Go away and the most attractive cities in Florida, Miami is a stunning and often intoxicatingly beautiful place. Awash with sunlight enhanced-natural colors, there are times – when the neon-lit South Beach in the night sky shone warm and the palm trees swaying in the breeze – when a city that looks better is hard to imagine. Even so, the people, not climate or landscape, that makes Miami unique. Half of the two million Hispanic residents, the majority of Cubans. Spanish is the primary language almost everywhere – in many places it’s the only language you’ll hear, and you will be expected to speak at least a few words – and news from Havana, Caracas or Managua frequently gets more attention than words latest from Washington, DC.
Only a century ago Miami was a pioneer in swampy mosquito-tormented settlers. The arrival of the railway in 1896 gave the city’s first fixed land-link with the whole continent, and cleared the way for the Twenties property boom. In the Fifties, Miami Beach became a celebrity filled resort area, just as thousands of Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro’s regime began arriving in mainland Miami. The Sixties and Seventies brought a decline, and Miami’s reputation in the Eighties as the vice capital of the United States at least partly deserved. When the police show Miami Vice so glamorously underlined, drug smuggling, endemic; also, in the year 1980 the city has the highest murder rates in America. Since then, though, much has changed for two very different reasons. First, the gentrification of South Beach helped make tourism the lifeblood of the local economy again in the early Nineties. Second, the city determined to woo Latin America brought rapid investment, both domestic and international: many U.S. corporations run the South American operations from Miami and a certain environment, such as Key Biscayne, is now home to a growing expatriate community of Peru, Colombia and Venezuela.
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