(2 of 6)
Signs of Miami's manifest destiny as a hemispheric power are evident. International trade through the city is a $25.6 billion business and growing by double digits annually, some 20% in 1992 alone. While the U.S. was reporting a trade deficit last year, Miami's port district recorded a surplus of more than $6 billion. Miami International Airport, now the nation's second largest international passenger and cargo hub, is poised to overtake New York City's Kennedy International Airport by 1995-96. It is already the world's fifth busiest cargo airport. Ships sail from Biscayne Bay to virtually every port in the world, from Barranquilla to Bombay.
Tourism, long southern Florida's major industry, is also changing to reflect its new international role. For the first time last year, the number of foreign visitors to Miami (4.7 million) passed domestic ones (3.8 million), generating $7.2 billion in business. Foreign tourism was set for another record this year, until a spate of tourist murders -- three of them Germans on three separate occasions just this year -- revived worries about Miami's rate of violent crime, the highest in the U.S. Despite the bad press, European airlines like British Airways and Iberia Airlines of Spain have increased capacity to the city. Even the Russian airline Aeroflot makes money on Miami by picking up Florida-bound tourists at a stopover in Shannon, Ireland. And in 1992 a record 1.5 million tourists sailed from Miami, the cruise capital of the world, aboard 20 liners bound for balmy ports from Cozumel to Caracas.
Miami's fate, it is often said, was sealed when Fidel Castro started reading Karl Marx at the University of Havana. The mass exodus of middle- and upper- class Cubans, driven into exile by communism in the 1960s, began a process that lifted the city from its utter dependence on domestic tourism into the global economy. The Cubans, given immediate political asylum and resettlement help by Lyndon Johnson and subsequent Administrations, prospered.
Intent on returning home, however, those early exiles did not bother to assimilate into the American melting pot. Instead, they "acculturated," learning the American way of doing business while building a Spanish-speaking enclave unlike anything anywhere else in the U.S. "In Miami there is no pressure to be American," says sociologist Lisandro Perez, a Cuban-born immigrant and head of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. "People can make a living perfectly well in an enclave that speaks Spanish."
Today there is no other U.S. city in which so much of the day-to-day business is conducted in Spanish. "Almost everyone in international business here is bilingual, even the Americans," says Fred Brenner, general manager of SunBank's International Banking Division and himself bilingual. Unlike in New York or Los Angeles, where Spanish is primarily heard in the barrios, it is spoken in Miami not just by the exiles playing dominoes in Little Havana but also by businessmen in the boardrooms of Brickell Avenue.