Magic City Mania

By Carlos Miller
She would have been sexy had her body not been ravaged by years of crack, heroin and multiple sex partners.

Jagged ribs jutted through a tattered t-shirt. Needle tracks dotted her bruised, bony arms.

And smeared lipstick created a permanent smile on a face that had been bruised one too many times.

She loomed over my table at Kingdom on Biscayne Boulevard, her body illuminated by the full moon rising over the eastern horizon.

“What are you writing?” she asked.

“A poem. At least trying to,” I responded.

“About what?”

“About this. About life. About Biscayne Boulevard. I don’t even know yet.”

I was on my third Heineken and had been hoping the alcohol would loosen the words that had been trapped in my subconscious mind. Words that would be flowing out of me like an unhinged beer tap had I been standing in the shower, driving down the street or laying in bed trying to get to sleep. Anywhere except in front of a damned computer screen or staring at a blank notebook page.

“Will you read it to me?”

Usually my answer would have been no. I don’t like sharing my unfinished work. And I get annoyed when people look over my shoulder as I write. It’s no different than when people walk into my kitchen and peer into my pan as I cook. Just sit the fuck down and enjoy the final product. You won’t be disappointed.

But on this night, all I had were two lines. Two good lines. Two solid lines. But two lines that were going nowhere.

I looked down at the Moleskine notebook I always carry in my back pocket and cleared my throat. Then I read those lines aloud.

“Under a full moon on Biscayne Boulevard”
“Drinking a beer at an outside bar.”

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By Carlos Miller
A loaded Colt .45 was tucked neatly in the waistband at the small of my back. A Canon 10D was strapped around my neck. The African drums were pounding furiously beside me.

And the lady with the microphone was asking me to step up and introduce myself.

It was Saturday night in Liberty City and I was the only non-black person in a room filled with spoken word poets.

As the smell of incense permeated the air and the smoke created a foggy haze, I accepted the microphone and told them I had no poem, but I had a story.

The drums came to a simmering beat as I told them that I was born and raised in Miami. That I lived away for ten years. That I returned only a few months ago and was on a mission to rediscover my city.

I admitted that back in the day, I would never have set foot in this place. That the only time I would even come to Liberty City was to cop weed. And that I had even been skeptical about showing up that night because I was unsure at how I would be received.

Then I thanked them for having received me with open arms, literally, as a poet named Lady Divine gave me a giant hug and told me to make myself at home after I told her I wanted to photograph the poets.

But I never got a chance to thank them for introducing me to the literary goldmine that I discovered in Miami’s underground spoken word scene.

I never got a chance to thank them for inspiring me to start writing and reciting my own politically conscious poems in front of crowds.

And I never got a chance to thank them for breaking down some of the stereotypes that had been instilled in me since childhood about Liberty City.

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I wrote and posted the following essay on democraticunderground.com after I had returned from Havana in May 2006.

I am reposting it on this blog because Cuba will continue to be a huge part of this blog, even though it is technically about Miami. Click on the photo below to see a slideshow of my Havana trip. CM

By Carlos Miller
They throw the word “libre” around like we throw the word “freedom.” There is the Habana Libre Hotel (called the Havana Hilton during the 1950s), the Cuba Libre cocktail (which the locals will quickly tell you es una mentira) and signs displaying the words “Viva Cuba Libre” next to the Cuban flag are plastered throughout the city.

But only in the parts of the city where most tourists don’t venture. As if serving as a reminder to the Cuban people that they are free to purchase all the freedom fries they want, as long as they use Peso Convertible as opposed to Moneda Nacional.

After all, there are two currencies in Cuba. Two economies. The tourist economy and the local economy. The Peso Convertible is supposedly equal to one American dollar, kind of like a Disney Dollar except the Cuban government only gives you 80 percent for every dollar. Part of Castro’s cold war against Bush.

But Cuba is anything but free. If it were free, the Cubans would be allowed to walk down the street by my side without a police officer demanding their papers. They would be allowed to enter the hotel lobbies and get on the Internet, providing they are able to pay for it.

They would be able to buy a flight out of Cuba at a moment’s notice without having to go through an entanglement of bureaucracy that ultimately denies their request. Of course, not many of them would be able to afford the flight even if they had the freedom to come and go as they please. A doctor makes $30 a month and a college professor makes about $20 a month.

And if the United States were truly free, then I would be allowed to travel to Cuba without breaking the law. But that was one of the reasons I was there in the first place. To commit an act of civil disobedience. To protest the U.S. Government’s restrictions on Cuba. To send a big Fuck You to George W. Bush (more on that later). Read the rest of this entry »

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By Carlos Miller
The green-eyed gringo had fallen in love with Havana. Its casinos. Its rum. Its music. And more importantly, its women.

It was 1958 and my dad was 37 years old. A World War II veteran. A University of Miami graduate. And a confirmed bachelor with a taste for Latinas. And who could blame him?

The Virginian native had immersed himself into Cuban culture to the point where he could maintain an in-depth conversation about Cuban politics in Spanish, even if he did it in a strong gringo accent. It was from these conversations that he developed a deep resentment against President Fulgencio Batista.

So on New Years Eve that year, when it was announced that Batista had fled the country, my dad was partying on the streets with the rest of the Cubans. And he continued to celebrate on the streets with hundreds of Cubans when Fidel Castro rolled into Havana eight days later.

But as history shows, the party was short-lived. It wasn’t long before Castro started wielding his iron hand against the Cuban people. And it wasn’t long before Castro wielded his iron hand against my dad, deporting him out of the country at gunpoint.

The way my dad told it years later, as we sat at his kitchen table sharing a bottle of Bushmills Irish Whiskey, he knew things were changing for the worse when he landed in jail one night after chatting up a Cuban woman, whose boyfriend turned out to be a “Fidelista”.

Once he was in jail, he learned that the Fidelistas had taken on an extreme anti-American sentiment, which was surprising because it was only a few weeks earlier that he befriended a bearded Castrista at el Floridita, the nightclub that was reputed to have invented the daiquiri.

Not only was the Floridita said to be Hemingway’s favorite bar, Esquire magazine listed it as one of seven of the world’s most famous bars in 1953.

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