Miami--From Oy Vay to Oye

Every South Florida schoolchild is taught the story of the founding of Miami, for to Floridians the tale has all the sacred qualities of a modern Aeneid. In 1896 a woman named Julia Tuttle came south to visit the charming village that was then called Fort Dallas. She fell in love with town--here Miamians usually add, "of course"--and wrote to her friend Henry Flagler, owner of the Florida East Coast Railroad, begging him to bring his railroad down so more people could visit the area. Flagler laughed; nobody would want to go that far south, he said. Then came the frost of 1896 that destroyed most of Florida's orange crop. The frost didn't reach Fort Dallas, however, and Tuttle saw her chance. She plucked some orange blossoms off a tree in the yard of her hotel and sent them to Flagler. He was impressed. He brought the railroad to Fort Dallas, and as Tuttle had predicted, the tourists followed. In swarms.

If you ask Miamians today why they came to live there, you will soon realize that the entire city is populated by latter-day Tuttles. By the millions they came, first as tourists to Paradise; once there they fell in love with it and decided to stay. The "snowbird"--a Miami term for a Northerner who flies south for the winter and never leaves--is the central figure of Miami history. Everyone is a snowbird, a former snowbird, or a descendant of a snowbird.

Like the generations of New Yorkers who moved to California, the snowbirds who followed Julia Tuttle had a vision of Miami as the Promised Land, where everyone was free to bask in the sun--and make money--with no interference from anyone else. But unlike California, Florida remained the Promised Land. The kooks and the high taxes stayed away; citizens of Miami congratulated themselves on finding heaven and keeping it heavenly. Somehow they seemed immune to the problems of the rest of the United States.

Today the word "Miami" is always linked to bad news--a report on racial tensions, drug abuse, or an ongoing street war between Cuban and Colombian smugglers. Miami is more prosperous than ever, but those who live there know it is a decadent prosperity, that of a civilization that has lost its way and can find security only in the worship of gold. It is as if Miamians were playing the final scene of an epic morality play in which, led astray by egocentrism, complacency, and boundless greed, those who dreamed of Miami as the tropical Zion destroyed the dream for themselves and for others. As a Coral Gables schoolteacher said after reading reports of the McDuffie riots, "We've got trouble in paradise, but Miami is no longer paradise."

But tourists have always brought in most of Miami's money, and when Miami Beach's popularity began to decline in the 1960's, the area began to grow desperate. Florida has always been more than ordinarily susceptible to greed, perhaps because of its newness; in a city where "old Miami" arrived before 1950, the only thing that separates the worthy from the unwashed is wealth. Miamians will go to great lengths to show off their wealth: It is a city of huge diamonds, Cadillacs and 80-foot yachts. California may be the birthplace of the "me generation" and Boston may have its Puritan ethic, but Miami's code demands conspicuous consumption.

What Miami gambled on, fatefully, was the ability of the city's Latin quarter to attract wealthy South American visitors. At that time the Cuban refugees numbered about 20 per cent of the population, and relations between the Cuban and the non-Latin white (or "Anglo") communities were good. The Anglos had welcomed the Cubans fleeing Castro with open arms, and in return the Cubans settled in a decaying neighborhood and turned it into a boom town. But as it turned out, the decision to chase South American pesos shattered the fragile Cuban-Anglo harmony and turned it into hatred. In addition, the "New Prosperity" of the 1970s, as Miamians call it, created racial problems where none had seemed to exist beforehand and, some say, turned Miami into a hateful place to live.

The South Americans came in numbers beyond anyone's wildest dreams Nobody could believe there were so many South Americans with the money to fly to Miami, but they kept pouring in with suitcases full of cash to go on shopping sprees for luxury goods unavailable in Rio. Suddenly, the Anglos realized that these new tourists spoke no English--in fact, they were coming to Miami because all their business could be transacted in Spanish. For years Miami had boasted of being the gateway to Latin America, and once that boast was fulfilled, it became clear that if you were going to be the gateway to Latin America, you had to speak Spanish to get a job. Which meant that jobs were going to go to Cubans.

That was when the Anglos saw, with horror, that somehow the Cuban fraction had risen from 20 per cent to 45 per cent of the population. Miami had changed from a city with a charming Latin quarter to a Latin city. In the early '70s English-speaking Miamians began to grumble about losing control of "their" city. Today they say it louder. To an Anglo the Spanish language seems to be everywhere, far more prevalent thatn English. Everyone complains about receiving wrong-number telephone calls from "Latins" (a favorite euphemism for Cubans). In fact, one of the less obnoxious ethnic slurs for a Cuban is "oye," the command form of the Spanish verb to hear and the word with which the Cubans start their phone conversations. When Anglo friends greet each other with "oye" it is a half--but only half--joking way of saying, "My God there are so many fucking Cubans in this city they're going to drive us out."

A favorite topic of conversation among Anglos in Miami revolves around whether the government should print driver's license tests, ballots, and even U.S. citizenship tests in both English and Spanish. Jewish residents, who had been among the most forward in welcoming the Cubans in 1961, point out with an edge in their voices that nobody printed the ballots in Yiddish for their ancestors when they came to America. The Jews in South Florida cast about 20 per cent of the area's votes, and there is widespread hostility toward the Cubans from this powerful group. That especially startles the Latins, who point out that it was not so long ago that signs outside of Florida hotels reading "No dogs, no Jews allowed" were still standing. Even today there are restricted clubs on Miami Beach, the bastion of Florida Judaism.

But, like the rest of the Anglos, the Jews feel that long ago they carved out a secure niche for themselves in Miami, and today that niche is being threatened by the Cuban tide. Jewish Miamians have long thought of Miami as "their city," where they could be secure; Miami Beach has a higher percentage of Jewish residents than Tel Aviv. A generation ago the Jews dominated South Florida as the Cubans do now. But like the Magnificent Ambersons, they refused to change when the times changed, and today the leadership mantle has slipped from their hands. Or, as a Jewish Coconut Grove resident put it, "In 20 years Miami has gone from oy vay to oye."

The Cubans claim, with a great deal of truth, that the Jews and other Anglos are just jealous because Spanish is the growth industry in Miami. But the economics of the New Prosperity have caused misery for a lot of Miamians. The influx of South Americans has driven real estate prices through the roof, three-bedroom houses sell for $500,000 and more; one-bedroom apartments start at $400 in many parts of town. The only people who can afford Florida's standard of living are the tourists, and this has set everyone in Miami on edge. With the area suffering from an astonishing inflation rate, no one is in any mood to sit down and discuss community problems; they are all too busy making money to keep up with inflation. As is so often the case, the rich are winning and the poor are losing badly. In Miami, the greatest losers of all have been the Blacks.

Until the McDuffie riots it seemed that Miami had forgotten about its Blacks. White Miami was astonished that there were racial problems that went deeper than the McDuffie slaying. For years the city has been proud of its liberal racial reputation; Miami was one of the first cities in the South to desegregate. Blacks sit on the city and county commissions, and the deputy county manager is Black.

As with the rest of the nation, Miami's racial problems are largely economic: the Blacks are poor and unemployed; the whites are not.

Blacks say that white Miami is embarrassed of them because they are poor. Three years ago, when the city decided to redevelop a Black area of Coconut Grove, skeptics claimed that the city didn't do it out of social consciousness but because it was afraid the tourists would see an ugly side of town. As Miami has grown wealthier, the Blacks' poverty has become more noticeable, and the Blacks have been pushed onto the margin of economic life.

This is especially true now that Spanish is a necessary job skill in Miami. Most Blacks don't have the money it takes to learn Spanish, and in any case many jobs require employees to be completely bilingual. There are even some places in Miami where "bilingual" means that you must know some English to get a job.

Relations between Miami's Blacks and Cubans were never very good, in large part because many of Miami's Black church groups claimed that Cubans were supplying the cocaine smuggling rings that run rampant in the city streets. After the arrival of the Freedom Flotilla, Blacks found it particularly obnoxious that the city and county governments were helping the refugees find jobs while Black unemployment was high. Yet during and after the rioting, many Miamians were actually relieved that the Black rioters didn't attack the Cuban areas of town, because that, people feel, might have sparked a street war. You can still walk around Key Biscayne or the old sections of downtown Miami or Miami Beach and sense, if you look at the old, somehow more tropical building from the 1920s that brought people down here a long time ago. But afterwards you will always feel that Miami lost its innocence along the way, somehow sold its soul for the sake of prosperity.

In Bayfront Park stands the Torch of Friendship, erected as a symbol of the hope that someday, there would be friendship and understanding between all peoples of the Americas. Today the Torch of Friendship is a kind of sick joke.