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Even believers like Joaquin Blaya are worried that Miami will become another banana republic, bedeviled by huge divisions between the rich and the very poor. There is no doubt that waves of immigrants have put an enormous strain on Miami, both financially and socially. Roughly 140,000 Anglo residents have fled in the past decade, largely in response to the city's growing Hispanic character. Some areas of the city today resemble the Third World, with the homeless and immigrants living under highways or in matchstick houses along canals.
Three times in the past decade, Miami has erupted in racial disturbances -- caused in part by blacks frustrated as each new immigrant wave passes them by economically. The black Cuban-American neighborhood of Allapattah now serves as an uneasy buffer between the blacks of Liberty City and the white Cubans and Nicaraguans living in Little Havana. But Dade County board chairman Art Teele, a black who won his job with the backing of the commission's new Latino members, doesn't see race as the problem. "There is some lingering resentment by the blacks," he admits, "but today they are just as resentful of the Haitians arriving."
Much will depend on the city's leadership in the next decade -- a leadership that has been notoriously lacking in the past. "Miami has never had enlightened leadership. The Anglo establishment lives in the Miami of the '40s and '50s," gripes Maurice Ferre, the Puerto Rican-born county commissioner who shaped much of Miami's downtown skyline while serving as mayor from 1973 to 1985. As head of Dade's Destination 2001 panel, Ferre believes the key to the future is in the younger generation of Cuban Americans who live with one foot in each world. New surveys show, however, that the new generation, although bilingual, prefers to speak English. If they assimilate too well, they risk diluting the Spanish-speaking enclave that is making the city an international success.
By the time they take over, of course, Miami may be well established as a hemispheric power thanks to the latest arrivals: the Europeans. The Norwegians have built a $1 billion stake in southern Florida, primarily in Miami's booming cruise business. The British are the second biggest investors from the Continent. Barclay's Bank regularly finances Washington's grain deals with Russia, not from New York but from Miami. The Germans are snapping up waterfront property along the beach and Biscayne Bay. The mysterious Munich investor Thomas Kramer even has visions of building something between a modern-day Manhattan and a reconstructed Portofino at the tip of Miami Beach.