Miami. Jan Nijman

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      Figure 15. Intercepted Haitian refugees waiting to go ashore at the Coast Guard station in Miami, April 14, 1980. © Miami Herald Media Company, 1980.

      Haitian refugees received a different legal treatment from Cubans as most were considered economic refugees rather than political ones. Many were sent back and others had to endure extensive clearance procedures. Krome Detention Center in southwest Dade County, the main site for the processing of Haitian refugees, was overflowing. It was common to be detained for prolonged periods of time. By July 1982, almost two years after the number of intercepted refugees peaked, there was a backlog of 32,000 cases. Being black, poor, modestly educated, and lacking good English-language skills, most of those who were allowed to stay faced an uphill battle. They settled in concentrated areas of Dade and Broward counties such as the area northeast of Overtown that would become known as Little Haiti, the city of North Miami, and Fort Lauderdale. Haitians became the largest immigrant group in Broward County in the early 1980s.

      In more than one way, then, 1980 proved to be a turning point. First, it raised anxiety among non-Hispanic whites to the level of despair.²⁵ In the eyes of Miami’s white establishment, their city was under siege. Near the end of the year, an English-only referendum was passed as a means to resist the Cuban siege. Non-Hispanic whites feared that their city was forever lost.

      For the Cubans already in Miami, the events of 1980 served as a wake-up call. On the one hand, the arrival of the marielitos indicated that the Cuban stay in Miami would not be as temporary as they first hoped and expected. On the other hand, the hostile and organized response of the local population to the growing Cuban presence provided a lesson to the Cubans. After 1980, Cubans set their eyes on Miami and laid claim to the city. They naturalized in large numbers to become enfranchised, and the number of Cubans in political office increased notably.

      Finally, Miami’s African Americans were caught in between. Instead of tasting the long awaited fruits of the victory in the civil rights movement, African Americans were crowded out of Miami’s political apparatus. The sharp contrast between the harsh treatment of Haitian refugees and the federal government’s pampering of Cuban immigrants provoked accusations of racism. Economically, the successes of recent Cuban immigrants intensified feelings of relative deprivation among African Americans. Relations between the two groups were cool and distant and would remain so for many years. At times they would find themselves in open conflict with each other, as when Nelson Mandela visited Miami in 1990—he was revered by African Americans but scorned by Cubans for his sympathetic relations with Fidel Castro.²⁶

      The multiple crises of 1980 and the subsequent surge in crime rates tarnished Miami’s national image. These vexing times were perhaps best reflected in the infamous Time cover story in October 1981, which was titled “Paradise Lost?” It chronicled South Florida’s volatile recent history and elaborated on the exploding drug trade and crime epidemic. The article featured a map of South Florida that showed main tourist sites and beaches, alternated with alarming symbols such as guns to indicate high-crime areas, boats overloaded with Haitian refugees off the Atlantic coast, and small airplanes and cigarette boats carrying cocaine. The piece had turmoil, declivity, and danger written all over it. The publication was received with indignation and a fair bit of denial by the local establishment—it was clear that the “magic city” had been transformed in ways beyond its control. The Time article dealt another blow to the bewildered state of mind of South Floridians.²⁷

      Organized crime had been a part of Miami’s history since the early twentieth century and was particularly striking during the 1920s and 1950s. After Castro’s revolution, a considerable part of Havana’s Mafia activities shifted to Miami. The Havana connection was no more, but things only seemed to get busier in South Florida. In 1967, Newsweek dubbed Miami “Mob Town, USA” and referred to the “syndicated beach front” of Miami Beach.²⁸ More was yet to come. The surge in crime in the late 1970s and early 1980s was extraordinary, even by Miami’s standards. In 1979, Miami already had by far the highest crime rates of all major cities in the nation. Then, in 1980, violent crime rose another 82 percent and the murder rate went up 78 percent.²⁹ Much of it was “disorganized” organized crime, the sort of chaos to emerge in a place that actually had an impressive tradition of illicit networks but that was thrown into disarray with the sudden appearance of a range of new illicit opportunities and connections, and plenty of characters to seize the day. This was the era of the “cocaine cowboys,” immortalized in Brian de Palma’s remake of the movie Scarface in 1983.

      In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the cocaine-trafficking business firmly established itself in the city, with major ties to Colombia and other offshore regions. The willing participants included old-time mobsters, ex-CIA agents, some marielitos, bent bankers, opportunistic lawyers, corrupt police officers, small airplane owners, petty criminals, and an ambitious new crowd of South American gangsters, mainly from Colombia. The cocaine business set off new waves of violence that made headlines around the country. The New York Times referred to Miami as “Murder City, USA,” a place where crime had gone “berserk.”³⁰ The following report from the Miami Herald describes one of the leading characters on the scene and gives an impression of Miami’s outlandish criminal milieu at the time: