The Dangerous Paradise of 1980 Miami
DAVE BARRY HAS described Miami as a tropical paradise full of people from many different lands, cultures, backgrounds, and walks of life, all of whom want to kill each other. The city’s proximity to the piratical Caribbean, which has always been happy to help Americans evade their country’s prohibitions, has inspired breathtakingly flamboyant displays of open criminality since the beginning of recorded Miami history.
Sometimes this is merely amusing, as when Calvin Coolidge’s entourage pulled into Key West in 1928 on the first leg of a state visit to Cuba and discovered that, even with the president of the United States and his vast law-enforcement traveling party in town, nobody made even a pretense of observing Prohibition. The one-night stopover turned into a drunken bacchanal, with reporters dizzily toppling off gangplanks into the ocean the next day as they tried to board Coolidge’s Havana-bound flotilla.
Other times it has been deadly. On the day after Christmas in 1969, a pair of Cuban-exile cocaine trafficking groups, occupying five cars, raced through Miami’s crowded downtown streets for half an hour, engaged in a running gun battle that left two men badly injured and one dead. The low body count was surprising, especially given that several participants were CIA-trained veterans of the Bay of Pigs. But what is truly astonishing is that the bang-bang was so ordinary that it didn’t rate even the merest mention in The Miami Herald.
Why should it? Miami was full of untethered rage and a plenitude of weapons. The foes of Fidel Castro carried out at least 30 bombings in 1975. crime writer Edna Buchanan once opened her trunk to load reporter) had stashed a load of machine guns there to smuggle to his pals in Havana.
