The Islands

ABOUT THREE MILES into the heart of the city, but at a point where the Miami River is still wide enough for a small ocean freighter to just squeeze through, the denizens of the Gunkhole were trying to figure out why the Coast Guard was on their case.
The officers had been through earlier that day, rapping on hulls, waking people up well before noon. The twenty-fourth of the month, they kept repeating. The twenty-fourth. They wanted to make sure everybody knew, because they were coming back then, and with extreme prejudice.

The river rat lounged in his bathrobe near the newest blowout patch on the deck of his fiber-glass twenty-eight-footer. It was now near sundown, the hour that, along the river, made the sober acutely aware of their condition, setting them off in search of a cure. Near a banyan tree, one of the ubiquitous rusting fifty-five-gallon drums bore empties of the universal solvents: Myers's Rum, Beck's Beer, Tropicana Orange Juice, and 80 W 90 gear oil.

The river rat was the one who had christened with the name Gunkhole the largely commercial anchorage in which he and his cohorts lived on their boats. Actually, what he'd said was that there were two ways to go with boats: Merrill Stevens and Gunkhole, and this wasn't Merrill Stevens.

Merrill Stevens is a drydock and anchorage at the southern edge of Miami, on Dinner Key, in Coconut Grove. Its view is of Key Biscayne, the superwealthy island to which Richard Nixon used to retreat with his pal Bebe Rebozo. Merrill Stevens' customers wear starched whites, own "yachts," not "boats," and hire cleaning ladies for them while they are in port. The sterns bear the names of cities from Montreal to Panama. Merrill Stevens believes in hulls with many layers of fine lacquer, accented with metallic gold pinstripes. It does fine work. Its customers do little at all.

The Gunkhole, by contrast, is very different, but just as much Miami. Halfway between downtown and the airport, it's a somewhat trashed oasis. The Miami "River" is actually more of a crooked canal. It's lined with docked craft ranging from cabin cruisers to rustbuckets over a hundred feet long that haul, between islands, TV dinners or whatever. The open water between hulls on one side and hulls on the other, in fact, is less wide than a swimming pool is long.

It's nonetheless been so repeatedly dredged that, as you sit under the Gunkhole's banyan, in a salvaged leather seat from a ship's cockpit, amid the dead batteries and crapped-out motor-cycles, sipping beer, you can look out and see what appears to be the penthouse of a small apartment building drifting past, towering over the palms. It's actually a cargo ship improbably heading upriver, guided by two tugs being careful, very careful, not to scrape somebody's paint job.

Though the Gunkhole is hardly the antiseptic world of Dinner Key, there is little purposeless junk around it. A rusting pile of steel is being miraculously transformed into a fifty-eight-foot sailboat. A young blond Viking who barely speaks English is working with an acetylene torch, great precision, and the help only of a grizzled old man, to produce the hull's graceful curves, angling flat piece of metal to flat piece of metal.

Under a kerosene lamp, the woodworking "shop" of the aforementioned river rat stands on the bank, covered only by some sheets of plastic and a few lizards. Power cords off a jerry-rigged patch box lead to a jigsaw and a grinding wheel, next to a paint-brush and a can of epoxy. An old dory that's been painstakingly sanded down and caulked lies upside down on some logs. Shorn of its paint flakes and marine growths, the boat's timber shows its fine grain. Examined closely, this utilitarian cork is something of a work of art. Tiny white flowers bloom nearby.

Overhead, planes with exotic markings scream in low, drowning out the conversation, as they do all over Miami. The sport in the Gunkhole is to attempt to determine their cargo and origin by their sound and looks. Engines protesting their need of a tune-up as they angle their craft into the glide path are assumed to be from islands where the fine points of twentieth-century technology are considered optional. Ditto jets that, while over a populated area, jettison excess fuel so that their wings won't break off on landing. The airways of the islands continue to harbor virtually every make of commercial aircraft ever built, no matter what its age. A Super Constellation, the triple-tailed prop job made obsolete by the first 707s, rumbles by, its nose at an odd angle to the runway. Nobody believes that anything legal is carted in the hold of the unmarked DC-3 that follows.

A Coast Guard environmental inspection? asked the pirate in cutoffs from the sloop docked nearby in the Gunkhole. He watched the soap suds trickle illicitly into the river from the open-air shower on the bank. Use of the shower constitutes indecent exposure. But more to the point, the soap pollution is the kind of thing the Coast Guard seemed to be upset about.

Any kind of law enforcement in the Gunkhole was considered a marvel. The evening was full of idle curiosity about what, exactly, moved the Coast Guard to attempt to tighten up on the laws against flushing toilets into the water.

Maybe it was the snake drills. Maybe that's what got to them. From time to time, it seemed right to throw a length of hose into the river, yell "Snake!" and everybody open up with shotguns, Magnums, semiautomatic weapons, whatever was handy on the boats. Apart from being fun, it established that the Gunkhole was heavily armed and crazy, which was all to the good. You wound up being able to leave your tools out on deck and go for a beer and come back, and nobody had messed with your stuff.

Maybe it was the dope. But no. For one thing, drug-smuggling is South Florida's number one industry - ahead of tourism. It would be preposterous to think of a pollution check as the pretext for a bust. "Fishing" boats whose nets had obviously never touched water plied the river all the time. It would take at least the Navy to put even a dent in the traffic. Besides, it was no big secret that the Gunkhole had no reason to be holding cargo. The multimillion-dollar shipments of marijuana bales were off-loaded at the seafood store up the way.

Maybe it was the 220-volt line to the radio's illegal linear amplifier that had brought the Coast Guard. That idea aroused great jocularity. When that radio was fired up, they explained, lights dimmed all over Miami, television along the river displayed un-seasonable snow, and you could ship-to-shore with Colombia. But the antenna had been broken for several weeks. No, that couldn't have been it.

The pirate allowed as how he thought he would just pull out to sea until this inspection nonsense blew over. The IRS and he had failed to communicate for some time now, and he saw no reason to risk his streak of luck by talking to the Coast Guard. Not about anything.

Unfortunately, there was a problem with that. It would lead to a hassle with the damn state of Florida, since the boat, which he'd built from scratch, suffered from an utter lack of title, registration, running numbers, tax payments, and so forth. The river rat in the bathrobe thought he'd hang around. He was fairly sure that he could find something more current than the expired registration sticker displayed on the bow.

Besides. There was a bright side to all this, he said. If you put five gallons of crankcase oil into the bilge of the neighbor's tugboat and got it pumping out just as the cutter hove into view, the Coast Guard would take one look at the slick on the water and hit the tug's captain with at least a $5000 fine.

The Coast Guard just can't take a joke about oil slicks, pointed out the river rat, warming to his idea. They'd lead that old bastard away in handcuffs. Probably impound the boat. Serve him right, just for the time he steered two hundred feet of concrete-post-laden barge through a yacht basin up by Hollywood. Get him out of the water once and for all.

I've been waiting for a chance like this, said the river rat. I've been patient too. And that's the answer right there. Five gallons of black oil on the twenty-fourth.

Between jets, the noise of the city streets that surround the Gunkhole could barely be heard. The anchorage is almost totally separated from that world by land, difficult to find, accessible only via twisted gravel back alleys, lushly shaded by tropical foliage, opening up only at the very end to the clearing, where a square-nosed barge had, improbably, been made over into somebody's idea of living quarters.

I think I know why the Coast Guard is prowling around here looking for cracked toilet seats, mused the pirate. I think it's really pretty simple. I think they're just trying to figure out what the hell they've got on their hands here.

The first railroad didn't discover what it had on its hands in Miami - that "tangled mass of vine, brush, trees and rock," as the site on which it was to grow was then described - until the turn of this century. That was decades after the rails had reached California, at a time when Frederick Jackson Turner was prematurely declaring the end of the North American frontier. It was almost four hundred years after the Spanish discovered Florida, only to decide that it apparently hadn't been worth the bother.
asdfThe railroad was built by a former partner of John D. Rockefeller, one Henry M. Flagler. His vision was to offer one of the few places on the mainland decidedly below the frost belt to the leisured wealthy with whom he was accustomed to associate. As regionalist Neal Pierce notes, he had already "made" Palm Beach to the north, with a sumptuous new hotel, The Breakers. In a kind of winter Newport, private railway cars of the ultrarich crowded the Palm Beach sidings, and large private "cottages" clustered near the hotel. "In the evenings," historian Marjory Douglas recorded, "the music from the hotel ballroom mingled with the rustling of palm fronds, glittering in moonlight, and the winds of the sea."

The only hitch with Palm Beach was that it still was not reliably Caribbean enough to guarantee the rich a permanent haven from the cold. So Flagler built farther south, ultimately pushing his railroad even past Miami, out into the water. Seven hundred men died laying steel, island by island, until "Flagler's Folly" got to Key West in 1913. Flagler's next stop, literally, was Havana, and for a while a car ferry plied between Key West and Havana. But he wanted to build a railroad bridge to the Cuban capital, a goal the state of Florida actually began to implement in 1934. This plan might have had an awesome effect on the region's twentieth-century history, had it not been for the hurricane of '35, which wiped out forty-one miles of railroad track and trestle and forced the abandonment of the Havana bridge.

It's important to note Flagler's dream, because it was the first of the many that have washed over South Florida in waves, each different, each ultimately receding, but each leaving its mark at the high-water line.

Every one of those dreams continues to exist here intact - un-assimilated - captured by the promise of the sun. Because they are dreams - visions of a kind of perfection leaving old problems behind - they do everything they can to ignore each other.

The yachted aristocrats, in their dream, had not envisioned an invasion of pensioners wishing to live cheap where the slush does not grow. The white-haired from a homogeneously Anglo-German Great Plains, meanwhile, were rather taken aback. that large numbers of blacks and some crackers, as they are still locally called, considered Florida an extension of Dixie. The crackers and blacks were amazed that the Mafia considered South Florida a vacation spa, meeting place, retirement goal, and place to invest their ill-gotten gains in legitimate business. Then the Mob found itself in the midst of a cultural, economical, demographic, and political island on the land, transformed by "a piece of Manhattan which floated 1,000 miles to the south, warmed by the waters of the Gulf Stream," as one professor put it. Miami had become a dream to northeastern Jews, too.

What these dreams have had in common is that they belonged to the inhabitants of the mainland. Miami looked in one direction for its future. North. Real estate and tourism were the driving force of the economy, the source of riches. The money that came in, came in from the cold.

Despite their considerable differences, the newcomers shared a certain background so fundamental that they took it for granted. They all spoke English, for one thing, and they acknowledged certain continental Anglo ideas, not the least of which was that this was a white man's world.

This is why the geographic reorientation that South Florida has undergone in the last decade has been the most sweeping of any not caused by war in North American history. The economy and culture have turned completely around, and are now facing due south. They now look to Cuba, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Venezuela - even Argentina - for their future. As Liberty City rioting showed in 1980, black dreams have been dashed. Anglo dreams, though still alive, have become a little irrelevant.

"Jaime Roldos, the then-president-elect of Ecuador, said it best at the trade fair here in 'seventy-nine," said Maurice Ferre, who ought to know, he being the mayor of Miami. "He made a beautiful speech and then the key line was 'Miami has now become the capital of Latin America.' "

In 1959, Fidel Castro altered the history of North America in a way he undoubtedly hadn't intended. When he stepped out of the Sierra Maestra and into power, Cuba was one of the wealthiest islands in the Caribbean, as well as the largest. Unfortunately, it was also only marginally sovereign - an economic colony of the United States. There were gross inequities in the distribution of income. The Batista regime Castro overthrew was corrupt. Havana had become an anything-goes playground for foreigners in which prostitution, gambling, and vice flourished. And the large underclass suffered from vast gaps in education and health care. In the course of attacking these problems, however, Castro discarded civil liberties and democratic reforms as bourgeois baggage. Property not only of the oligarchy but of the middle class was seized; class consciousness turning the poor against the well-off was encouraged; and, ultimately, enemies of the regime and their families were threatened, imprisoned, and killed.

The result was refugees. Hundreds of thousands of them, fleeing by boat and airplane, from repression. But these refugees of the sixties were different from most who had arrived on the North American mainland; they assumed that they would soon be returning home. They were not refugees, but exiles. It was clear to them that the Castro regime was a temporary, if not inexplicable, aberration; it would soon fail under the burdens of its own contradictions. The masses would rise and overthrow him.

So first they settled nearby, and South Florida is the nearest-by to Havana there is. Second, because they viewed Florida as a temporary refuge, they made no excessive effort to integrate themselves into the existing social structure. (To this day, Cubans do not participate as vigorously in Miami elections as they could because many still have not applied for United States citizenship. That would be to concede that they're never going home.) And third, they plotted.

They plotted compulsively, and with the skill peculiar to their circumstances. The Cubans who left the island, understandably enough, were those who stood to lose the most by staying.

Doctors, lawyers, accountants, bankers - professionals of all kinds who were less than enthusiastic about being forced into the fields to hack away at the sugar cane - made up an extraordinary proportion of the exiles. As Ferre has said, an entire class - an entire nation - was uprooted from Cuba and dropped into Miami. Neurosurgeons who did not speak English took jobs in Florida hospitals changing bedpans. Distinguished jurists whose training was useless in a legal system totally different from the one they knew loaded bundles of the Miami Herald onto trucks. And they learned about the dark side of power. With the highest patriotic motives, they turned to the small clique in their midst accustomed to clandestine activities - the irate mobsters of Havana who had also skedaddled at their first opportunity - to raise money, purchase arms, train cadres. Small boats began to run raids, shelling coastal oil and sugar refineries. Guerrillas were secretly landed in Cuba to attempt the counterrevolution.

Men disappeared from Miami for months at a time. Later it would be discovered that they had been on huge, isolated Central American ranches, conducting maneuvers, training for the Bay of Pigs.

The Cubans' new environment was totally supportive of this underground. Not only was the Miami Mafia on cordial terms with their cousins who had run the lucrative Havana casinos and brothels, but Washington egged them on. The new young president of the United States who would soon organize the Green Berets was eager to explore new methods of dealing with insurgencies. The Central Intelligence Agency was delighted to help organize a small war against communism. These troops were motivated.

It will doubtless never be known exactly how much this unholy alliance changed the course of history. But conspiracy theorists, for example, are convinced that John Kennedy would be alive today, a graying elder statesman in his sixties, had it never existed. Castro, they say, enraged at the repeated clandestine attempts on his life ordered by the CIA and subcontracted to the Mafia, was behind the assassination of Kennedy.

The one thing that can be said for certain is that Miami was transformed into the intrigue capital of the hemisphere, reinforcing the dissimilarity between South Florida and the mainland to which it was only physically attached - an island very much like Hong Kong.

Even now, although the Cuban community has become far more interested in legitimate enterprise than in retaking the island - has become middle class and more involved in prosperity than exotic poisons - the pattern of operation the CIA pioneered persists.

Secrecy punctuated by tall tales envelops aspect after aspect of Miami. A reporter attempting to get at a description of the internal workings of the place is tempted to throw up his hands. "Those that know don't say, and those that say don't know," I was repeatedly told, even about the affairs of publicly held multinational corporations whose Latin American operations are headquartered in Miami. And the tales one does hear are so hair-raising -the "snake drills" mentioned earlier are an excellent example - that one is tempted to write them off as macho b.s. baked too long in the sun.

Yet there are certain undeniable facts and sober estimates about the place:

• "There is an unusually large number of gun dealers here," says Bob Nunnery, special agent in charge of U.S. Customs operations here. "A lot of the trade is legitimate," but when Central and South American political operatives need equipment on the sly, "they tend to come here also." It's routine news - the papers don't make a big deal out of it anymore - when a Salvadorian diplomat is nailed smuggling high-powered weapons out of Miami, or a quarter of a million rounds of illegal ammunition is discovered stashed in a shipment of air conditioners. "There's a huge traffic in weapons," says Dave Tucker, director of the Treasury Department's local Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms division. "You can triple your money by selling in Central and South America. We really just touch the surface of this."
• Companies like Focus Scientific and Electronics openly advertise as CIA equipment stuff ranging from infrared nightscopes to antibugging devices to phone scramblers.
• As many as nine deposed Central and South American heads of state have been counted living in the Miami area at one time. When Anastasio Somoza was ousted as the ruler of Nicaragua - and before he moved to Paraguay, where he was killed - Miami is where he, his henchmen, and his money fled.
• The Federal Reserve has noted that in 1979, an excess of 5.4 billion more untraceable cash dollars - much of it in $100 bills - arrived in Florida banks, from other parts of North America and the world, than left. The Fed assumes that this currency, which is an amount on the order of the United States balance-of-trade deficit in some of the 1970s, constitutes payoffs to the underground economy. California, which also has its share of tourism and crime, by comparison, showed no such surplus.
• Murders linked to the drug trade are averaging more than one a week in the Miami area.
• Plane crashes associated with attempts to fly in under coastal radar defenses, without lights, in order to land marijuana at isolated dirt airstrips, also without lights, have mounted to as high as one a day.
• When the Nixon administration went looking for talent to break into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate, it went to Miami and recruited CIA-trained Cubans.
• When DINA, the Chilean secret police, sent Michael Townley, a thirty-five-year-old North American Anglo, to murder Orlando Letelier, Townley also sought out militant Cubans to aid him in his scheme. Orlando Letelier was the former Chilean ambassador to the United States during the leftist Allende administration, which was overthrown by the CIA. The goal of the four Cubans, one of whom was the head of an outfit called the Cuban Nationalist Movement (CNM), was to trade their involvement for permission to set up a government-in-exile in Chile under its present military dictatorship. Admittedly, these Cubans who helped bomb Letelier's car in the streets of downtown Washington were from the Cuban community in New Jersey, not Florida. But Armando Santana, the man who became head of CNM when its former leader went to prison over the Letelier murder, and who denies vigorously the FBI conclusion that he is also head of a terrorist group called Omega Seven, told CBS's "6o Minutes": "I'm not criticizing the old generation, but everything in history evolves. The new generation takes over, okay. That's common history. But the tactics of the old generation are concentrated on waiting for the green light from Washington, and waiting for the Marines to solve their problems; the CIA to solve their problems for them. And we don't believe the American government and its interests are ever going to concord with our interests. If we're going to wait for the Marines to liberate our nation, I'm going to be buried here in the United States."

Miami is the only place in the United States [says Mayor Ferre], that's going to escape major recessions, and the reason - you really have to be honest about it - goes back to two things: the drug cash flow that comes in and impacts the whole community. And number two, the increased centralization of trade, commerce, and banking in Miami toward the Caribbean and Central and South America. This is the place to do business. And so, you no longer go to New York like it used to be ten years ago. Ten years ago, Miami was not a trade center. Why was it not a. trade center ten years ago and why is it a trade center today? [asked Ferre, who is himself Puerto Rican and has a Latin habit of conducting an entire dialogue by answering his own questions]. The availability of a tremendous amount of money - most of which comes from drugs, but not all - and the availability of a tremendous Spanish-speaking infrastructure. Hospitals. Engineering firms. Real estate. Lawyers. Banks. You can go from the cradle to the grave and make a lot of money in-between in Miami. In Spanish.

The foreign investors, many of them narcotics financed [Kimball has tes-tified], have huge cash resources so that when they are competing against legitimate investors who want to buy a property, they are quite willing to make larger down payments, quite willing to bid up the price so that the real yield, for example, on a large building in Coral Gables would be about one percent. You can see that no [ordinary] investor would be prudent to compete in the present financial market. If the doctor has to pay more for his office, or a warehouse in which brooms are kept has to have higher rent, because of this type of inflation, you can begin to see the impact on every citizen. And in some areas we see virtually all shopping centers in large metropolitan areas, virtually all office buildings, going into the hands of foreign investors.

• Between 1974 and 1978, trade to and from the rest of the Islands more than doubled, to about $6.5 billion.
• As of early 1980, fifteen international offices of U.S. banks, chartered in Miami under terms of the federal Edge Act, were active. Fifteen more foreign banks, hailing from South America, the Islands, Great Britain, Spain, Israel, Canada, and Japan were setting up shop. They joined thirty international banks and a dozen international departments of local banks already there. This made Miami North America's third-largest international banking center, and its growth was not tapering off.
• Free-trade zones, in which goods remain free of customs duties while they are being assembled or transshipped, have boomed. The one in Miami alone is expected to handle $2 billion worth of goods a year, three quarters of which are expected to move by air.
• Since 1972, the number of firms engaged in the export-import business has tripled. The Miami Yellow Pages have eighty pages of ex-im listings. They show more than 300 freight forwarders.
• The seaport of Miami, which was supposed to fulfill the area's needs through the year 2000, is way overcrowded, and expansion plans are proceeding.
• The director of the Miami airport expects to see international passenger traffic at his facility jump from 40 percent of the action to 70 percent in the decade of the eighties.

Buenos Aires and Bogota were disqualified because of concern for the personal safety of employees transferred to those cities. There was quite a bit of terrorism going in those countries in nineteen seventy-eight, when this study vvas conducted.
Caracas was disqualified because of operational problems. That is, visa difficulties, acute shortage of hotel rooms, tax clearances needed for departure, and so forth. At that time, the Venezuelan government had its hands full trying to spend the oil money it was generating. They just had such a glut . . . Ships were sitting in the port for four to six months, trying to get unloaded. They just had too much business. And the way to slow things down is to make it difficult to get a visa.

San Jose and San Juan are somewhat isolated and lacking in direct air service to other locations in the area, so they were wiped out.

The remaining four cities - Mexico City, Coral Gables, Sao Paulo, and Rio - were surveyed and rated using the following criteria:

Number one, political stability and good business climate;

Number two, centrality of location;

Number three, regional air-transportation service;

Number four, telecommunications and mail service;

Number five, ability to maintain area perspective. Let me explain that a little bit. We have major subsidiaries in Mexico City and Sao Paulo and in Buenos Aires. There was a fear that there would be trouble with the local management maintaining its local perspective and the division management maintaining a regional perspective. The fear was that the regional management would always be telling them what to do, see.

The sixth category was ease of expatriate adjustment and living. In other words, living conditions. You know, [North Americans] think that they've got to go somewhere and they've got to have good clear running water and they've got to have sewerage, got to have lettuce they can eat, and vegetables, without fear of dysentery. And you've got to have a telephone in every bedroom and blah, blah, blah.

The seventh was operating costs.

And the reasons those others bombed out [said Trelenberg], primarily were poor communications from that city to other cities in Latin America - not to the United States, but to other cities in Latin America - and poor air connections.

I don't know the reason
I stayed here all season
With nothing to show
But this brand new tattoo
But it's a real beauty
A Mexican cutie
How it got here
I haven't a clue.
Wastin' away again in margueritaville
Searchin' for my
Lost shaker of salt
Some people claim
That there's a woman to blame
But I think
Hell it could be my fault.