Letter from Miami

Virtue and Vice in the Sunbelt

During the morning show on radio station WQBA, La Cubanísma, the disc jockey is quizzing listeners about geography. “¿Cuál es la calle más recta de la Habana?” he asks, his shoulders still swaying to the rhythms of the tune he has just segued out of. “What is the name of the straightest street in Havana?” After a suitable pause he supplies the answer: Virtudes, or Virtue Street, and the familiar joke gets a big laugh from the group of men sitting outside the D.J.’s booth. The jock quickly points out that by now the Communists have probably changed all the street names in Havana anyways, but that, “it’s important to know these things.” Then he shoves a new cassette into his state-of-the-art console, the music starts up, and through the clear Plexiglass wall one can watch him almost dancing in his seat to the Cuban sounds he’s sending over the airwaves to the people of that most Cuban city—Miami, Florida, U.S.A.

At the moment, no city in America is hotter than Miami. Miami Vice, with its sophisticated montages of jai alai frontons, speedboats, high rises, and girls in bikinis, could just as easily be a fantasy about Los Angeles or Honolulu as far as the realism of the urban portrait is concerned. But the fact is that, like a somewhat over-the-hill movie star, Los Angeles isn’t quite as bankable as it used to be, while Hawaii (Magnum, P.I. not-withstanding_ isn’t quite there yet.

Miami is another story. Miami—or parts of it, at least—has been hot for quite a while. Indeed, Miami was, in a certain sense, one of the earliest prototypes for that great continental shift we have come to think of as the ascendancy of the Sunbelt. Already in the 1960s, Jackie Gleason—the hottest television star of his generation—had become so enchanted with Miami that he, along with his entire production company, abandoned New York (thus prefiguring so many corporate moves of the succeeding decade) for the city where the palm trees sway in the breeze from the Caribbean and the golfing goes on all year long. The retirees had discovered Miami Beach, and the former vice president, one Richard Milhous Nixon, began to discover the pleasures of the Miami suburb of Key Biscayne, not least of which were the new friends—so many of the Cuban-American—to be made there.

Had Miami not been transformed by the Cuban presence, it would in all likelihood resemble most other cities in the Sunbelt. Indeed, it is entirely possible even now to live in Miami (or spend time there as a tourist) and thin of oneself as being in yet another rich, temperate place that resembles nothing so much as a giant construction site, and where all the help speaks Spanish. The stewardesses and young lawyers who live in neighborhoods like Coconut Grove or on condominium islands like Grove Isle (a development that one cannot enter without a pass) are virtually indistinguishable from their California or Texas counterparts. One finds the same luxury shopping malls, the same pseudo-Italian cafés, even the same preferences in automobiles and ethnic foods: Nissans and sushi bars predominate at the moment, with Audis and tandoori making determined runs.

Even the locals will admit that Miami does not have all that much (besides its climate, its prosperity, and its proximity to the Caribbean) to recommend it. The city has no real museums, no first-rate universities, no symphony, an opera that is not quite dead but not quite alive either, and—with the exception of one in Coconut Grove—no theatre of any interest. The arts in Miami never found a patron the way, say, Houston had first the McAgy family and then the de Menils. Indeed, the best place to see modern art may well be Grove Isle. There the developer—Martin Margulies—has surrounded a series of undistinguished apartment blocks with a vast array of Dubuffets (the one at the gatehouse looks half-eaten by kudzu weeds already), Calders, Segals, di Suveros, and the like. No, what is interesting about Miami, what makes it not like other pleasant American cities, is precisely the thing that has made it notorious: the Latin, particularly the Cuban, influence.

Miami, everyone agrees, is a modern-day Casablanca. This may be a cliché, but like other clichés, there is truth to it. The cocaine trade is centred in South Florida, and it is quite possible—indeed, it has become commonplace—for a political murder in Colombia to be decided upon over dinner in Hialeah. And many banks have laundered money from the drug trade, at least according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. A customs officer once wrote that “if we were 100 percent effective, we would so drastically affect the economy that we would become the villains.” Miami is a city awash in “black” money. If one takes as a rule of thumb the Economics 101 principle that each dollar circulates through an economy three times, it is easy to see how crucial the drug trade is to South Florida.

Drugs are only part of the story. Many multinational corporation have set up their Latin American headquarters not in Caracas or Mexico City but in Miami, and the city has also become a banking center, serving Latin America in much the way Switzerland serves the rest of the world: it is as haven for the money of almost the entire Latin-American middle class.

A Cuban magazine editor put it this way: “I think,” he said, “that if you took any country in Latin America and looked at every businessman worth a million dollars or more, you would find that he had at least one bank account in Miami.” The fact is that such people not only hold Florida bank accounts but have also, in recent years, bought houses, boats, and even commercial property. All of this serves them as a hedge against the possibility that one day things may go to hell back home in Colombia, or Honduras, or Peru, or Chile. For the Latin-American elite, this is not simply a bad dream. Key Biscayne is full of Nicaraguans who made money under Somoza and, because there was Miami waiting, have not suffered any marked diminution in their standard of living.

As Miami has become a city of Latin Americans, it has become a focal point for all kinds of political activity. The place is full of Bay of Pigs veterans, anti-Sandinista Nicaraguans, right-wing operatives from the entire contintent (and, no doubt, some Communist ones as well). It is a caldron of bombast and intrigue. If Miami is not in fact Rick’s place it is, at the very least, Ricardo’s.

What transformed Miami was the Cuban revolution. After 1949, a somnolent South Florida resort town—a rather tough, Jim Crow town—began to receive wave after wave of anti-Communist Cuban refugees. At first, having arrived penniless, the Cubans clustered in the southwestern part of the city. But these people were not typical immigrants from “south of the border.” They were not fleeing desperate poverty (although the Castro government had made them destitute by confiscating virtually everything they owned), and they were better educated than most Miamians. Moreover—and this is a subject that people in Miami do not like to mention, although it accounts, among other things, for the bitter friction between black and Cubans—most of the refugees had white skins. The cozy elite of Dade County and its environs soon found itself competing with more than a million energetic Cubans—talented, experienced in business, in short, people whose anti-Communist fervor was matched only by their drive to make it in what they persisted in thinking of as their “temporary” home.

And make it they did. The prosperity of South Florida can be considered neither solely a part of the Sunbelt’s general prosperity nor simply a function of all the cash that flows from drug trafficking. The Cubans made Miami into a big city—a world-class economic center. As capitalists, they can be compared only to the Jews and to the overseas Chinese in entrepreneurial drive.

The longer one remain in Miami, the clearer it becomes that what appears to be one big Cuban neighborhood is in fact several Cuban communities, often as much at odds with each other as with the world outside. On Southwest Eighth Street, the business hub of the emigration of the early 1960s, one drives past a sign that reads: the kiwanis of little havana welcome you to calle ocho. Old-line anti-Communism is still practiced here with gusto. At station WRHC, Thomas Regalado Jr., the news director (his father also works at the station, after having served thirteen years as a political prisoner in Cuba), has a decal over his desk of crossed American and Cuban flags under the legend “Libertad vs. Comunismo: Reagan-Bush ’84.”

At another station, Agustin Tamargo, perhaps the city’s most popular Spanish-language talk-show host, devotes his entire program one eventing to two members of a militant exile group who denounce a guest from a previous segment. They argue violently over whether their adversary is a dupe, an agent, or a lackey. This kind of dogmatism is part of the baggage of exile politics. In Paris during the 1920s, the White Russian émigrés probably argued among themselves in similar tones. And there is little doubt that the views expressed along “Calle Ocho” are indeed the views of the overwhelming majority of Cuban-Americans. What complicates things is that the Cubans of Miami have made such as success of their exile that perhaps in spite of their political views, their reality is being transformed. For most of them, economic prosperity in South Florida makes it doubtful that they would seriously contemplate returning to Cuba even if Castro fell tomorrow. Having grafted a piece of Cuba onto the American mainland, they have probably less reason to return than most are willing to admit. America, as it were, is stuck with them, and they are stuck with America.

Their children already seem American. To an outsider, the physical differences between older Cuban men and women and their American-born, or, at least, American-raised offspring are remarkable. Older Cubans are often short and thickset: clad in their guayaberas, drinking their endless cups of coffee and punctuating their voluble sentences with baroque, flamboyant, gestures, they seem like, well….foreigners. In contrast, young Cuban men look like other Floridians. Indeed, it is understandable to mistake young Cubans sitting in one of the all-night cafés of Little Havana for a couple of Anglo tourists. Sometimes they may be heard speaking to each other (or, more often, to a child) in accentless American English only to shift, almost on whim, into pure Cuban Spanish.

So many of these tall, rangy young men radiate a very American kind of self-confidence—the kind so often thought of as “Texan.” This physical transformation is something that is remarked on by people who teach in Miami’s high schools and colleges. Fifteen years ago Cuban girls usually had the big bottoms and generous figures of their mothers, but now they are as lithe—and sometimes as anorexic—as their Anglo sisters.

It would be preposterous to think that Cuban-Americans will assimilate in the way that, say, Germans, or Poles, or Jews did. The Spanish language is in North America to stay. But whether one looks at the teenage joyriders who flock to Coconut Grove on Saturday nights or at a crowd watching a football game in the Orange Bowl (itself on the edge of Little Havana), young Cuban-Americans seem increasingly at ease in every aspect of American life. Certainly this has dampened the fury of exile politics in Miami. A young Cuban filmmaker said to me in all seriousness that “no one’s been blown away over politics for the last year or two. It wasn’t always that way.”

If the older generation of island-born Cubans are brilliant, driven merchants and businessmen, their children combine these talents with unashamed materialism and money hunger of the Sunbelt. One is what one owns, and, perhaps because they realize their prosperity is so dependent on the drug business, Miamians don’t seem to care too much how people get their money. As I drove through Coconut Grove one balmy evening, a friend who has lived in Miami all his life mentioned to me matter-of-factly that although the Grove had once been a hippie neighborhood it was now (after the fortuitous removal of a city ordinance barring high-rise construction) populated by “rich doctors, lawyers, and coke dealers.” It was not that he had a particularly low opinion of lawyers or doctors (or even a high opinion of coke dealers); it simply made no difference to him whatsoever.

In this sense, at least, Miami is the new Casablanca. Anything goes, and yet everything is just fine. No one admits to being shocked by anything, and yet there is a considerable effort to appear respectable. Miami sometimes seems like America dubbed into Spanish and sometimes like Latin America without leftists. A relatively insignificant North American city has been transformed into the hub of Hispanic America, and the consequences are both reassuring and unsettling. For Miami is more than just another free port. What is going on in Miami—whether the subject is drugs, illegal immigration, world banking, bilingualism, or any of a dozen other issues—may well be what goes on in the rest of the Sunbelt not so many years hence. It is an extraordinary spectacle—both of virtue and, it goes without saying, vice.