In February I spent two weeks in Miami, two weeks of 85-degree weather and soothing doses of sunlight and seafood. It was hard sliding back into Logan Airport at 24 degrees and giving up my Cuban shirt for a wool coat. What made it hard was not only going from warm air to freezer blasts, but also the change of place, coming from a city that faces Central and South America back to a city that faces Boston and New York and Washington -- in other words, only other American cities.
Flying into Miami is, in Joan Didion's words, like leaving "the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere." What Miami, like Los Angeles, faces is the rest of the world that is not the United States, a world often revolutionary in its practice, sometimes culturally opposed to notions of progress and civil rights, and almost overwhelmingly poor, hungry, and desperate. In many ways Miami is a prevision of what America is going to cope with in the next half-century. It's not just the narrow issue of immigration. It's about learning that the rest of the world is not just potential markets or foreign policy headaches for the State Department but is filled with people who have ideas of their own about what should and should not be done.
"Miami" is really several Miami's. Downtown, with its elegant Bayside shopping mall and cathedrals to money, is the yuppie, capitalist Miami, the glitz of high-rise condos along Brickell Street. Going north up to Eighth Street the traveler comes to Little Havana (or, as the Cubans call it, "Calle Ocho"), and here one arrives at another world, Latin in pulse and shape, from the old men playing dominos to the various memorials for the Bay of Pigs brigade. Continuing north the traveler comes to Little Haiti, an area just beginning to thrive but which is still umbilically attached to the home country, so much so that speculating if someone standing on the corner is a Ton Ton Macoute is ordinary conversation on the street. Around the new Miami Arena, the beautiful home of the hapless Miami Heat, spreads Overtown and Liberty City, where blacks struggle in obscurity until Miami does something to make them riot. The anglos, blacks, and hispanics are in a tense ballet, each struggling to make and re-make Miami into its own image, each group bringing to the choreography cultural baggage that does not, and may never, have anything in common.
There is undeniable tragedy and venality in Miami, but also undeniable excitement as the rest of the world slips over America's threshold and brings with it new eyes and new visions. New Hampshire may never suffer the strains Miami does, but it won't be able to ignore their effects. The future's color is brown, not white, and Miami is its port of entry.
Abortion
An Easter Message