Miami -Crime, Cuba and Colors
I ignored Miami. Twice in my first 3 years in the US, I landed on MIA airport and headed straight to Key West. Turned out I wasn’t the only one who did. The English, French and Spanish completely discarded this land of swamps, frogs and mosquitoes and fought wars over the ports of St.Augustine, Tampa even the neighboring Key West. Believe it or not, Miami, as a city, was incorporated as late as 1896. And since its conception, the entire existence of Miami can be summed up in 3 words- Crime, Cuba and Colors.
Miami flourished on account of Prohibition with the rum-runners from Cuba and Caribbean making good use of its unguarded borders to smuggle alcohol to US.CIA trained thousands of Cubans immigrants to use against Castro in the cold war but as Kennedy-Khrushchev signed an agreement to end the missile crises, these highly trained, unemployed Cubans became highly dangerous drug-traffickers. The clear weather and vast stretches of land gave birth to commercial aviation only to be utilized later by Columbians to drop in cocaine worth billions of dollars. For 3 decades Miami fed the novelist who wrote under the genre of Miami Crime itself.
The 1959 Cuban exodus on Mariel boat is what we generally think caused the “Cubanization” of Miami. But it was actually American infatuation with the exotic-tropical-baroque Havana that influenced Miami since its origin. Little Havana today still boasts latin-jazz, age old cuban cigar shops, dominos park and multitudes of cuban bakeries (oh their obsession with sugar).
As for colors, I really don’t need to describe the colorful and radiant South beach( the pictures will). What I want to mention is Wynwood. A kind-of shady area in Miami that became the canvas of street artists. The concept of murals isn’t alien to a New Yorker but I have never seen a neighborhood where art extends beyond the walls to every nook and corner of it.
I stayed in Miami for a week alone, and since I wasn’t drinking then, it was hard to imagine I will have much to do. But this shady city is a great spot for a solo trip with the warm Atlantic waters, the magnificent sunrise of the South Beach, the fresh orange juice and an opportunity to wear(or not wear) anything without being judged.
