History of Miami
Wednesday, September 10th, 2008By Carlos Miller | Magic City Media ©2005
Brash and beautiful. Edgy and enticing. And sultry and swank. Miami is all that and much more.
A city that arose from a swampy flatland a little more than 100 years ago, Miami is a bustling metropolis renowned for tourism, fashion and nightlife as well as a Mecca for international trade and business.
It is the youngest city in the United States, but the third most popular destination for international travelers behind Los Angeles and New York, cities that dwarf Miami in size.
Not even a rash of internationally publicized tourist slayings in the early 1990s was enough to permanently deter tourists from vacationing in this tropical city.
Nicknamed “The Magic City” in the early 1900s because it seemingly became a city overnight without ever being a town, Miami has acquired a myriad of other nicknames over the years, including the “The Gateway to the Americas”, “The American Riviera”, The Sixth Borough” as well as the degrading “Cocaine Capital” and embarrassing “Banana Republic.”
It is a city that has weathered hurricanes, riots, scandals, corruption, crime, racial tension, political turmoil and endless waves of immigration, only to bounce back with swaggering bravado.
On the brink of bankruptcy a little more than ten years ago, Miami once again proved its resiliency by recently becoming one of the hottest – if not hottest – real estate markets in the country with more than 100 skyscrapers under construction that are filling the gaps of Miami’s already colorful skyline. Not that real estate booms are anything new to the Magic City.
It is an ever-evolving city that has yet to reach its potential, a culturally diverse metropolis that many believe is a blueprint for American cities in the 21 century. And although Miami is often criticized for having no history, its name was spoken among these parts more than 10,000 years ago.
Mayaimi
In 1567, two years after Pedro Menendez de Avilez founded the country’s oldest permanent city in St. Augustine, the Spanish explorer arrived in South Florida and encountered an Indian settlement on the banks of what is now the Miami River.
The tribe known today as the Tequestas spoke proudly of “Mayaimi” as they pointed to the river, which had been their lifeline for centuries. Back then, the Miami River was a crystal-clear, rapid flowing channel of water that connected Biscayne Bay to Lake Okechobee via the Everglades.
Historians believe Mayaimi meant either “clear water”, “sweet water”, or “big water.” It was most likely the word they used to describe the entire body of water, from the mouth of the river to Lake Okechobee, which at 730-square miles in south-central Florida, is the second largest fresh water lake in the nation.
The Tequestas, who hunted whales in the Atlantic Ocean and deer in the Everglades, had great respect for the water surrounding them. It is unclear where the Tequestas migrated from. Some believe they ventured down south from the Ohio area. And others believe the Tequestas were actually Aztecs who paddled on over from Mexico.
The Spanish, who were most likely seeking gold, built a mission on the north bank of the river in an attempt to convert the Tequestas to Christianity. But the tribe resisted and eventually died off from disease, battle and enslavement brought on by the Europeans.
Today, the legacy of the Tequestas not only lives on with the name of the city, but Tequesta artifacts are continually being uncovered in downtown Miami as old buildings are being demolished to make room for the new skyscrapers. In 1998, construction workers uncovered the Miami Circle on the south bank of the Miami River, a circular piece of limestone bedrock consisting of chiseled holes that is at least 2,000 years old and may have had some sort of religious or spiritual significance to the Tequestas.
Florida remained mostly under Spanish rule for the next two centuries, with some brief interludes of British and French rule. During this time, South Florida became a haven for runaway slaves, displaced Indians and marauding pirates who preyed on Spanish vessels transporting gold from South and Central America back to Spain.
Several other Indian tribes moved into South Florida from Georgia and Alabama to escape the wrath of the United States land expansion. The Indians were joined by the runaway slaves. The Spanish called the new arrivals “Cimarrones”, which means “wild” and “unruly,” and allowed them to live freely in Florida.
But when the Spanish ceded Florida to the United States in 1819, the Cimarrones became known as the Seminoles, a fierce tribe that waged three wars against the United States in the government’s quest to settle South Florida. The Second Seminole War was the bloodiest and costliest of all U.S./Indian wars, as well as the first time the U.S. found itself fighting an enemy specializing in guerrilla tactics.
Fighting next to the Seminoles were the runaway slaves, who became known as the “Black Seminoles.” In an attempt to quash the stubborn Seminoles, the United States built a military barrack on the north bank of the Miami River and the area became known as Fort Dallas. Historians believe that if it weren’t for the resiliency of the Seminoles, and later the Civil War, in which Florida succeeded from the union a mere 16 years after it became a state, Miami would have been established much earlier.
After the Third Seminoles War, the tribe disappeared into the Everglades, letting the white man have the banks of the Miami River and going down in history as the only tribe to never have signed a peace treaty with the United States. The Seminoles retained their grit throughout the years. In 1979, the Seminoles became the first U.S. tribe to sue the government for its right to operate bingo games on the reservation, which paved the way for modern-day gaming on reservations throughout the United States.
Today, the Seminoles own and operate the Seminole Hard Rock Casino in Broward County. The Miccosukee tribe, one of the original tribes from Georgia that had joined the Seminoles when they entered Florida more than two centuries ago, re-established their tribe in 1960. They now operate the Miccosukee Resort and Gaming west of Miami on the edge of the Everglades.
After the Civil War, veterans from both armies and former slaves moved to South Florida to begin a new chapter in their life, joining the black Bahamians already living there. The Bahamians had been coming to South Florida since the early 1800s to salvage the remains of ships that had wrecked on South Florida’s treacherous reefs. They were called “wreckers” and it was a lucrative trade.
The settlement growing around the Miami River was still being called Fort Dallas as other communities emerged along the coast, including Coconut Grove, Buena Vista, Cutler and Lemon City, which is present day Little Haiti.
Despite a few ramshackle buildings in these communities, modern-day Miami was still a swampy jungle infested with alligators, snakes and panthers. It was a remote area that could only be reached by boat, the Last Frontier of the continuous 48 states. And it became the only city in the country to have been founded by a woman.
Birth of a city
Julia Tuttle, an Ohio widow who owned several hundred acres of land on the north side of the Miami River during the late 19th century, envisioned a gateway city for international trade. For years, she had been trying to persuade millionaire Henry Flagler to extend his railroad to South Florida, but he didn’t see the potential of settling a mosquito-infested jungle. That is, until 1895, when a cold spell wiped out crops in all of Florida except the southern tip.
It is said that Tuttle seized on the opportunity to send Flagler a box of orange blossoms from South Florida – ripe and ready to be exported throughout the country – and a city was born. Tuttle, known as the “mother of Miami”, and William and Mary Brickell, who owned land on the south bank of the river, agreed to give Flagler land in exchange for him extending the railroad south. Today, Brickell Avenue, which runs from the south bank of the river, is Miami’s financial district.
The first train pulled up to the north bank of the river in April 1896 with Flagler at the helm. Three months later, the various settlements along the coast were incorporated into a city. Voters wanted to name the new city “Flagler”, after the man that gave them a direct rail line to New York City.
But Flagler wanted to call the city Miami. That was, after all, what the Spanish had called it during the 200 years they controlled it. And what the Tequestas had called it for much longer than that.
Miami became an instant tourist attraction, thanks to Flagler, who built streets, instituted water and power systems and financed the city’s first newspaper, optimistically named The Metropolis. In 1897, Flagler built the Royal Palm Hotel on the north bank of the Miami River, in the heart of modern downtown, a luxurious five-floor, 400-room resort with electric lights, elevators and a swimming pool.
It became an instant winter retreat for the rich and famous, including Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. As word spread of the newly formed paradise, thousands flocked to Miami to buy property.
Miami entered the 20th century riding the first of its many real estate booms. As the city expanded westward, the everglades were drained to make room for new houses and roads. Some unsuspecting investors ended up buying worthless swampland. Even back then, Miami was attracting its share of swindlers.
The 1920s land boom
Miami may be southern in geography, but it was built with northern money and inspiration. It was a New Jersey native named John Collins who purchased a strip of swampland off the coast of Miami, envisioning an “Atlantic City of the South”. And it was Carl Fisher, a well-traveled Indiana native who made his fortune selling cars, who envisioned a “Fifth Avenue of the South” on the uninhabited island.
That island became Miami Beach in 1915, where Collins built his oceanfront hotels and casinos, and Fisher built Lincoln Road, a thoroughfare of expensive shops, nightclubs, bars and theaters. That year, Fisher completed the Dixie Highway, a 1,300-mile road that connected Miami to Chicago that ensured a steady flow of tourists.
The two men then began an aggressive marketing campaign targeting northern urbanites. Fisher went as far as purchasing a giant illuminated sign in Times Square during the middle of winter proclaiming “It’s June in Miami”. Thousands responded and Miami Beach became the hottest tourist spot in the country. And unlike the turn of the century, when only the rich and famous could afford the train ticket to Miami, the 1920s was a time when Miami was accessible and affordable to America’s middle class, thanks to the advent of the automobile and Fisher’s Dixie Highway.
World War I had just ended and the economy was thriving. Most families owned cars and brand new highways that connected New York City and Chicago to Miami, kept a steady supply of tourists coming. Unlike in previous years, most of the new visitors were young, middle-class families that came looking for homes and land, rather than resorts and hotels.
Prohibition was keeping the country dry, but people were allowed to drink freely and openly in Miami, as the city gained a reputation for debauchery. Thanks to the hundreds of rum runners smuggling liquor in from the Bahamas and Cuba, Miami had a steady supply of booze to keep people happy. As the tourist slogan confirmed several decades later, “the rules are different here.”
The land boom pushed Miami’s boundaries westward and its buildings skyward. Developers built the Dade County Courthouse, which remained the tallest building south of Baltimore for several decades. They also built a skyscraper modeled on the Giralda Tower in Spain that became known as the Freedom Tower after thousands of Cuban refugees were processed there during the 1960s. In the eyes of the Cuban exile, it is Miami’s Ellis Island.
In 1922, developer George Merrick, the son of a Massachusetts minister, began carving out what would be the nation’s first planned community; an enclave of Spanish castles and tree-lined streets that became known as Coral Gables.
Merrick also built the Biltmore Hotel, another building modeled after the Giralda Tower in Spain. He nicknamed his creation “the City Beautiful.” Today, Coral Gables is a Mediterranean oasis within a thriving metropolis.
But there was a price to pay for paradise as many residents discovered in 1926. A severe hurricane with winds up to 150 mph wiped out most of the city, killing up to 300 people and leaving thousands homeless. Described by the U.S. Weather Bureau as “the most destructive hurricane ever to strike the United States”, the storm destroyed all of Collin’s casinos, washing away his Atlantic City, and flooded Fisher’s Fifth Avenue. It also left Flagler’s Royal Palm Hotel in shambles where it had to be demolished. And it killed Miami’s land boom, placing the city in the Great Depression three years before the rest of the nation.
But Miami managed to rebound from the depression before the rest of the nation, thanks to a new wave of development that sprung up on Miami Beach. The new hotels that emerged from the hurricane rubble became known as the Art Deco District. With their sleek streamlining and bold geometric patterns, the colorful hotels once again turned Miami into a winter playground for rich and famous northeasterners – the only people who could afford it during those years.
Those years may have been lean, but Miami was still able to retain its allure for notoriety. In 1928, Al “Scarface” Capone bought a house in Palm Island, a residential island between Miami and Miami Beach. The man known to the feds as Public Enemy Number One was a notorious Chicago bootlegger. Setting up shop a short boat ride from the Bahamas was a wise business decision. And although Miami officials publicly decried Capone’s arrival, they were secretly grateful. Capone was a big spender during a time when Miami was in the economic doldrums.
Less than a year later, as Capone resided in his new home, a group of his henchmen entered a Chicago warehouse dressed as police officers, and gunned down seven rival mobsters in what went down as the most spectacular mob hit in gangland history. All fingers pointed to Capone, but there was nothing the Feds could do. He had been in Miami.
Nevertheless, newspapers throughout the country dubbed the incident the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre” and turned Capone into an overnight celebrity. Capone had to hire a press agent to handle the numerous interview requests, which he conducted with his cocky charm and trademark cigar.
Although Capone was eventually jailed for tax evasion, Miami continued to attract its share of criminals.
In 1933, when President-Elect Franklin Delano Roosevelt was touring the country, an Italian immigrant who had moved to Miami from New Jersey, entered a Miami pawnshop and purchased a .32 caliber pistol.
Armed with his new purchase, Giuseppe Zangara joined a crowd of spectators in downtown Miami to listen to Roosevelt’s speech. He worked his way to the front of the crowd, stood up on a wooden chair and fired six times, missing Roosevelt but striking Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who died two weeks later. During his trial, Zangara claimed to be an anarchist who was trying to kill Roosevelt. He was electrocuted two weeks later in the Florida State Penitentiary.
Some historians believe Zangara was a hit man hired by Capone to kill the Chicago mayor. Cermak, they say, had been trying to use his political muscle to move in on Capone’s turf. Although Capone was in an Atlanta prison at the time, it was no secret that he had been running his organization from his cell until he was transferred to Alcatraz the following year. Capone returned to Miami after being released from prison in 1939. By then, an untreated dose of syphilis had left him mentally incompetent. He died in his Miami home in 1947.
Black Miami: The Early Years
Despite its northern influence, Miami had a southern police and sheriff’s department that kept it solidly segregated well into the 1960s. Even white Jews were barred from certain Miami Beach hotels until after World War II, an irony considering Jews eventually became a majority on the beach.
But even though Miami’s blacks were treated like second-class citizens, they have long played a role in turning Miami into the Magic City. It was black voters, who made up a third of the vote in 1896, which enabled Miami to become incorporated in the first place. And it was black laborers, mostly Bahamian immigrants, who cleared out the mangroves from the swamp and built the railroad, hotels and streets that turned Miami into a winter playground. It was also Bahamian settlers that established South Florida’s first black community in Coconut Grove four years before Miami became a city.
The 1900 census showed that 40 percent of Miami’s citizens were black, most of them foreign born, mainly from the Bahamas. And for the next twenty years, more than 10,000 black Bahamians immigrated to Miami. By 1920, Bahamian blacks made up 16 percent of the city’s population. Even back then, Miami was a haven for immigrants.
Once Miami was incorporated, blacks were told they could only buy property in a small area north of downtown. The white people called it “Colored Town”. It later became Overtown.
By the 1930s, Overtown was a thriving entertainment district for black performers known as “Little Broadway”. After all, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, Count Blasie and Ella Fitzgerald may have been allowed to perform on Miami Beach over the years. Up until the 1960s, they weren’t allowed to sleep in its hotels. So they stayed in Overtown and gave after-hour performances that lasted until daylight.
World War II
Less than a year after Pearl Harbor was attacked, a German U-boat torpedoed an American vessel off the coast of Miami Beach in plain view of carousing tourists who watched the ship burn and sink. That incident, along with more than 20 other similar incidents along the Florida coast that year, prompted the government to turn Miami into a military center.
Miami Beach’s Art Deco hotels were turned into military barracks for the duration of the war, and more than 600,000 service men trained in South Florida throughout the war, keeping Miami’s economy stable. When the war ended, hundreds of veterans remained in Miami, and thousands more moved to the Magic City from all over the country for a piece of postwar sunshine. And as Miami continued expanding westward in yet another development boom, a new style of hotels emerged five miles north of the Art Deco District. Miami, once again, became a tropical retreat for America’s middle class.
During the mid-1950s, post-modern architect Morris Lapidus left his mark on what became known as North Beach by building the Fontainebleau Resort and Eden Roc Hotel. The buildings, with their sweeping forms and eccentric details, were criticized by the architectural world for being gaudy. But they became the backdrop for another generation of jetsetters, gangsters and entertainers.
Meyer Lansky, known as the brain behind Murder Inc., one of Chicago’s most ruthless crime syndicates, was running several illegal gambling and prostitution operations on Miami Beach during this time. All were ignored by the local police. As long as the tourists were happy, so were the locals.
And how could the tourists not be happy? This was a time when Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, Bob Hope, Lena Horne, Milton Berle, Bobby Darin, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin were all performing regularly at these hotels.
By the 1960s, Miami Beach had become a frequent backdrop for television shows, boxing matches and movies. In 1964, a week after the Beatles introduced themselves to America on the Ed Sullivan Show in New York City, the British band flew down to Miami and performed live on the show a second time via satellite. More than 70 million Americans tuned in to see the band that was taking the country by storm.
Nine days later, a young boxer named Cassius Clay shocked the world by defeating heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in Miami Beach for the world title. Shortly after the fight, Clay announced he had joined the Nation of Islam and had changed his name to Muhammad Ali, considered by many to be the greatest boxer of all time.
But before all that happened, a revolution had been brewing 90 miles south of Florida that would forever change the face of Miami.
“El exilo”
On New Years Day in 1959, Fidel Castro overthrew Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, setting the stage for thousands of middle and upper class Cubans to flee their homeland for Miami. They arrived in Miami thinking it would be a temporary stay. After all, they had the backing of the United States, who had vowed to combat communism throughout the world.
In 1961, the CIA trained almost 1,500 Cuban exiles for a planned invasion of Cuba. President John F. Kennedy promised them full air support. Not only was the Bay of Pigs invasion supposed to take Castro by surprise, the U.S. government’s involvement was supposed to remain a secret.
But the plan failed miserably. Castro’s army was fully prepared and once word of the invasion reached Moscow, the Soviets responded by threatening the United States with warfare unless they backed off immediately. The Air Force was called off, leaving the exiles, known as the Brigade 2506, at the mercy of Castro’s army. Almost 200 exiles were killed and almost 1,200 captured.
Less than a year later, Kennedy got the prisoners released by giving Castro $50 million in medical and baby supplies. Then, against the advice of his advisors, he flew down to Miami to visit with 30,000 Cubans in the Orange Bowl, where he accepted the brigade flag for safekeeping and promised that it would fly over a free Havana soon.
But Kennedy was killed less than a year later and the Cuban exiles never forgave him for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Some conspiracy theorists speculate that Cuban exiles from Miami were behind the assassination, along with the CIA and the mafia. In 1976, Bay of Pigs veterans hired a lawyer to get the brigade flag back from storage in a museum basement. Today, the flag is on permanent display at the Bay of Pigs Museum in Miami.
The Bay of Pigs is responsible for turning hundreds of thousands of Cuban exiles into republicans, creating a powerful voting bloc that permanently changed politics in a city that had been democratic since its birth. It also fueled the creation of several anti-Castro militant groups in Miami.
One of the first groups called itself Alpha 66 and claims to have conducted hundreds of military operations against the Cuban government throughout the 1960s. Other Cuba exile groups emerged that began a series of bombings against local business and people whom they believed were sympathetic to the Castro regime.
One Cuban exile, Orlando Bosch, was convicted in 1968 for firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter in the Port of Miami because it was trading with Cuba. Bosch, who served four years for that incident, spent another eleven years in a Venezuelan jail for his alleged role in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner, which killed 73.
In 1983, the Miami City Commission, which by then had become majority Cuban, proclaimed an “Orlando Bosch Day” in his honor. Bosch, who was reportedly trained by the CIA, was pardoned by Republican President George Bush in the early 1990s.
Another exile, Luis Posada Carriles, also served time in a Venezuelan jail for the 1976 Cuban airliner incident. Posada, who escaped from jail in 1985, continued his terrorist activities, including bombing a Cuban hotel in 1997 that killed an Italian tourist, he admitted to the New York Times that same year. In
2005, he snuck into the United States seeking asylum, hoping George W. Bush would pardon him as his father pardoned Bosch more than a decade earlier.
But Bush, who was fighting his “war on terror” abroad, found it difficult to justify granting Posada asylum. As of this writing, Posada’s case was still being reviewed by the U.S. Government. And there has been no word from the Miami City Commission on whether they plan to proclaim an official Luis Posada Day.
In 1972, three Cuban exiles from Miami were among the five arrested for breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC, an incident that lead to the downfall of President Richard Nixon.
Eugenio Martinez, Virgilio Gonzalez and Bernard Barker all had CIA ties. Barker, despite his Anglo surname, was a former member of the secret police of Fulgencio Batista, the fascist dictator whom Castro replaced. A fourth burglar, Frank Sturgis, was an Italian-American who lived in Miami and helped organize the Bay of Pigs invasion. Sturgis is believed to have recruited the Cubans for the operation.
Nixon, who owned a home in Miami’s Key Biscayne, had watched his presidential administration come full circle in Miami. The lifelong politician had won his presidential nomination on Miami Beach during the 1968 Republican National Convention – as Miami’s first inner city riot broke out seven miles across the bay.
Racial unrest
By the late 1960s, more than 100,000 Jews had relocated to Miami Beach from the northeast, an influx second in size only to the near 500,000 Cubans who had settled in a working class neighborhood west of downtown, known today as Little Havana.
Miami had become a curious mix of rural whites, native blacks, Jewish transplants and Cuban exiles, a recipe that created an underlying tension for several decades. And its police department, which had remained stoutly southern in attitude, was overwhelmingly white, despite patrolling a city that was almost one-third black.
Adding to the tension was the decision to construct Interstate 95 through the heart of Overtown, which wiped out the neighborhood’s main business district and cultural center, marking the end of what had been known as “Little Broadway.” Population dropped from 40,000 to 10,000.
The late 1960s was a time when civil unrest around the globe was strife, a period in which the civil rights movement was sweeping across the South. But to the blacks living in Miami, who were losing low-income jobs to the Cuban immigrants, it seemed as if the civil rights movement had stopped short of the Miami border.
In 1968, as the nation’s spotlight shone on Miami Beach for the Republican National Convention, Miami blacks staged a rally in the hopes it would generate national attention. The rally began in Liberty City, a black community north of Overtown. And it turned violent when a group of youths threw rocks at a car driven by a white man with the bumper sticker “George Wallace for president” on his car. Wallace was the Alabama Governor running for president who supported segregation.
The man ended up crashing his car and a group of black youths began chasing him. He ended up getting pulled inside a bar by a group of black men who protected him. His car was overturned and set on fire.
That incident attracted the attention of Florida Governor Claude Kirk, who was at the convention when the riot broke out. He met with the blacks, listened to their grievances and agreed to meet with them the following morning to come up with a solution. But he never showed up, which lead to more rocks and bottles being thrown.
Police ended up firing into a crowd of demonstrators, killing two people. Officers killed two more people before the riot ended five days after it started. An investigation found no wrongdoing on behalf of police.
By the time Nixon resigned, the Cuban anti-militant groups in Miami had become more violent, assassinating six people between 1973 and 1976 for voicing moderate opinions about U.S. relations with Cuba. They were also responsible for a car bomb that blew off the legs of Emilio Milian, a popular news director for WQBA – “La Cubanisima” – who dared condemn the exile violence on the radio.
Once the Cubans had earned the reputation of being the most violent ethnic group in Miami, in came the Colombian cocaine cowboys, who started a gang war reminiscent of 1930s Chicago, but with better weapons.
In 1979, after several gangland slayings in Miami, Colombian drug traffickers entered a liquor store in Dadeland Mall and emptied their machine guns, killing two rival gang members as well as two liquor store employees. The Colombians began earning a reputation of leaving no witness behind, regardless of their involvement in the drug trade.
The Roaring 80s
Miami had reached a boiling point in its short history. It was like a teenager who had grown up too fast, seeing things most adults never do. It was not the melting pot that civic leaders portrayed it to be, but a bubbling chemical experiment.
It began smoldering in the late 1970s with the arrival of more than a hundred thousand Haitian and Nicaraguan refugees. The Haitians, who were black, poor and did not speak English, arrived in rickety boats, fleeing poverty and human rights abuses imposed by Dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier.
The Nicaraguans, who came from their country’s upper and middle class, arrived by plane, fleeing the newly imposed Sandanista government. The federal government ruled that the Haitians were not allowed to enter the country because they were fleeing economic hardships rather than a communist regime, a judgment that was perceived as racist by Miami’s Haitian and African-American communities.
Adding sparks to this simmering tension was the Mariel boatlift, which began in April 1980 and brought more than 125,000 Cuban refugees to Miami over a six-month period. It is estimated that up to 25,000 of them had been released from Castro’s jails or mental institutions.
Miami then exploded with one of the bloodiest civil disturbances in the history of the United States.
On May 17th, one month into the boatlift, an all-white jury acquitted four police officers in the death of Arthur McDuffie, a black ex-marine who was beaten to death by several white police officers. McDuffie was unarmed and had no criminal record when he was chased on his motorcycle and beaten to death for a traffic violation six months earlier.
Police had then tried to cover up his death by making it look like he died from injuries sustained in the motorcycle wreck. As news of the verdict spread through Miami’s black neighborhoods, a rage that had been simmering for years erupted onto streets.
Black residents pulled white drivers out of cars and killed them before turning the cars over and setting them on fire. White residents drove into black neighborhoods and began shooting blacks at random, including a 14-year-old boy who was shot in the head.
Police and blacks exchanged gunfire as businesses were looted and burned. And for three days, a black plume of smoke hung over Miami as the Florida National Guard tried to maintain order. When it was over, 18 people were dead, more than 400 injured and more than $1 million were left in damages.
In the wake of the riot, black community leaders echoed the same reasons they did after the 1968 riot: Loss of jobs to Cuban refugees and excessive brutality at the hands of Miami police. There had been a series of well-publicized police injustices against the black community in the year leading up to the riot including a white state trooper getting probation for molesting a black girl.
When police killed McDuffie in December of 1979, it had been another drop in the bucket for Miami’s black community. But when the all-white jury acquitted the four white officers, it became a flaming match thrown into a can of gasoline.
However, the lesson fell on deaf ears because Miami officials had their hands full with the thousands of Cuban and Haitian refugees swarming the city. Five months after the riot and six months into the boatlift, crime in Miami had skyrocketed - including a 775 percent increase in robberies – mostly attributed to the criminal element among the Cuban refugees.
And despite an increase in Coast Guard boats that began intercepting Haitian refugees at sea and turning them back, the Haitians continued coming to Miami for a chance at a better life. In 1981, the bodies of 33 Haitians who had drowned at sea after their boat had capsized, washed upon an exclusive residential beach in Broward County, once again, shedding an international spotlight on South Florida.
As rival Colombian gangs continued to shoot it out on Miami’s streets in a bloody battle for cocaine territory, the criminal element among the newly arrived Cuban refugees moved in for a piece of the action. And so did Miami police, who were on their way to becoming the most corrupt police department in the United States.
By the end of 1981, Miami had become the “Murder Capital of the USA” for the second year in a row, with an average of two murders a day, mostly attributed to the flourishing drug trade. Bodies were popping up everywhere.
Bound and gagged and stuffed in car trunks. Slumped over steering wheels after being machine gunned at traffic lights. And strewn in Dumpsters, canals and shallow graves in the Everglades. It got so bad that a refrigerated trailer that had been seized in a drug raid was placed outside the morgue to handle the overflow of bodies.
And the turmoil continued into 1982, when another three days of rioting broke out in Miami’s black community after a Cuban police officer shot and killed a 20-year-old black man who appeared to be reaching for a gun. But this time, they did not wait for a trial and verdict to begin rioting. It started less than an hour after the shooting. One person died in that riot – a black looter at the hands of a police officer.
Then came the Miami River Cops case. In 1985, more than a dozen police officers raided a drug boat docked on the Miami River to steal cocaine. Three drug dealers ended up jumping overboard and drowning. The cops also killed a bar owner as a way to eliminate the middleman in their flourishing drug business.
An investigation unveiled a wide pattern of corruption within the Miami Police Department that had been building up for years. More than two dozen police officers were convicted and 17 officers sent to prison. And almost 100 other officers were disciplined for their involvement. Most of the corrupt officers were young, Hispanic and part of the recruiting class of 1980, in which the department significantly lowered standards to meet the demands of a city facing skyrocketing crime.
In the late 1980s, another wave of Nicaraguan immigrants arrived in Miami, fleeing the civil war that was ravaging their country. Unlike the previous Nicaraguan immigrants, most of these immigrants were poor and unskilled. And rather than fly into Miami International Airport as their predecessors did, they worked their way up through Central America and Mexico, entering the country through Texas before making their way to Miami to join the more than 100,000 Nicaraguans who had settled in the city in the prior decade.
The decade ended just the way it started; with another inner-city riot. But this time, more than 1,500 journalists were in town for the Super Bowl, a moment that civic leaders were counting on to change Miami’s image.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day in 1989, just six days before Miami would host its sixth Super Bowl, a Colombian police officer shot and killed a 23-year-old unarmed black motorcyclist in the back of the head. A second black man, who was a passenger on the motorcycle, died the following day from injuries sustained in the wreck that followed.
Within minutes of the initial shooting, crowds gathered at the scene and began pelting police officers with rocks and bottles. By that evening, cars and buildings were burning in several black communities in Miami. After two days of rioting and looting, one person was dead and more than 20 cars and buildings had been torched.
A month later, the riot claimed its second victim, a black man who had intervened when he saw two black men attack a white man during the riot, allowing the white man to escape. Hilliet Williams, a lifelong resident of Liberty City, had been beaten so severely that he was hospitalized for a month before he died. Almost a year later, as the city held its breath for another riot, the officer in the shooting was convicted for manslaughter. William Lozano appealed the decision and was acquitted in 1993. Nobody rioted.
The 1980s were by far the most turbulent and divisive decade for Miami, but there were many shining moments. The University of Miami Hurricanes emerged as a national powerhouse that decade, winning three national championships by mostly recruiting South Florida high school football players – many who grew up playing on Miami’s riot-torn streets.
Those three championships marked some of the few times during the 1980s where the city celebrated together, regardless of ethnicity. Today, with five national championships under its belt, the Hurricanes provide more players to the National Football League than any other university by continuing to recruit local high school players.
“The Big One”
Miami entered the 1990s battled-scarred, hardened and wizened. But thanks to the popular 1980s TV show Miami Vice, there was a steady increase in tourism. Foreigners wanted to see the colorful city they saw on the television screen. After all, Miami Vice made the once-famous Art Deco District look like a trendy neighborhood of sexy urbanites. The truth, however, was that it had become a slum; a neighborhood of elderly Jewish transplants, drug addicts and homeless people. It wasn’t a safe place at night.
So civic leaders and developers restored the district to how it looked in its heyday in the 1930s. And almost overnight, South Beach became the hippest party district in the world with nightclubs that pulsated until dawn. It became the backdrop for fashion magazines throughout the world. And it became the destination for jetsetters around the world.
So now things were looking up for Miami. Crime was down and tourism was up. Most of the criminals who came on the Mariel boatlift were either in prison or had killed each other off. The majority of the immigrants, whether they were from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua or Central and South America, had settled in a steady routine of honest living.
So Mother Nature decided to stir things up a bit with a category five hurricane in August 1992. Hurricane Andrew packed sustained winds of 165 mph, striking Miami with a ferocity that had not been experienced since the 1926 hurricane. Andrew roared through Miami-Dade County for four hours, tearing off rooftops, blasting windows and plucking trees from the ground.
When it was over, 15 people were dead, more than 25,000 homes demolished and another 100,000 damaged. Another 29 people died in the wake of the storm that, up until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, was the nation’s costliest natural disaster, having caused more than $25 billion in damage.
But unlike the 1926 hurricane, Andrew struck south of the city, concentrating most of the damage to South Miami-Dade County and saving the newly renovated Art Deco District from major damage. So that winter, as Miami tried to rebound from Hurricane Andrew, tourism picked up stronger than ever. And that set the stage for Miami’s next crisis.
The 1980s had turned Miami residents into the best-armed civilians in the country. That became evident after Hurricane Andrew, when hundreds of Miamians were openly walking around with guns on their belts to protect their property from looters. Knowing the violence could strike anywhere, at any moment, Miami residents did not hesitate to defend themselves against attackers. So the criminals turned to the tourists, which became easy targets in their rental cars.
It started in January, 1993 when a 33-year-old Canadian tourist was shot and killed as he drove his rental car in Miami Beach. Four days later, a Venezuelan diplomat was robbed and murdered outside a private home as he pulled up in his rental car to attend a dinner party.
And less than two months later, a 59-year-old German tourist was killed as he tried to rescue his wife from a purse snatcher. The following month, another German tourist was murdered, this one a 39-year-old mother whose rental car was bumped from behind. When she stepped out to survey the damage, two men robbed and beat her, then ran her over.
As Miami tried to recover the international black eye that was causing tourism to plummet, the FBI began investigating Miami City Hall for corruption. It turned out that Miami’s city officials - while telling the world that Miami was no more unlawful than any other major city in the United States - were pocketing thousands of dollars in bribes and bilking millions from taxpayers.
It all went down in 1996 as Miami celebrated its centennial anniversary. The FBI swept down on Miami City Hall, arresting City Manager Cesar Odio, City Commissioner Miller Dawkins and Lobbyist Jorge Luis de Cardenas in a bribes-for-contracts scandal. All three ended up in prison as well as Miami Finance Director turned informant Manohar Surana. The investigation also led to the conviction and imprisonment of Miami-Dade County Commissioner James Burke.
Mayor Stephen Clark, who had presided over Miami through a good part of two decades, had died in office six months before the arrests. It was alleged that he was also benefiting from shady dealing.
Court documents show that Odio had also set up a special account with more than $1 million each year in taxpayer’s money that was available to him and other commissioners when ever they felt the need to take their friends and family out to expensive dinners, sporting events or vacations. This money was also used to make donations to political organizations.
The result: Miami was $70 million in the hole – a city on the brink of bankruptcy.
When word of the financial crisis reached Wall Street, Miami’s bond rating was reduced to junk status. Then a movement to abolish Miami emerged. Their goal was to dissolve the Magic City into the county and pretend it never existed. The issue was put on a ballot in 1997: Should the city of Miami be wiped off the map? The voters said no - all 24 percent of registered voters who showed up to vote.
Dead man voting
Two months after Miami’s resurrection, voters went to the polls again, this time to vote for a new mayor. After the ballots had been counted, Xavier Suarez emerged as the victor, ousting incumbent Joe Carollo, who had taken office 15 months earlier to replace the late Steve Clark.
But his victory was immediately deemed suspicious because there was such a large disparity between votes cast at the polls and absentee ballots. A Miami Herald investigation determined that many of the absentee ballots had been cast by voters who lived outside Miami’s city limits. And other absentee ballots had been cast by convicted felons, who are forbidden to vote in Florida. On Election Day, several of Suarez’s volunteers paid homeless people $10 each to vote for Suarez.
And in one case, an absentee ballot was cast by a man who had died four years earlier.
In his first two weeks in office, as state investigators began looking into the potential fraud, Suarez fired City Manager Ed Marquez, who was being credited by Wall Street for getting the city back on financial track. Suarez then tried forcing the resignation of Police Chief Donald Warshaw, along with 70 other department heads, but the State Attorney stepped in and told him that would be illegal. During Suarez’s first two months in office, Miami went through five city managers.
Suarez then appointed City Commissioner Humberto Hernandez – who was under federal indictment for money laundering – to investigate the state agency that was investigating the mayor for voting fraud. The mayor then flew up to New York and told financial analysts that the city’s $70 million shortfall was fiction, a tall tale created by previous mayor and political opponent Joe Carollo. But Wall Street officials did not buy that story. Suarez’s antics were so absurd, even for Miami standards, that Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen began calling him “Mayor Loco.”
Four months after Suarez was sworn into office, a judge voided the election because of fraud. The city that had survived abolishment a year earlier no longer had a mayor. A week later, a separate panel of judges reinstated Carollo as mayor, stating that he would have won in November if it had not been for the fraud. Carollo, whose nickname in the local media was “Crazy Joe”, immediately fired the city manager, replacing him with Miami Police Chief Donald Warshaw. The sixth city manager is six months.
Five months later, Miami Commissioner Humberto Hernandez was convicted for his role in the voter fraud and the unrelated money laundering charge, and ended up serving four years in prison. Although 26 people were arrested in the voter fraud scandal, there was no evidence that Suarez was aware of the illegal activities.
The Miami Herald won a Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting. With the exception of the Florida Marlins winning the World Series in 1997, only five years after their inaugural season, Miami managed to remain out of the national spotlight for more than a year.
But that would all come to end on the morning of Thanksgiving Day 1999 when a five–year-old Cuban boy was found clinging to an inner tube three miles off the coast of Florida.
Elian
Elian Gonzalez was one of only three survivors among 14 people who had set sail on a small boat from Cuba. His mother had died when the boat capsized. He was taken in by relatives in Miami who defiantly vowed to keep him despite the fact that his father in Cuba demanded his son be returned to him. Elian became a symbol of freedom for Miami’s Cuban community and a political pawn for local politicians.
It turned into an international child custody dispute that divided Miami among ethnic lines, destroyed political careers, altered the outcome of a presidential election and ultimately portrayed Miami’s Cuban community to the rest of the nation as fanatical extremists who place politics over family. Six weeks after the boy was found at sea, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service ruled that the boy needed to be reunited with his father. They set a January 14th deadline, one week from the ruling.
Within hours, hundreds of Cuban Americans stormed the streets in Miami, vowing to paralyze the city. They linked arms and formed human chains to clog traffic in various pockets of Miami, specifically in downtown. They plopped down on the only road leading to the Port of Entry. And they disrupted traffic on Miami’s expressways by driving slow. More than 100 people were arrested in the protest that lasted throughout the evening and the following morning. Police finally dispersed the crowds with tear gas.
Meanwhile, the boy’s Miami family, consisting of his great-uncle and second cousin, challenged the federal decision in a state family court, which ruled in the family’s favor. But U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno – who was born and raised in Miami - overruled Florida’s court decision. She did, however, extend the deadline indefinitely for the boy to be reunited with his father.
The drama intensified two months later when Miami-Dade County Mayor Alex Penelas - an up-and-coming politician who was rumored to be Al Gore’s running mate in the 2000 election - committed political suicide by openly defying the federal government.
During a press conference on the steps of the U.S. Federal Courthouse in Miami, Penelas accused the Clinton administration of provoking civil unrest in Miami by insisting that Elian be reunited with his father. He also declared that county police would not assist federal agents if it came down to them having to seize Elian from his Miami family. It wasn’t a pretty moment for the democrat who had been named People magazine’s “sexiest politician” in 1999.
Not missing a beat, City of Miami Mayor Joe Carollo, old Crazy Joe himself, declared that he was not going to allow city police to assist federal agents in seizing the boy. To the rest of the nation, it appeared as if Miami’s top two politicians, both born in Cuba, were in the process of seceding from the United States. Although many of their Cuban-American constituents cheered their defiance, many in Miami’s Anglo and black population – as well as non-Cuban Latin American population – were disgusted.
Reno set another deadline for the Miami family to turn the boy over, which the family ignored.
Nine days later on Easter weekend, federal authorities raided the house where Elian had been staying, seizing the boy in a moment that was captured on camera and broadcast to the rest of world in minutes.
Within hours, hundreds of Cubans had taken to the streets. Some overturned and burned Dumpsters. Some burned the American flag. And a few others threw rocks and bottles at police. Police, for the second time in three months, were forced to use tear gas to disperse the crowds. More than 300 people were arrested.
The protests continued for several days and included a day-long strike that shut down most businesses in Hialeah and Little Havana, Miami-Dade’s most populated Cuban communities.
A week later, about 2,500 people, mostly Anglos and blacks - with a scattering of Cuban-Americans and other Latin Americans - held a counterdemonstration in South Miami-Dade to voice their support for Reno’s decision.
Meanwhile, Miami Mayor Joe Carollo was seething at not having been notified by Miami Police Chief William O’Brien of the impending raid. Not having the power to fire the chief, Carollo ordered Miami City Manager Donald Warshaw to fire him. Warshaw refused, so he was fired. O’Brien resigned the following day, saying he could no longer work for a divisive mayor in a city that needed to heal.
The two Anglos were replaced by Cubans, further infuriating Miami’s non-Cuban community. The following day, someone draped a banner in front of City Hall with the simple message, “Banana Republic,” dropping a load of bananas in the parking lot.
The Cuban community vowed to get their revenge come Election Day. Seven months after the raid, they showed up in droves to vote against Al Gore. The Democrat Presidential Candidate ended up receiving 70,000 fewer votes in Miami-Dade County than Democrat Bill Clinton did four years earlier. Republican George Bush ended up winning the state of Florida by 538 votes, his victory sealed by the U.S. Supreme Court that year.
Like the 1980 riot, the Elian Gonzalez affair exposed deep cultural divisions within Miami. As one local columnist put it, “the six-year-old boy has proven to be the single most destructive force in South Florida since Hurricane Andrew.”
It was a harsh reality check for residents who had convinced themselves that Miami had matured into a world-class city; that despite the crime, corruption and chaos that had prevailed in the previous two decades, Miami was on par with New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, cities that Miami had been trying to emulate since its conception.
But the truth was, those more-established cities viewed Miami as an enfant terrible, a nice place to visit during the winter, maybe even a decent place to retire, but as politically and economically stable as a third world country. The fact that Mayor Joe Carollo was arrested for domestic violence in February 2001, less than a year after Elian’s seizure, prompted the New York Times to say that Miami was “the epicenter of embarrassment.”
It didn’t help that five months later, former city manager Donald Warshaw was sentenced to a year in prison for stealing nearly $70,000 from a children’s charity while serving as Miami’s police chief. And four months after that, 13 Miami police officers were arrested by the FBI and charged with shooting unarmed citizens and conspiring to cover it up by planting guns in four separate incidents.
Most of the victims were black. Eleven of the officers were Hispanic. Two were Anglo. Miami, it seemed, was on the verge of another civil breakdown.
The biggest blow to Miami’s ego that year, not to mention its pocketbook, was the sudden loss of the Latin Grammys awards show to Los Angeles after more than 60 Cuban exile groups had planned to protest the internationally televised event. The exiles believed the musicians were agents of Fidel Castro, an opinion shared by Crazy Joe Carollo.
Latin Grammy organizers pulled out of Miami less than a month before the scheduled event saying they feared for the safety of attendees. After all, on two previous occasions during the late 1990s, exile groups spat on and pelted fans with rocks and eggs as they entered a concert where Cuban musical groups were going to perform.
The loss of the event ended up costing Miami an estimated $35 million. The New York Times described it as “the latest embarrassment for Miami.” And The Los Angeles Times described it as a “public relations black eye and a major economic blow for Miami.” But Carollo offered no apologies, saying the demonstrators’ first amendment rights took precedence over the millions the city would have raked in.
The loss also exposed something never seen before in Miami: A rift between the normally unified Cuban exile community. Two weeks after the announcement, six Cuban American groups lead a caravan
through the streets of Miami denouncing the Cuban hardliners by protesting the “climate of violence and terrorism.” The groups also vowed that they would lobby to bring more Cuban artists into Miami as a way for young Cuban Americans – many who had never set foot on the island – to keep in touch with their roots and culture. It was a monumental moment in the 42-year history of the Miami exile community that was reported on page B5 of The Miami Herald.
That November, as Crazy Joe ran for re-election against Mayor Loco, a political newcomer stepped into the ring.
A New Beginning
To Miami’s Anglo and black communities, mayoral candidate Manny Diaz seemed no different than the other six men running for mayor in 2001. Like five of his opponents, Diaz was born in Cuba, so he appealed to the powerful Cuban American voting bloc. The only non-Cuban running for mayor that year was Maurice Ferre, a career politician who was born in Puerto Rico and became Miami’s first Hispanic mayor in 1973.
Diaz was viewed with skepticism when he vowed to unite Miami’s divided cultures. After all, he was one of the attorneys for Elian Gonzalez’s Miami family during the four-month saga. Most Anglo and black voters didn’t even bother voting that year.
But a look into Diaz’s background shows that perhaps he does have a genuine interest in reaching out to other cultures. In 1980, when Diaz was fresh out of law school and the Mariel boatlift was creating serious rifts between Miami’s Anglo and Cuban communities, Diaz stepped in to lead the newly formed Spanish American League Against Discrimination. Although the primary goal of the organization was to protect Cubans against discrimination, Diaz took it a step further by protesting the double-standard that was applied to Haitian refugees who were being shipped back to Haiti.
And in 1979, Diaz joined Carrie Meek’s campaign, helping the African American politician to get elected to the Florida House of Representatives. Four years later, Meek became the first black to be elected to the Florida Senate. Diaz spent the next twenty years building a multimillion dollar law firm while helping democrat candidates get elected, preferring to remain behind the political scene.
But even though he was a lifelong democrat, Diaz registered as an independent prior to running for mayor in 2001, perhaps in an attempt not to be compared to a Castro-loving communist by his fellow exiles. Diaz said he switched parties during the Elian fiasco because he had become disillusioned with the party.
Regardless of the reasons, it was Miami’s Cuban community that got him elected.
Diaz shocked Miami residents by not firing anybody during his first two weeks of taking office, a tradition that had been established during the prior decade with Mayor Loco and Crazy Joe. And four years into his term, he has not spent a night in jail for domestic violence or been investigated for voter fraud.
For Miami standards, he was boring. For New York standards, he was impressive. In 2004, the Manhattan Institute, a respected think tank based out of New York City, awarded Diaz with its Urban Innovator Award. After all, since Diaz took office in 2001, Miami’s bond rating went from junk to investment status, leading to a surge in private investment and a multibillion dollar development boom that is altering the city’s skyline. Another factor was that major crime in Miami had plummeted to its lowest level since 1978.
Diaz also led the way in persuading Latin Grammy organizers to return to Miami in 2003, giving the city a chance to repair its image of right-wing extremism. Diaz struck a deal with organizers of the event that placed the obligatory Cuban exile protesters in an area that would not put the attendees in direct contact with them. The exile groups voiced their disappointment, reminiscing of the days when Crazy Joe gave them his full support. But Diaz stuck to his guns, saying he was looking out for the entire city rather than a boisterous constituency.
As it turned out, the protesters got their way anyway, thank to President George W. Bush, who denied entry to the Cuban performers by not authorizing their visas. Miami officials proclaimed the event a success, a step in the right direction for Miami’s tarnished image. And even though Latin Grammy organizers decided to host the show in Los Angeles the following year, the 2003 event had laid the groundwork for an even bigger event – the MTV Video Music Awards show.
In 2004, for the first time in its 21 year history, the MTV Video Music Awards show was held in a city other than New York or Los Angeles. The unpredictable, sometimes racy event was a perfect match for Miami. And it pumped an estimated $100 million into the local economy, a godsend considering it was held in August during Miami’s slowest tourist month. It was deemed such a success that MTV chose Miami for its award show in 2005. For perhaps the first time in history, Los Angeles and New York were outshined by their younger rival to the south.
But Mayor Diaz refused to get caught up in the hype, a mistake that has plagued Miami for more than a century. Instead, he told members of the Manhattan Institute that Miami was on its way to becoming a world-class city, but it most likely won’t happen under his administration, even if does get reelected in 2005. And unlike the time when Mayor Loco flew to New York and told analysts that Miami’s financial shortfalls were a work of fiction, no one in the room doubted him.
The truth is, beneath all the glamour and the glitz that Miami loves to promote, there are serious issues that affect any city experiencing growing pains. In 2000, the U.S Census said Miami was the poorest city in the United States. In 2003, Miami still had a high rate of poverty, but it had become the fifth poorest city in the country.
And although immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America continue to pour into Miami, they are quickly absorbed into the local economy. Colombians, Brazilians, Venezuelans, Argentines and Jamaicans continue to diversify the city that was built by Bahamians and revolutionized by Cubans and internationalized by everybody else. There is even a growing Russian community that is informally referred to as “Little Moscow.”
Twenty-five years after the Mariel and Haitian boatlifts, a significant portion of the arrivals have started their own businesses, setting the standard for the new arrivals. Many of their children have graduated college and speak two languages.
And the face of Miami has spread beyond its borders up to Broward and Palm Beach Counties, where the populations of Colombians, Jamaicans, Haitians, Brazilians and Asians have skyrocketed in the last decade. There was a time when these counties wanted nothing to do with Miami. The old joke was that you needed a passport to drive from Broward into Miami-Dade County.
But in 2004, civic leaders from the tri-county area formed the South Florida Regional Business Alliance, a regional push to obtain government funds for infrastructure, attract investors and promote tourism for the three counties. In 2003, the federal government recognized the tri-county area as the sixth-largest metropolitan area in the nation.
The U.S. Census also said the tri-county area, an area referred to as South Florida with a population of more than five million people, is the most diverse region in the country.
Many sociologists believe that Miami is the city of the future, a reflection of how the rest of the nation will look during the next century. Some economists believe Florida, led by Miami, will dominate US trade this century, replacing New York and California as the major points of transport.
After all, they say, the trading routes will run north to south rather than east to west. Others say those theories are hype considering the area was nothing but a snake-infested jungle when New York and Los Angeles were older than Miami is today.
But if history is any indicator, anything is possible in the Magic City.
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