Explore Florida
MIAMI is an often intoxicatingly beautiful place, with palm trees swaying in the breeze and South Beach’s famous Art Deco buildings stunning in the warm sunlight. Away from the beaches and the tourists, the gleaming skyscrapers of downtown herald Miami’s proud status as the headquarters of many US corporations’ Latin American operations. Even so, it’s the people, not the climate, the landscape or the cash, that makes Miami so noteworthy. Two-thirds of the two-million-plus population are Hispanic, the majority of whom are Cuban, and Spanish is the predominant language in the cafés, the beachfronts and the cocktail lounges.
Just over a hundred years ago Miami was a swampy outpost of mosquito-tormented settlers. The arrival of Henry Flagler’s railroad in 1896 gave the city its first fixed land-link with the rest of the continent, and cleared the way for the Twenties property boom and subsequent bust after 1924. In the Fifties, Miami Beach became a celebrity-filled resort area, just as thousands of Cubans fleeing the regime of Fidel Castro began arriving here as well. The Sixties and Seventies brought decline, and Miami’s dangerous reputation in the Eighties was well deserved – in 1980 the city had the highest murder rate in America.
Since then, with the strengthening of Latin American economic links and the gentrification of South Beach – which helped make tourism the lifeblood of the local economy again in the early Nineties – Miami is enjoying a surge of affluence and optimism.
Read More-
Biscayne Bay’s million-dollar mansions
Biscayne Bay’s million-dollar mansions
America’s rich and famous have been coming to Miami for years, hiding away within ostentatious palm-smothered mansions on the cays that lie between the city and Miami Beach; the only way to get a good look is to take a boat tour from Bayside Marketplace. These are unashamedly touristy, but provide fabulous views of the city, and include a narrated jaunt around some of the most exclusive areas. Guides will point out the opulent mansions of Shaquille O’Neal, Sean Combs (aka P Diddy or Puff Daddy) and Oprah Winfrey, among numerous others.
Operators include Island Queen Cruises (t 305/379-5119, w www.islandqueencruises.com), which runs daily 1.5hr tours (10.30am–7pm, on the hour) for $26. You can also tour the same islands by kayak, though it pays to take the boat tour first so you know which celebrity backyard you’re paddling past. Try South Beach Kayak (Wed–Sat 10.30am–sunset, Sun & Mon 11am–sunset; $25/2hr, $70/day; t 305/332-2853, w www.southbeachkayak.com), 1771 Purdy Ave, Miami Beach, near the Venetian Causeway.
-
Cubans in Miami
Cubans in Miami
During the mid-Fifties, when opposition to Cuba’s Batista dictatorship began to assert itself, a trickle of Cubans started arriving in a predominantly Jewish section of Miami that was then called Riverside. The trickle became a flood when Fidel Castro took power in 1959, and the area became Little Havana, populated by the affluent Cuban middle classes who had the most to lose under communism.
These original immigrants were joined by a second influx in May 1980, when the Mariel boatlift brought 125,000 islanders from the port of Mariel to Miami in only a few days. These arrivals were poor and uneducated, and a fifth of them were fresh from Cuban jails – incarcerated for criminal rather than political crimes. Bluntly, Castro had dumped his misfits on Miami. The city reeled and then recovered from this mass arrival, but it left Miami’s Cuban community utterly divided. Even today, older Cuban-Americans claim that they can pick out a Marielito from the way he or she walks or talks.
That said, local division gives way to fervent agreement when it comes to Castro: he’s universally detested. In Miami, Cubans have been killed for being suspected of advocating dialogue with Castro. Despite failing to depose the dictator, Cuban-Americans have been far more successful at influencing the US government. Since the 1980s, Cubans have been vociferous supporters of the Republican Party in what has traditionally been a crucial swing state – and therefore one of the main reasons that the US embargo of Cuba (imposed in 1962), remains in place, for now at least.
