Incidents of Travel in Latin America. Chapter 1, Part 1.

Incidents of Travel in Latin America

Lars Holger Holm

Planetai (πλανῆται) means Wanderer. This book is dedicated to all Lonely Planets.

1. At the Gate

My plane to Barranquilla, Colombia, wasn’t delayed but it had proved impossible to prolong the car rental without paying through the nose. Since that would have been an ugly sight, I decided to return my stately vehicle hours before take-off. This left me with time to kill. I figured Las Olas Boulevard in downtown Fort Lauderdale would be the place, and entered the local bus servicing the Hollywood International Airport. Truly, it would have been easier to say hasta la vista to a Corolla. But this was a state-of-the-art American beauty, with all that goes with it. The reason I ever enjoyed the privilege to hang out with her for so long was the following. 

As I arrived in Miami one month earlier, the compact cars were in such demand that the rental dealership didn’t have enough of them available. To make up for the vehicle shortage they’d thrown in some Mercury Grand Marquises – a more elegant edition of the Ford Victoria preferred by police forces and cab drivers nationwide – in the lot, offering them at economy price. Generally unable, even under normal circumstances, to resist temptation, I jumped at it. My European heart made an extra beat at the mere thought of turning the key to an eight-cylinder monster with a 4.6 litre engine, knowing I was deliberately and willingly indulging in sin. Since Miami (or to be precise, Miami Beach herself) is pretty much the emblem of it, there simply couldn’t be a better way to arrive there^.[1]

             
South Beach is a case in point. In the 1970s and 80s its population was up to 80% Jewish and South Beach itself is practically still a ghetto. Before before World War II Jews, though allowed to buy property anywhere, could only settle south of 5^th Street and this restriction on their activities was only suspended as late as in 1949. After that, South Beach became known as ‘the waiting room of death’ as increasingly older people found it desirable to retire there. At this time there was nothing really fancy or upscale about it. If designer perfumes nowadays permeate its atmosphere, back then the streets smelled of mildew and gefilte fisch and on a visit you would overhear a wild array of eastern European languages blending with Brooklyn twang and Yiddish – it’s no coincidence that Michael Corleone in order to visit with businessman Hyman Roth in the second Godfather film has to go to Miami.

              

The Jewish scene was to remain relatively unchanged until the late 1970s, when Fidel Castro opened all of his prisons and mental asylums and poured their contents into clandestine boats destined for Miami, thereby creating a tsunami of crime inundating its beaches. South Beach quickly became one of the most dangerous places in all of North America and the Jews began to move northward. Then came the Art Deco renaissance, initiated by prominent Jews of the modern art scene determined to save the beach and restore it to pre-war glory. Some TV shows – pioneer among them had been the iconic Jackie Gleason Show, since the mid-1960s produced in Miami – and criminal series (Miami Vice, followed by the contemporary CSI Miami) helped to put it back on the map, and in the 1990s it began to be hyped up to its present level of mediatised hysteria. Although today in many ways synonymous with Sodom, South Beach is simultaneously home to a large Orthodox Jewish community that has gradually come to supplant the original population of more liberally oriented Jews, and paradoxically seems to thrive in the shadow of its frivolous glitz. Or perhaps not so paradoxically, after all.

Besides, it isn’t just Rabbi Rabinowich who knows how to profit from it, even if he occasionally gets caught with his pants down. We also have the heritage of pushers and dealers in the grand Cuban tradition of Scarface. We have Cuban Jews and Israelis mixing freely with Colombian, Venezuelan and Russian goy mafiosi distinguished by gold chains so heavy that they can hardly keep their necks straight. Their women, (as artificially big-chested as they are self-absorbed – that is, when they’re not absorbed by their cell phones) prefer diamond rings and necklaces since their values never decrease. Add to these a set of modern day WASP retirees populating the entire Florida coastline, but in particular its south, as well as the steady coming and going of foreign tourists and well-to-do Europeans taking refuge there during the winter season.

             
If Asians don’t make up any significant portion of Miami’s population by and large, Latin families do, clustering around Calle Ocho (SW 8^th Street), Little Havana and West Little Havana, with their rather picturesque mixture of small malls, cash only gas stations, restaurants, shops and Latin bakeries, seedy one-night stand motels with names like Venus, Stardust and Jamaica, strip joints, dry cleaners, PC repair shops, dollar stores and lawyers advertising for clients needing help to file for bankruptcy, divorce or to get off the hook for speeding or ’Drinking Under the Influence of Driving’.

Like an oasis appears to the south of mid Calle Ocho the wealthy and serene Coral Gables (by no means off limits for Latinos who have made it) with its lavish golf courses, long tree adorned alleys, manicured gardens, elegant mansions in a variety of colonial styles, streets with Spanish and Italian names marked in black print on whitewashed corner stones, a chic downtown and a jeunesse dorée pitching camp in the gardens of the Biltmore Hotel. It also, somewhat surprisingly, includes within its perimetre a token trailer park for people of considerably lesser means, symbolically located next to a funeral parlour and a cemetery.

The contrast is immediate and only announced by the drive-through archway and extended gable made from coral that have given the name to this town. Driving south on 49th street – which is another thoroughly Latino dominated residential backwater tucked in between the major traffic artery Route 836 (separating it from the airport), and 8^th Street – you find yourself transported, once you have crossed over 8^th Street into the Gables, by the fairy’s magic wand. 

Here the rather inconspicuous SW 49th Avenue completely changes appearance, like Cinderella going to the ball, congenially assuming a new name resounding of saga and history: Granada Boulevard. Whereas the single plane villas to the north of 8^th Street would no doubt announce a wealthy neighbourhood in Managua and Tegucigalpa, they are just plain ordinary in Miami. From the absence of barbed wire to protect the residents from unwanted intrusion you can tell you’re actually not in Managua or Tegucigalpa, but doors and windows are indeed covered by iron bars, just as in those places.

Once you’ve entered Granada Boulevard on the other hand, bars in front of the windows would be an unpardonable faux pas, giving you away as a despicable nouveau riche from the Third World. Here we don’t rely on iron bars but on the Coral Gables Police, discreet cameras, alarm systems and Neighbourhood Watch. The streets are clean – not a dog turd as far as an eagle’s eye can see – and hardly frequented by pedestrians. Although there are perfectly maintained pavements in place everywhere, there are times of the day when the residences of Coral Gables are akin to a vision of serene, golden America painted by a late Edward Hopper. 

The effect of its flowery gardens and long canopies of trees arching the streets for miles give a surrealistic impression: on a clear day the colours are overly vivid and, seen through a pair of good sunglasses, almost psychedelic. Adding to the enchantment is a full scale lighthouse in Moorish style overlooking the green sea of the golf course with its huge Banyan trees. I have sometimes remained motionless in front of the lighthouse thinking I’m the only witness to the world on Day One without humans. It’s rather like the dream in which you wake up to a perfect world but there’s nobody besides yourself in it. So, like a King Midas everything you touch does turn into gold, but you also starve to death by the means that made you rich. A memento to ponder for sure.

             
Add to Coral Gables the various Central and South-American nationalities populating communities such as Fontainebleau and the City of Doral. In the middle of it sits, as the heart of ultra-urban civilisation, Miami Airport set against the vibrating, silvery skyline of downtown. To the north of the airport is Latin Hialeah, and the predominantly Afro-American scene of Little Haiti, North Miami and Miami Gardens, which, in spite of its seducing name, features many a thorny, unkempt shrubbery. Some houses look more like abandoned tool sheds, flaunting rebar and naked concrete. Aluminium chairs litter the grass and loaded boat trailers clog up the driveways. There are entire blocks filled with military looking barracks (housing projects) with people aimlessly hanging in street corners, or drifting in and out of utility and second-hand stores – that is, when they’re not actually pushing a department store trolley ahead containing all of their belongings, including a cardboard mattress custom made from a FedEx delivery box. 

             

As a contrast there is the strange amalgamation of former hippie homes at the opposite end of town, tucked away in quaint Coconut Grove, with its vaguely bohemian younger generation and wealthy Coral Gablers ‘with a difference’, living practically next door to the Bahamian ghetto around the intersection of Grand Avenue and Douglas Road, where rape, abuse, robbery and murder allegedly are still on the weekly menu and police cars are frequently transfixed, flashing their strobe lights for hours.^[2] 

The Miami University campus is further down, constituting Coral Gables’ southwestern corner along the US 1, also called South Dixie Highway.^[3] Continue down that main stretch and you reach South Miami with its interminable automobile showrooms and car sales parking lots. Off to either side, tranquil Pinecrest, Cutler and Palmetto Bays to the east, Kendall, Homestead to the west, and still more remote neighbourhoods which the imagination is keen to populate with alligators lurking in the swamps. 

Having passed these vast areas there remains only the frontier town of Florida City with its last call discount liquor stores still within the limits of Dade County, as well as the 18 mile long desolate causeway through crocodile infested mangroves bringing the traveller to the endless Florida Keys, where a different story begins.

  

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^[1] I think it’s fair to say that this type of car still sits in a no-man’s land between ‘no longer modern’ and ‘still not classic’ (the last models rolled out of the Detroit factory as late as 2011). As of today it primarily appeals to Latinos and Afro-Americans as the epitome of the American Dream within reach even for the not very rich. It is indeed a well-manufactured vehicle in the grand tradition of full-size sedans that takes on the long, straight US Interstate Highways in the same manner as a mature Côte-du-Rhône takes on a ripe Roquefort cheese – it’s a marriage made in heaven!

^[2] In this connection it might interest movie watchers that the marital comedy Meet the Fockers from 2004, featuring Dustin Hoffman and Barbara Streisand as the “once” hippie couple, receiving in their charmingly rundown and luxuriously overgrown Miami home the ever so slightly stricter parents of the to-be-bride, congenially personified by Robert de Niro (who also produced the film) and Blythe Danner, is set in the Coconut Grove. The children to be married are played by Ben Stiller and Teri Polo.

^[3] To the newcomer in Miami it can be more than just a little confusing that some streets have up to four different names, so that although you're correct in assuming you should make a right turn onto SW 22^nd Street, you won't find it because you're supposed to know in advance that at this particular junction it’s marked out as Coral Way, and at another one as The Miracle Mile. Though you just might be able to figure out that the above mentioned Calle Ocho is identical with SW 8^th Street, you also need to know that another synonym for it is the Tamiami Trail, as well as Felipe Vals Road. It goes without saying that East 8^th Avenue is also and better known as Le Jeune Road, or simply as 42^nd Avenue and that East 9^th Street is of course identical with NW 62^nd Street, in turn identical with Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Nothing could be simpler!