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CHAPTER 3

Extreme Makeover

A Time magazine article in 1958 reported that “gaudy, gritty Greater Miami” had become “the revolutionary headquarters of the Americas.”¹ The area was referred to as a “plotters’ playground” for Dominicans, Haitians, and especially Cubans who were aiming at the demise of the governments in their home countries. South Florida was the ideal location because it was close by, it had various big and small airports and seaports, and its coastline was like a maze with innumerable winding waterways. In addition, the city’s transient atmosphere and crime networks made it relatively easy to engage in subversive activities.

It was not the first time that Cubans had used South Florida as a backstage for their political struggles. Ever since the beginnings of armed resistance against Spain in the 1860s, they would at times seek refuge in Key West. From the 1920s onward, Miami was the haven of choice. Since the establishment of the Republic of Cuba in 1902, politics had been erratic and unstable. The island witnessed several irregular transfers of power and occasionally politics turned violent.

When President Gerardo Machado’s rule took a dictatorial turn in the late 1920s, it caused a flow of refugees to Miami. In 1933, the president was pushed aside in a military coup: his opponents returned home and celebrated while disillusioned machadistas took their place in Miami. Machado himself fled to the Bahamas before settling in Miami. It was a pattern to be repeated several times. Almost two decades later, in 1952, the democratically elected president, Carlos Prio, was unseated in a coup d’état led by General Batista, resulting in the largest number of refugees yet to arrive in South Florida, Prio himself among them. There were about twenty thousand Cubans in South Florida then. For some upper-class Cubans, Miami was familiar terrain as it had been a popular vacation and shopping destination since the 1940s.

Batista’s government in the 1950s was characterized by corruption and nepotism. Poverty was widespread and the gap between rich and poor was enormous. Havana, with its casinos and famous nightlife, was an important place in American organized crime networks and the Mafia provided political support for Batista. So did the U.S. government, best illustrated by the infamous remark of a State Department official in 1956 that “Batista is considered by many a son of a bitch … but at least he is our son of a bitch.”² It was a reference to Batista’s warm treatment of U.S. multinationals and his fervent anti-communist rhetoric.

Prio dedicated himself to the overthrow of Batista and provided financial support to various militant groups. Fidel Castro stopped by in Miami in 1955 to accept a hefty financial contribution and went on to Mexico to organize and train his military forces. In December 1956, Castro’s troops invaded Cuba and for the next three years fought the Batista regime from their base in the Sierra Maestra Mountains. Batista fled to Brazil on December 31, 1959 and later settled in Coral Gables. Castro’s triumph, or at least Batista’s downfall, was a cause for celebration among the large majority of exiles. “The familiar changing of the guard took place, with exultant fidelistas leaving, to be replaced by defeated batistianos. Scuffles broke out in the Miami airport between passengers arriving from and departing for Havana, causing local police reinforcements to be sent in.”³

It took another two years for Castro to proclaim his communist sympathies openly and for the United States to break off diplomatic relations. During 1959 and 1960, many Cubans saw the clouds gather and turned away from the revolution in disillusionment.⁴ At first, the return of exiles to Cuba exceeded the arrival of new refugees in Miami—the Cuban population in South Florida most likely dropped around this time. But as Castro’s revolution revealed its true colors, a growing number of Cubans packed their bags. On December 26, 1960, operation Pedro Pan commenced, in which desperate Cuban parents sent more than fourteen thousand children on their own to the United States, to be cared for by relatives, friends, and foster parents.

Between 1959 and 1961, about 50,000 exiles reached Miami.⁵ The first waves of refugees contained a large number of wealthy business people who had been able to hang on to their possessions and get out in time to bring their wealth to Miami. They were soon followed by other elite Cubans who had waited too long and had seen their properties confiscated. They, in turn, were succeeded by smaller business owners and professionals from the middle classes. The exodus accelerated in 1962. Between June and August, an estimated 1,800 Cubans arrived in Miami every week and by October of that year there were a total of 155,000 registered refugees. Leaving Cuba became harder after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of April 1961, and even more difficult after the missile crisis of 1962.⁶ Still, by 1965 the number of exiles had climbed to 210,000.

In the national news in the United States, most attention was on Cuba, not South Florida. The CBS evening news on December 1, 1966 reported that “to a great extent these people represent the professional and business class of Cuba; the able, the educated, the successful…. Cuba has been gutted. This exodus is the biggest brain drain the Western Hemisphere has known.”⁷ The federal government’s preoccupation with Cuba was expressed in the immense resources dedicated to gathering intelligence on Castro’s government, Cuban politics, and counter-revolutionary movements in Miami. During the 1960s, there were three hundred to four hundred CIA agents in South Florida, making it the largest CIA “station” after Langley headquarters in Virginia.

The majority of refugees remained in Miami. They stayed with relatives and acquaintances, rented property, or received shelter from the authorities. Initially, local, public, and volunteer agencies banded together in Miami to assist the refugees.⁸ But as the numbers escalated, unease grew among the local population. And when, at the end of the missile crisis, it became clear that the Cubans were not likely to go home any time soon, politicians in South Florida took action. They requested emergency help with the “refugee crisis” from the federal government. In response, the Kennedy administration organized a large-scale program to resettle Cubans throughout the United States. It seemed to work, at first. By 1966 about 135,000 people were resettled all over the United States, with the largest concentrations in New York and California.

But in 1965 Castro agreed to the departure of large numbers of “traitors to the revolution.” The “freedom flights,” as they were called by the Cubans in Miami, continued until 1973 and by that time another 340,000 refugees had entered the United States, most choosing to stay in Miami. And that was not the only issue. Miami’s appeal to the exiled Cubans was simply irresistible, and the resettlement scheme was a losing proposition:

All the time that the freedom flights were coming into Miami, resettlement flights were leaving it in an attempt to distribute more evenly the burden of refugee resettlement. By 1978, 469,435 Cubans had been settled away from Miami. To federal and local bureaucrats, this was ample evidence that the “problem” of refugee concentration in South Florida had been resolved. In the late 1960s, however, a discreet countertrend started that saw resettled Cuban families trek back to Miami on their own. In 1973, a survey estimated that 27 percent of the Cubans residing in the Miami metropolitan area had returned there from other US locations. A survey conducted by the Miami Herald in 1978 raised that valuation to about forty percent. As a consequence of this accelerating return migration, by 1979, on the eve of Mariel, close to eighty percent of Cubans in the United States were living in Miami, making it, in effect, Cuba’s second-largest city and the refugees the most concentrated foreign-born minority in the country.9

During the first year of Castro’s revolution, life in South Florida seemed to be going on as usual. For most Miamians, the Cuban revolution initially seemed another episode of a familiar story and it was mainly greeted with indifference. In the 1960s, “Miami Beach’s spectacle of idleness, luxury and sex remained the predominant national and international image of the city.”¹⁰ The Beatles performed there on their first tour in the United States in February 1964, at the Deauville Hotel on Collins Avenue for a crowd of twenty-five hundred. They played in only two other American cities, New York and Washington, D.C. In 1965, Jacky Gleason moved his popular TV show from Manhattan to Miami Beach, exposing the allure of Miami to national audiences on a weekly basis.

But economically things were not going well and South Florida in the 1960s showed something of a disconnect from the rest of the country. The period from 1961 to 1969 witnessed one of the most sustained periods of economic expansion the nation had ever known, with annual growth rates near 5 percent. At the same time, South Florida’s economy was lackluster. The strong performance of manufacturing in the U.S. economy as a whole was mostly irrelevant to South Florida, where manufacturing had always been insignificant. It witnessed only minimal growth in tourism and most economic indicators were flat. The real estate business cycle had turned down after the high-rolling 1950s. The financial drain on resources with the arrival of Cuban refugees did not help. Then, in the early 1970s, the United States and much of the world economy went into a prolonged recession, which kept parts of the South Florida economy down for a long time.

The stagnation of the 1960s was particularly visible in downtown Miami. Since the turn of the twentieth century, this had been the bustling center for retailing, commerce, and popular culture. Prominent hotels were just around the corner on Biscayne Boulevard, and Bayfront Park was a popular public space. Within a few years, shops closed, hotels struggled, and people stopped coming. Petty crime increased and the area turned desolate at night.

In Miami Beach, the decline was conspicuous as well. By the mid-1960s, the MiMo hype had faded, money had become scarce, and not much of anything was being built. The deco district, already passé in the 1950s, turned seedy. Lincoln Road lost its shine and upscale shopping moved north to Bal Harbor. The Fontainebleau was operating well below capacity and in the circumstances its flamboyant pretentiousness turned a shade pathetic. A number of small hotels on Ocean Boulevard were forced to open up to middle-class northern retirees whose definition of excitement was bingo night. South Beach, once the most fashionable destination for the nation’s jet set, gradually became known as a slow-paced retirement resort. It acquired the cheerless nickname “God’s Waiting Room.”

The economic malaise was reflected in the decreasing growth rates of Dade County’s resident population: from 89 percent in the 1950s it dropped to 36 percent in the 1960s, then to 28 percent in the 1970s. Between 1960 and 1980, Dade County witnessed only one new incorporation, though Islandia could hardly be regarded a real town.¹¹ Most significantly, net domestic in-migration for Dade County decreased in the 1960s and then, in the 1970s, it turned negative: domestic out-migration had started to exceed domestic in-migration, in no small part owing to accelerating migration from Dade to Broward by those who had little tolerance for Cuban immigrants. It was reflected in the changing numbers of non-Hispanic whites: they still grew by 29 percent in the 1950s but fell to 4 percent in the 1960s, and turned to -1 percent in the 1970s. It was a fundamental reversal of what had happened in the first half of the twentieth century. Even though Dade County continued to receive large numbers of immigrants from the rest of the United States, since the early 1970s net domestic migration has consistently been negative.

For Broward County things were different. It had never witnessed the excesses of Miami or Miami Beach and thus developed more steadily. It had lagged behind Dade County during the first half of the twentieth century but seemed to be catching up as its population quadrupled in the 1950s. The Broward economy in the 1960s did not mirror national trends of sustained expansion, but it was not as stultified as the Dade economy, and the Broward population still doubled. It did so again in the 1970s, with a growing number of migrants coming from Dade County. Broward’s steady growth was reflected in numerous incorporations, including Pembroke Pines, Lauderdale Lakes, Sunrise, Coral Springs, North Lauderdale, Parkland, Tamarac, and Coconut Creek.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the civil rights movement was gathering momentum across the country. As late as the early 1960s, segregation laws discriminated against South Florida’s blacks. Blacks were systematically kept from using public facilities such as beaches, swimming pools, parks, hospitals, transportation, and schools. Many private restaurants, hotels, bars, and stores refused service to them. Prior to 1945, they were not allowed on any of Miami’s beaches—beginning that year, Virginia Key had the one and only beach designated for “coloreds.” Because it was not connected to the mainland by bridge, people had to get there by rowing a boat.

Pervasive discrimination kept blacks from moving into white residential areas. Miami Beach was all white. The Beach police enforced a midnight curfew, and many famous black entertainers, like Ella Fitzgerald, Count Basie, and Billie Holiday, were forced to leave the island after their shows. They would usually perform again for a black audience in late night hours at the Lyric Theater or one of the other clubs on N.W. 2nd Avenue in Overtown, popularly referred to as Little Broadway. Famous blacks who visited Miami over the years, like W. E. B. DuBois and Zora Neale Hurston, too, would stay at hotels in Overtown. In 1963, when Harry Belafonte did a show at the Eden Roc on the Beach and actually spent the night there, it made local news headlines.

Overtown was the heart of South Florida’s black community. It was there in the Greater Bethel AME Church in 1958, in front of an “overflow audience,” that Martin Luther King campaigned to double the number of black registered voters.¹² By 1950, Overtown was home to nearly half of Dade County’s black population and it had evolved into a tight-knit community. Most were working-class people, but there were many thriving small businesses and many families owned their homes.

But by the time American blacks finally won legal recognition of their constitutional rights, Overtown was heading into a sharp decline.¹³ The overall slowing of South Florida’s economy, and particularly the downturn in construction, had a negative impact from the early 1960s onward. As blacks started to gain access to stores outside Overtown, retail business in the district suffered. But irreversible destruction came with the building of two major highway flyovers right through the middle of Overtown. Construction of I-95 and I-395 began in the 1960s and was finished in 1976. The first split the area into western and eastern parts; the second cut through the larger eastern part and resulted in a north-south divide. The large spaces beneath the elevated expressways swallowed up a large part of the area and turned it into a wasteland. The local traffic circulation system turned dysfunctional. Total forced displacement was estimated at 12,000 people and another 4,830 decided to move out on their own initiative. In 1960, Overtown had peaked at a population of 33,000. By 1970, the community had lost more than half of its population and a third of its businesses. Home ownership dropped more than 50 percent.

Many people who left Overtown went to Liberty City, an area just to the north that consisted mainly of New Deal public housing projects from the 1930s. The creation of Liberty City had some additional, more insidious origins: Miami’s business and political establishment “conceived of this project as the nucleus of a new black community that might siphon off the population of ‘Colored Town’ and permit downtown business expansion. The availability of federal housing funds mobilized the civic elite, who seized this opportunity to push the blacks out of the downtown area.”¹⁴ In other words, Liberty City was invented in part to allow the expansion of Miami’s central business district into Overtown. With the construction of the highways and the demise of Overtown in the 1960s, Liberty City grew quickly but it never replaced the Overtown community of the past. Against the backdrop of the prolonged economic downturn of the 1960s and 1970s, it transformed into a ghetto. Opa Locka, which also experienced fast growth of its African American population during the 1970s, had a similar fate.

The achievements of the civil rights movement did not translate into economic gains for South Florida’s blacks. The protracted recession played its part but so did ongoing racial discrimination. The massive arrival of the Cubans seemed to make things worse still with increased competition for jobs and affordable housing. In addition, black concerns were overshadowed by public debates on the Cuban refugee crisis.¹⁵ Black discontent and frustration rose, as did racial tension.

The first time that things came to a boil was during the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach in August 1968—four months after the assassination of Martin Luther King. The situation became explosive when, shortly before the convention, George Wallace came to town to showcase his racist campaign for the presidency in front of an enthused crowd of white supporters. With the national media attention focused on Miami during the convention, African Americans organized a rally to protest racial policies of the Republican Party. The police went in, a confrontation ensued, and things turned violent. The Liberty City riot went on for several days, took four lives, and drew national attention.

On August 16, 1968, when things had quieted down, the black-owned Miami Times newspaper put it this way: “The riot last week came as no surprise to us. It should have not surprised any of you either. If you had only looked around you and seen the results of social injustice and inequality, surely you would have seen the disturbance coming.”¹⁶ Printed in a newspaper that was almost exclusively read by blacks, those words were not likely to reach the people who most needed to hear it.

The single most dramatic year in Miami’s history was probably 1980. Three different stories had been underway in South Florida for some time, with distinct origins, different characters, and following separate logics. As in the plot of a fashionable drama movie, the stories would gradually converge, then intersect and reach a common climax. That climax happened in the summer of 1980.

The first story was triggered in Cuba. On April 1, several thousands of Cuban asylum seekers occupied the Peruvian embassy in Havana. The event drew international attention and caused considerable embarrassment to the Cuban regime. After two weeks of failed negotiations and threats, Castro decided to open the port of Mariel to anyone who wanted to leave. The Cuban government allowed ships and boats from Miami and elsewhere to enter the port and pick up the human cargo. But the people who were gathered at Mariel were not only the dissidents who had sought refuge in the Peruvian embassy. Castro seized the opportunity to empty his jails and, it was said, mental hospitals, mixing them with the dissidents. The Cuban leader declared, “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.”¹⁷

Figure 13. Mariel refugees arrive at Key West on board the Lady Virgo, 1980. State Archives of Florida.

About 125,000 marielitos entered the United States over the next six months. Eighty percent ended up in Miami.¹⁸ The first groups of new refugees were greeted with sympathy and enthusiasm. But when the size of the stream of refugees started to register in South Florida, apprehension set in, and when it became apparent that Castro had used the event to rid himself of delinquents and mental patients, apprehension turned to panic. Even if the actual numbers of “deviants” remained a matter of speculation, there could be no doubt that the marielitos were very much unlike the wealthy entrepreneurial classes of the first wave of refugees. Most were poor and had little education. Criminal elements soon made their presence known. Already during the summer months of 1980, South Florida saw a spike in crime rates, particularly in Miami Beach and Little Havana, where many of the newcomers were housed.

The situation was reported on almost daily in the news. The local authorities called in vain to have the refugees diverted to Costa Rica and other destinations in Central America and the Caribbean—anywhere but Miami. Even among the Cubans who had been in Miami for some time, concern grew and some distanced themselves from the marielitos out of fear of seeing their reputation blemished. Their worries were understandable: according to national polls, by 1982 the large majority of the U.S. public held negative views of Cubans, more negative than of any other immigrant group in the country.¹⁹

The second story took off in downtown Miami about four months before the Mariel boatlift got under way. In the early morning hours of December 17, 1979, thirty-three-year-old Arthur McDuffie, a black motorcyclist, was beaten to death by an all-white group of policemen. Before the beating, McDuffie, an insurance salesman and a former U.S. marine, had been chased by the police at high speed through parts of Liberty City and Overtown. The reason for the chase was never quite clear, but police records did show that McDuffie had accumulated traffic citations and was driving with a suspended license. When McDuffie gave up and got off his motorcycle at the corner of North Miami Avenue and 38th Street, a scuffle ensued. The policemen handcuffed McDuffie, removed his helmet, and hit him savagely over the head with clubs and fists until he collapsed. It was a gruesome scene: “McDuffie lay immobile, his head split open and his brain swelling uncontrollably.”²⁰ Subsequently, one of the police officers ran his vehicle over the motorcycle to create the impression that the injuries were the result of an accident. Four days later, McDuffie died in Jackson Hospital. The Dade County examiner would later testify that McDuffie’s wounds were “the equivalent of falling from a four-story building and landing head-first … on concrete.”²¹

The four police officers were suspended before the end of December. It turned out that they all had considerable track records of citizen complaints and internal affairs probes. Emotions ran high in Miami and the McDuffie trial was moved to Tampa. It started on March 31, 1980, a day before the Cuban dissidents in Havana headed for the Peruvian embassy. For that one day, at least, all eyes in Miami were on the trial. The four officers were indicted for manslaughter, as well as tampering with or fabricating evidence. The charge against one of them was later elevated to second-degree murder.

The trial lasted about six weeks. Then, on May 17, an all-white jury in Tampa announced the verdict: the four policemen were acquitted on all charges. The news sent shockwaves through the black community. Within hours of the verdict there were demonstrations in downtown Miami and in Liberty City. When police forces confronted the demonstrators, violence erupted, which quickly spread to the Black Grove and Overtown. The governor of Florida called in thousands of National Guard troops to restore order, but the riots still lasted a full three days. Eighteen people died, hundreds were wounded, and damages were estimated up to two hundred million dollars. They were the worst race riots in U.S. urban history, to be superseded only by the riots in Los Angeles in 1992.

This was not just about McDuffie, no matter how perverse the case or the outcome. “Many Miamians, whites as well as blacks, were shocked by the acquittals. But for blacks, the trial had a significance that went beyond the McDuffie case itself. It represented the truest, most damning test of the entire legal system.”²² Frustration among Miami’s blacks had been building for years in spite of, or maybe fueled by, the legal achievements of the civil rights movement. Economic advancement was wanting, relations with the Miami police had been profoundly hostile from the beginning, and it seemed that blacks could be discriminated against, maltreated, and even murdered with impunity. The six weeks of the McDuffie trial coincided with the first phase of the Mariel boatlift. The massive arrival of ever more Cubans and the media attention it demanded, precisely at this time, must have compounded a sense of isolation among many blacks, who received painfully little sympathy for their plight from other Miamians.

Figure 14. Riots in Liberty City following the McDuffie verdict: a National Guardsman tells a motorist to keep moving, May 19, 1980. © Miami Herald Media Company, 1980.

The third story’s origins lay in Francois Duvalier’s Haiti. Also known as Papa Doc, Duvalier was elected as Haiti’s president in 1958. His despotic and murderous regime terrorized the population and condemned the majority of Haitians to egregious poverty. According to many measures, Haiti was the most impoverished and most repressive nation in the Western Hemisphere. By the late 1950s and early 1960s, many of the more affluent Haitians had already left the country and sought refuge in places like New York, Paris, and Montreal. Despite its similar climate and tropical environment, South Florida prior to the civil rights movements did not appeal to Haitians because of its blatant racism.

After 1977, refugee flows toward South Florida started to pick up, slowly at first, and gathered momentum. By early 1980, the so-called Haitian boat people were streaming into South Florida almost daily, crammed into small rickety boats that were barely able to make the 720-mile journey. A number of efforts to reach South Florida failed dramatically. One of the most tragic incidences was in October 1981 when a flimsy vessel named La Nativité sank in a storm less than a hundred yards off the coast and thirty-three dead bodies washed upon the shore near Fort Lauderdale. The migrants were probably dumped off a large smuggling ship and herded onto La Nativité a few miles off the coast. The going smuggling fee was said to be around $1,500 per person.²³

When the Mariel boatlift took off in May 1980, the Haitians, too, responded to the call for freedom. Refugee numbers increased rapidly in the early summer months and peaked in August 1980, at the same time that Cuban arrivals reached their highest volume. The number of registered Haitian refugees for that month was 2,477 and the total for 1980 was 24,530.²⁴ That did not include those who escaped interdiction or detention—in the fall of 1980 it was estimated that every day about 200 Haitians entered South Florida illegally.

Between 1977 and 1981, approximately 60,000 Haitians sought refuge in South Florida. The local and national perception of Haitians was very negative, in part perhaps because so little was known about them. Indeed, Haitians have suffered some of the worst stereotyping in the modern history of the Americas. Many looked at the boat people as poor, uncivilized, voodoo-practicing peasants who were likely to carry diseases such as tuberculosis and, later, AIDS. These stereotypes fueled the resolve of local governments to lobby for stringent federal policies to curb Haitian immigration.

Figure 15. Intercepted Haitian refugees waiting to go ashore at the Coast Guard station in Miami, April 14, 1980. © Miami Herald Media Company, 1980.

Haitian refugees received a different legal treatment from Cubans as most were considered economic refugees rather than political ones. Many were sent back and others had to endure extensive clearance procedures. Krome Detention Center in southwest Dade County, the main site for the processing of Haitian refugees, was overflowing. It was common to be detained for prolonged periods of time. By July 1982, almost two years after the number of intercepted refugees peaked, there was a backlog of 32,000 cases. Being black, poor, modestly educated, and lacking good English-language skills, most of those who were allowed to stay faced an uphill battle. They settled in concentrated areas of Dade and Broward counties such as the area northeast of Overtown that would become known as Little Haiti, the city of North Miami, and Fort Lauderdale. Haitians became the largest immigrant group in Broward County in the early 1980s.

In more than one way, then, 1980 proved to be a turning point. First, it raised anxiety among non-Hispanic whites to the level of despair.²⁵ In the eyes of Miami’s white establishment, their city was under siege. Near the end of the year, an English-only referendum was passed as a means to resist the Cuban siege. Non-Hispanic whites feared that their city was forever lost.

For the Cubans already in Miami, the events of 1980 served as a wake-up call. On the one hand, the arrival of the marielitos indicated that the Cuban stay in Miami would not be as temporary as they first hoped and expected. On the other hand, the hostile and organized response of the local population to the growing Cuban presence provided a lesson to the Cubans. After 1980, Cubans set their eyes on Miami and laid claim to the city. They naturalized in large numbers to become enfranchised, and the number of Cubans in political office increased notably.

Finally, Miami’s African Americans were caught in between. Instead of tasting the long awaited fruits of the victory in the civil rights movement, African Americans were crowded out of Miami’s political apparatus. The sharp contrast between the harsh treatment of Haitian refugees and the federal government’s pampering of Cuban immigrants provoked accusations of racism. Economically, the successes of recent Cuban immigrants intensified feelings of relative deprivation among African Americans. Relations between the two groups were cool and distant and would remain so for many years. At times they would find themselves in open conflict with each other, as when Nelson Mandela visited Miami in 1990—he was revered by African Americans but scorned by Cubans for his sympathetic relations with Fidel Castro.²⁶

The multiple crises of 1980 and the subsequent surge in crime rates tarnished Miami’s national image. These vexing times were perhaps best reflected in the infamous Time cover story in October 1981, which was titled “Paradise Lost?” It chronicled South Florida’s volatile recent history and elaborated on the exploding drug trade and crime epidemic. The article featured a map of South Florida that showed main tourist sites and beaches, alternated with alarming symbols such as guns to indicate high-crime areas, boats overloaded with Haitian refugees off the Atlantic coast, and small airplanes and cigarette boats carrying cocaine. The piece had turmoil, declivity, and danger written all over it. The publication was received with indignation and a fair bit of denial by the local establishment—it was clear that the “magic city” had been transformed in ways beyond its control. The Time article dealt another blow to the bewildered state of mind of South Floridians.²⁷

Organized crime had been a part of Miami’s history since the early twentieth century and was particularly striking during the 1920s and 1950s. After Castro’s revolution, a considerable part of Havana’s Mafia activities shifted to Miami. The Havana connection was no more, but things only seemed to get busier in South Florida. In 1967, Newsweek dubbed Miami “Mob Town, USA” and referred to the “syndicated beach front” of Miami Beach.²⁸ More was yet to come. The surge in crime in the late 1970s and early 1980s was extraordinary, even by Miami’s standards. In 1979, Miami already had by far the highest crime rates of all major cities in the nation. Then, in 1980, violent crime rose another 82 percent and the murder rate went up 78 percent.²⁹ Much of it was “disorganized” organized crime, the sort of chaos to emerge in a place that actually had an impressive tradition of illicit networks but that was thrown into disarray with the sudden appearance of a range of new illicit opportunities and connections, and plenty of characters to seize the day. This was the era of the “cocaine cowboys,” immortalized in Brian de Palma’s remake of the movie Scarface in 1983.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the cocaine-trafficking business firmly established itself in the city, with major ties to Colombia and other offshore regions. The willing participants included old-time mobsters, ex-CIA agents, some marielitos, bent bankers, opportunistic lawyers, corrupt police officers, small airplane owners, petty criminals, and an ambitious new crowd of South American gangsters, mainly from Colombia. The cocaine business set off new waves of violence that made headlines around the country. The New York Times referred to Miami as “Murder City, USA,” a place where crime had gone “berserk.”³⁰ The following report from the Miami Herald describes one of the leading characters on the scene and gives an impression of Miami’s outlandish criminal milieu at the time: