted he opposed the detention policy, although he had kept quiet about it until it was exposed. Still the media and political pressure did appear to make a difference. On November 1^st, the Haitians were allowed access to lawyers, a privilege not accorded to many of their compatriots from the boat last December, according to congressional testimony last month from Haitian advocate Wendy Young. And they will likely be allowed to apply for a release bond; the difference is that the December refugees had fewer legal rights because they didn't make it to land, while the new "dry foot" group is legally eligible for parole by INS, or bond by a judge.

But this is just one more skirmish in the continuum of the U.S.'s problematic relationship with Haiti and its people. And with balancing national security and human rights. In 1996, after a couple of homegrown militia boys led by ex-Army grunt Timothy McVeigh bombed a federal building in Oklahoma, legislators passed several laws aimed at curtailing immigrant rights, ostensibly to discourage acts of terrorism. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, and the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act allowed immigrants to be deported for a wide range of offenses, including past crimes. As a result, the INS more than doubled the number of immigrants held in detention facilities. The agency farms out more than half of these to county jails. The same year, Congress passed a law making it illegal for the federally funded Legal Services Corporation to help illegal aliens.

After terrorists leveled the World Trade Center last year, the situation for immigrants got much worse. "Since September 11, I can't keep up with the number of provisions coming down from Washington that affect our immigrant community," Little lamented. "The refugee program was practically shut down." She argues that potential terrorists are unlikely to try the asylum route as a devious way into the country because there are many easier ways to go. Refugee claims are scrutinized much more stringently than other types of petitions.

That, at least, is nothing new. In the late Seventies, the now-defunct Haitian Refugee Center uncovered a widespread government policy called the "Haitian Program," which employed a number of duplicitous methods for deporting Haitian asylum-seekers. Methods such as extending work permits one year, then using those permits the next to find and deport Haitians in sham hearings. (This at a time when the bloody Duvalier family regime was enjoying its second decade of brutal repression.) The center sued and won new cases for 4000 Haitians whose asylum claims had been illegally denied. After Ronald Reagan entered the White House in 1981, the government began a new policy of detaining large numbers of immigrants seeking asylum in enormous centers like Krome (scandal-plagued and located just east of the Everglades in south Miami-Dade).

Still the refugees came. The late Eighties through the mid-Nineties saw the meltdown of what was left of Haitian society by the long period of instability after "Baby Doc" Duvalier's 1986 ouster from the country. In 1997 advocates such as Cheryl Little, U.S. Rep. Carrie Meek and prominent Haitian activists Marleine Bastien and Jean-Robert Lafortune worked to get Haitians included in the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act, which exempted hundreds of thousands of Cubans and Central Americans from the harsher provisions of the 1996 anti-immigration laws. But Haitians were left out, and more than 100,000 were due for deportation under the new laws. The advocates fought a trench war in Congress and won some protection for about 40,000 people.

Miami: See it like a native…of the Third World

So what is it that defines Miami today? Well, in addition to a sharp conservative bent, persistent racism and resilient ethnic conflict, last year the U.S. Census report officially declared Miami the poorest large urban center in the United States.

Nearly one-third of the city's population lives in poverty, a greater percentage than in any other city of 250,000 or more. (Miami-Dade County, with a poverty rate of about 20 percent, ranks 16^th among large counties.) The annual income below which the Census Bureau considers a family of four to be in poverty is $17,603. For a single person, the poverty level is $8,794. 28.5% of the population and 23.5% of families are below the poverty line. Instability from constant immigration and a dependence on a sometimes unpredictable tourism economy are among the common explanations cited by experts for Miami's relatively high poverty.

This is the context for November. All roads lead to Miami. See you in the streets!

If you come to Miami in November, this is what you will see

If you come to Miami in November,
this is what you will see