Category: Florida

Review of "Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida"

Gary Morimo’s Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida is concerned primarily with the manner in which Florida transformed from a barely inhabited region in 1900 to the state with the fourth largest population in 2000. Connected with this story of growth is the manner in which Florida formed a distinct identity distinct from its northern, more established neighbors. To accomplish this Morimo shows how it is that since the 1960s “Florida was more climate controlled, technologically inclined, and also older, more ethnic, more religiously and racially diverse, wealthier, whiter and less agrarian than the rest of the south” (7).

Florida’s beaches were early recognized as a place of beauty to be areas of repose and restoration by elites, leading to various real-estate booms and busts in Miami, the lack of transportation infrastructure, the real threat of hurricanes and the fetid and mosquito filled natural environment meant that most of the states economic activity in the beginning of the 20th century was agricultural and located in the interior of the state.

It was not until the onset of World War II that the conditions would be present that would lead to Florida’s rapid coastal development. First was the transition to Fortress Florida. Federal investment into the region for military bases brought with it service sectors, better roads and infrastructure to be used by the counties after they abandoned it. The many barrier islands were ideal for practicing amphibious assaults, such as the ones that would occur in the Japanese peninsula, and it is the state closest to the Caribbean. It thus was ideal as the base for operations to quell communist organizing in places such as the Dominican Republic following the capture of Cuba by Castro.

Morimo additionally illustrates how new technologies shaped the patterns of habitation, economic investment and culture of Florida. The creation of refrigerated rail cars and that capacity to make juice concentrated enabled agricultural barons to expand their market share and their income. Interstate highways led to the decline to smaller tourist attractions and restaurants and the increase of large tourist operations and chains. Air-conditioning made Florida an acceptable place to live year round to more people, while dredging operations made more land available for housing. It was not just technological innovation that helped create the state, but financial innovation as well.
Much of the mid-twentieth settlement of Florida was accomplished via financial instruments that made paradise affordable to northern retirees. Low down payments on homes facilitated a gray invasion of retirees while insurance policies were founded on political rather than economic rationales. Later came the Marielitos and shortly after them narcos, crooked bankers, dictators and their cabals from South and Central America brought with large amounts of money and a distinct culture that helped distinguish South Florida from “the south”. These factors that shaped modern Florida continue to do so and in ways that are not always clear – be they environmentally devastating or otherwise – however the image of Florida as an aspirational place to live continues despite it’s many peculiarities.

Review of "Miami"

Joan Didion’s book Miami is a New Journalism account that delves into the relationship between the large Cuban exile and Anglo communities in Miami and Washington D.C. While the type of political assassinations that were making headlines at the times of the book’s first publication is no longer a normal occurrence, the book is still insightful for understanding Miami’s official as well as their “underwater” history. As a caveat, however, Didion also engages in an unfair essentialization of Latins by framing their exile politics, as anyone familiar with 19th century radical exile politics London knows is always full of passion and intrigue, as being “Spanish” and a product of a hot environment. Her connection of their militancy to these, in the end, imperialist and orientalist notions is a mar on an otherwise compelling work.

The notion of the underwater narrative refers to the manner in which Cuban-American’s interact with the Federal government, specifically how the state deals with a body of foreign nationals which seeks to overthrow a neighboring country’s government during the Cold War epoch. Didion doesn’t examine many archival documents or policy proscriptions, but instead infers the underlying beliefs of policy advocated by the Cuban community and the American’s tasked with handling them. Handling their passionate excesses is seen as “disposal problem”, especially following the Mariel boat lifts when tens of thousands of refugees, normal, mentally disabled and criminal, were now considered “American citizens”. This problem of disposal is both one of housing, a la the tent cities created in the parking lots and empty spaces along stadiums, as well as how to deal with groups that, now free from the Cuban police, want to provoke a war between the two countries by attacking Soviet bloc ships in the Miami port and hit-and-run incursions into small Cuban ports. The solution to the first problem, how to house tens of thousands as fast as possible, isn’t mentioned but the latter is given an accounting. Simply put, the militants that left are given further training at the Ejercito Cubano Anticomunista camp in Homestead and other places around the Everglades.

At this point, the US backing of a foreign for to ostensibly invade another county, runs into a problem with this style of writing. Specifically, the paucity of sources allows for subjective inferences which may be far from the objective reality. While Didion can correctly claim that JMWAVE existed, that in the early 1960’s Miami the CIA had assembled the third largest Navy contingent of battle and retro-fitted ships in the event that they wanted to invade Cuba, she also states that there may have been anywhere from 15,000 to 150,000 anti-Castro operatives fielded by the CIA. While it is unlikely that she would have access to actual numbers so close to the time period she’s writing, the result is that the account only gives a small picture of the events rather than a larger, more coherent narrative. She drifts from inference to inference in a highly suggestive manner that feels true to life, but it’s still hard to say how much of it is true and how much of it is a reading of her own fears of the situation onto it. Instead of deep investigative reporting that gives detailed descriptions of the actors involved, she relies mainly on what is reported in the newspapers and is “known on the street”. People drop in and out of the book, only mattering insofar as Didion is able to get a point she wants to make across – usually how this group of exiles has led to a third-worldization of politics in Miami. The picture that she presents is one filled with conspiracy, martial ideas of political behavior, killing of people open to dialog with Castro and wealthy Cuban’s fundraising for la causa. It is a dark, paranoid and ultimately tragic portrait, but one can’t help but wonder if the focus on a small, sensational and militant contingent of people leads to a distorted view. Because while Didion shows that this group is able to gain a significant modicum of local political power and can gain access to upper-level bureaucrats in Washington DC, the latter’s instance on IR realism always checks the “poeticism” and volunteerism of the Cubans.

One of the poetic metaphors that Didion uses several times that I found fitting was the the manner in which Washington D.C.’s vacillating policy towards Cuba, indeed all of Latin America, leave traces on the board. People, the moving pieces on the board, end up resenting and feeling antagonism to their handlers for their perceived lack of commitment. This is especially clear in the section detailing the manner in which media strategy has come to dominate the presidency. This need to address the variety of issues prevalent in the United States disallows the type of intensive attention and concern that the Cubans would like to see given to their sense of purpose. As Cuban-American and American interests overlap only at limited points, especially towards a stable government widely perceived as legitimate by their own people, the American willingness to act is seen as weak as their capacity to act and change the government is seen as definitive. Such sentiments are shown in Didion’s excerpt from conversations with the elite, in the volunteering and fundraising for the Nicaraguan contras compartmentalized in the slogan seen on stickers at anti-Castro businesses “Hoy Nicaragua, Manana Cuba”. Additionally, these traces are visible in the varied treatment of the policing apparatus to Omega 7 and Alpha 66. Sometimes they are considered acceptable and given access to advanced military training and weaponry while at other times the membership is prosecuted for crimes. Salon has an article on their website that updates some of Didion’s writing. Most important as it relates to Didion’s work is the manner in which these groups changed when no longer coddled or assisted by the CIA and the American government’s prosecution of individuals in the United State which were arrested for attempting to gather information on these groups to prevent their action or to help arrest and prosecute them following actions.

Another interesting point that Didion makes is in hinting at the similarities between the former ruling class of Cuba’s beliefs and those of Castro. Perhaps it is because of an unrecognized fear of retribution that she is never heavy handed in pointing it out, but at several scenes the parallels between them are clear. The violent retribution against collaborators and the disruptive counter-demonstrations to silence “non-Cuban” speakers highlight the qualities which the exiles exhibit yet claim as cause for the Cuban regime to be overthrown. This dissonance finds itself in other places as well. One of the ways in which she speaks of correcting Castro’s unacknowledged or repressed presence is in the corrective she makes to other’s claims by pointing out that Castro has had a big if not one of the biggest effects on the development of South Florida as a community. As none of the people she interviews would likely be there if not for him, she does this to show how it is that their ideology has scrambled their worldview to the point that the conditions which lead to the revolution and his role in it is simply transformed into a target that, once killed, would solve all of their problems.

Review of "Take Back the Land: Land, Gentrification and the Umoja Village Shantytown"

Take Back the Land: Land, Gentrification and the Umoja Village Shantytown is a firsthand account by the primary organizer of the short-lived Umoja Village, Max Rameau. The opening chapters recount the general context of the Miami housing market for African Americans: the city was founded on and organized by racial principles, reinforced by economic inferiority and attempts at changing anything other than the symbolic order was met with police repression or co-optation of movement activists. The results of these policies encouraged local black entrepreneurs to leave or be subsumed by better capitalized competitors in other racial groupings and local black activists entering politics to act as the principals of local capitalist interests rather than that of the community which was locked into place as a result of their low wage, menial jobs with little to no opportunity at upward mobility. Such a socio-economic composition resulted in a slow downward spiral for Miami blacks as their political and purchasing power declined.

On a lower level of abstraction, the Hope VI program authored by the Miami-Dade Housing Agency (MDHA) offers a prime example of this. Funded by the federal government to the tune of 106 million dollars, the program was to address the paucity of affordable housing by providing increased quality and number of public and mixed-enterprise housing within the African American community of Miami. The actual results, however, were such that whites and Hispanics were steered to newer units closer to tourist areas or given rent vouchers while black families were placed in older housing and in unincorporated sections of Miami. As a result of these MDHA policies the city had to pay out in a legal settlement, however the pressure to adjust the housing was limited as people then had housing. The campaign for the Umoja village occurs in the aftermath of this settlement when the aforementioned housing projects that consisted of 850 housing units occupied by blacks were scheduled for demolition and replacement by a 462-unit project. If displacing this large number of occupants in order to halve the available housing wasn’t bad enough, more problems were to follow. Those ejected from their homes were offered first occupancy of the units to be built, which was made a meaningless offer as following the demolition they were never built due to the Miami-Dade Board of County Commissioners (MDBCC) restriction of MDHA funding due to “new priorities”.

The Miami Herald would later publish an expose on this situation in its House of Lies series, however the subsequent political backlash was marginal as the gentrification in question affected primarily an impoverished, politically disenfranchised community. To combat this specific problem and the general embrace by the MDHA of the gentrification process, Rameau and the activists he recruits begin to operationalize a plan to help the homeless occupy public land. Following the “Pottinger precendent”, any “life-sustaining activities” taken by homeless people was legal and police could not force them to halt or remove them from said location. Take Back the Land’s political action core was formed, outreach to local churches and NGO’s involved in similar “justice” campaigns made and after a location was chosen Rameau reached out to a group he refers to as “The Lake Worth Kids” to help him do the actual building of the shantytown.

Max had met this group of activists, actually organized around the name Lake Worth Global Justice, during the Anti-FTAA protests in Miami 2003. Amidst the flying canisters of tear gas, buzzing of rubber bullets and batons hitting the bones of protestors that has since come to be called the “Miami Model” approach to policing at international trade conventions, they’d exchanged contact information and, upon hearing his plans, agreed to assist. The account that follows relates to co-ordination of food, housing, news coverage, dissentions between the activists and the occupants over what came to be “self-rule” and other issues related to maintaining a shanty-town. Four major actionable areas are developed in consultation with the people living in the village: “deepening roots on the land; expand(ing) our political reach beyond the land; provide resident services; and promote resident development” (106).

Max moves back and forth from an on the ground description of what’s going on to reflections on the implications of it for questions of leadership, political agency and politics in general. While there are moments of drag, inevitable in any sort of close account of actions, the depiction of the various political actors and their attempts to contain, co-opt, or destroy the purpose of the village does make for generally compelling reading. While supportive of the need to bring attention to collusion between Miami developers with the City government and the corruption that ensues with such a relationship, I take issue with Rameau’s choice of land and housing.

Rameau states that his choice to Occupy the Land is practical and symbolic. The first rationale is that it provides housing for people that have been placed within a precarious economic situation exacerbated by aforementioned capitalist-government collusion and the second rationale is that it draws attention to the dehumanizing contradictions of capitalism undergirded by such a corporatist model of governance. That said, while land/housing is important, it is a single manifestation of Capital and once it is “taken,” the daily problems connected with their maintaining it quickly subsumes the greater struggle for the generalized improvement of conditions for the marginal black community. At moments Rameau seems to recognize this fact in his expressions of exasperation on the large amount of unexpected time and energy that must be directed towards maintaining the political core and the homeless groups cohesiveness rather than furthering their agenda. It’s also visible in his positive comments about, General Rashid, a member of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in American, (N’COBRA) who also binds the immanent need to help people marginalized and by gentrification politics but also extends it to reparations for the category of “Black people”.

Without digressing into a topic that requires more attention than what I am willing to give it here, ie. the impractical aspects of the federal government disbursing eight trillion dollars, or roughly 200,000 dollars for each black person currently alive in the United States; the variegated origin of “black people”, especially in South Florida, as well as the problematic construction of “white people” as an essentialist historical category considering the large scale of immigration that occurred following the emancipation of slaves, etc. I am sympathetic to the need for redistributionist/restorative measures to assist in the amelioration of the historical, institutional disenfranchisement of African Americans. However lacking a broader coalitional base and focusing solely on the “undeserving poor” without including the working poor, the large number of low-wage service sector blacks that have housing, greatly limits their options for political action. Thus while the symbolic aspect is indeed significant, the practical side is weak due to the small constituency involved in the political actions. Rather than a housing movement, it is instead a spectacle of housing.

To bolster my point, it’s worth citing a counterfactual to the confrontational, “adversarial” politics that Max Rameau advocated that would subsequently take form as the Occupy Wall Street movement to show how such a “movement” would exist. The group Lake Worth Global Justice (LWGJ), cited by Rameau as the core which helped him build the housing structures and co-created the culture of self-rule, has morphed from predominantly protest actions to gaining representation within their local government and expanding civic associations. Rather than simply creating a precarious spectacle, members of this group have been able to petition the Federal Government to assist low-income families without resorting to illegal squatting. Cara Jennings, mentioned in passing in Rameau’s account, was elected to Lake Worth City Commissioner in 2006, and was one of the sponsors for the formation of a Community Redevelopment Agency that subsequently applies for and obtained millions of dollars in federal funds [1]. With control over this money the members of LWGJ are able to monitor and direct spending to conserve and beautify traditional low-income housing areas and fund projects that benefit the whole community rather than just a cabal of developers. Additionally they have created programs of educational and legal outreach to marginalized Hispanic communities around the downtown core and further managed, through constant community involvement, to keep developers interests within the bounds of the community’s wishes through political agitation and referendum. The way Jennings and other in LWGJ have been able to do this is by following the rulebook of Civil Rights activists, ie. by making up for domestic deficiencies in funding and assistance due to economic marginalization by relying upon national entities, such as the Sierra Club, AFL-CIO, etc. for support. Her message, once able to be heard by voters with the assistance of these groups, thus was able to increase the pace of progressive change within the area. Issues of race and the different scale between Lake Worth and Miami are certainly factors of great importance, but so to is the non-essentially antagonistic relationship to the local and state government embodied by this approach.

These criticisms made, the book is still an insightful account of the short-lived movement whose operational presumptions have since been adopted by other political groups concerned with similar issues. Not only does it provide insight into the material realities of the abstracts of gentrification, corruption, co-optation, and others but it is also written in a clear, vernacular style.

[1] A particularly interesting aspect of the race was that Jenning’s “business-oriented” opponent printed and circulated through the mail flyers calling her a “radical anarchist” and his other opponent, former FAU professor, Andrew Procyk a Marxist.