Nowhere is the vitriol between Cuban exiles in Miami and supporters of Fidel Castro on the island more palpable than in the Spanish-language media. Radio stations and newspapers here regularly refer to Castro as “El Verdugo,” the executioner. Granma, the official Communist Party daily newspaper, refers to exiles as “the…
Something is horribly amiss. The floor is dry and sparkling clean. The urinals are attached firmly to the wall, which is noticeably void of gaping holes, as is the drop ceiling with the snappy geometric pattern. A huge mirror, uncracked and whole, beckons from above a clean white sink. The…
Maybe the fact that Metro-Dade County buys bottled water for its employees doesn’t surprise anybody. Maybe it should. Granted, there are some legitimate uses for bottled water. Rehabilitative Services, a division of the Human Resources Department, needs distilled water to mix addiction-treatment drugs. The Metro-Dade Transit Agency has mechanical considerations…
Carmen Caldwell didn’t flinch when acting Hialeah Mayor Julio Martinez fired her in January as the city police department’s coordinator for community relations and Citizens Crime Watch. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll do the job for free.” But donating up to twelve hours of her time each day apparently made his…
In the late Thirties, William “Tallahassee” Dranes, an obscure Panhandle blues singer, sat awake in a shotgun shack and mused about the weather. It was so hot that summer that birds fell out of the sky completely cooked. So hot that parking lots melted and poured down streets, carrying children…
The deep freezer in David A. Zlatkin’s one-bedroom apartment is stocked with chilled corpses, the macabre by-product of a hobby that has consumed him. Frozen to their bones are three red rat snakes, a scarlet king snake, a closely related scarlet snake, a cottonmouth water moccasin, a couple of mud…
The snakes of South Florida range from tiny blind snakes, often mistaken for worms, to the giant indigo and equally bulky Eastern diamondback rattler, both of which can grow to more than eight feet. Smaller species eat insects. The big boys take mammals and birds. Often a snake’s value to…
Tom Marko, part monk, part Tasmanian devil, has been cloistered for weeks in his office on Flagler Street. Subordinates say the director of Metro’s Passenger Transportation Regulatory Division looks pale and sickly, yet mysteriously triumphant. At times, they report, he is heard cackling into the telephone late at night, or…
Carl Hiaasen is a twisted visionary who exorcises sociological demons with words.
Greg Baldwin speaks with the straightforwardness of a person who has made the following statement so many times he has forgotten that most people will miss the weight of its full meaning: “The heterosexual community has to understand what we want and where we’re coming from and who we are.”…
Pepe Garcia was exhausted, drained, burned out. Too many twelve-hour days at the garment factory in Hialeah. And the work was boring, definitely not the career for an enterprising Cuban immigrant. So Pepe decided he needed a change, a drastic change. One day while looking through a local newspaper, an…
The time has passed when the only relief from bad fast food was Alka-Seltzer. Burger King, the Miami-based restaurant giant, has designed a program to show – or at least pretend – that it cares for its customers. The toll-free consumer-relations hotline (1-800-YES-1-800) is exactly what it sounds like -…
Six years ago, when Bill Barrere and other dedicated volleyball players went looking for a game on Miami Beach, they had just one choice: 85th Street. The location at the northern edge of the city was inconvenient, and the meager facilities (just two courts) often meant long waits for a…
It is time for all good people to come to the defense of their Pee-wee. I can’t tell you whether or not he did it. After all, I wasn’t sitting behind the long-haired, goateed man in that Sarasota adult movie theater on July 26, my eyes riveted on his hands…
Roberto Torres is rocking, ankles to unsure toes, on a concrete step high in the sweaty reaches of Guaynabo’s municipal stadium. He is a small, round man squeezed into a mesh tank top and Day-Glo shorts. On his face is a look of sheer contempt, which he rivets on a…
In the end, Cesar Bocachica couldn’t bear the silence. The six-foot-five-inch sharp-shooting forward left Florida International University last year, after just one stellar season, returning to Puerto Rico’s Superior Basketball League (SBL). “It was tough for me to get up for games in Miami,” recalls Bocachica, who, despite his stature,…
At the northeast corner of Grand Avenue and Douglas Road stands the hulking, vacant Tikki Club bar, in its heyday the scene of shootings, stabbings, and frequent drug busts. After a half-dozen years of disputes and delays, plans are under way to turn the site into “Goombay Plaza,” an open-air,…
While New York theater percolates with high-profile projects, marquee-caliber stars, and the thrill of premieres, Miami often must be content with Broadway Lite, Andrew Lloyd Weber slapping together a touring company to extract a few more cents from Phantom. New York probably thinks that’s the way it should be. After…
He was one of these guys you see on Friday afternoon at the 7-Eleven, stocking up on beer for the weekend, maybe buying some Lotto tickets, then piling into a battered van with his buddies and cranking up Zeta-4 on the radio. It would be nice to say his skills…
In recent weeks Miami’s financially floundering Jackson Memorial Hospital has become the principal battle zone in a union war for the hearts and minds of Dade County’s 14,000 nurses. Since 1975 a local chapter of the Florida Nurses Association (FNA) – one of only ten unions in Dade – has…
“In a story in the March 18 editions of The Herald, Homestead City Manager Alex Muxo’s fainting in 1981 was improperly described as a nervous breakdown. It was in fact a physical collapse brought about by exhaustion and stress.” — Miami Herald, March 22, 1989 Three years ago, observing an…
At the northeast corner of Grand Avenue and Douglas Road stands the hulking, vacant Tikki Club bar, in its heyday the scene of shootings, stabbings, and frequent drug busts. After a half-dozen years of disputes and delays, plans are under way to turn the site into “Goombay Plaza,” an open-air,…
