Police, Cubans Blamed for Miami Riot : Outside a No Name Bar Black Anger Still Boils

On the corner where black outrage boiled over into violence Monday, the people still are angry.

“They be shooting us down like dogs, like it’s hunting season,” said a longshoreman named Lorenzo Anthony Brown. “The police, they judge and try us on the spot.”

The men started to gather before noon Thursday, just as they do every day, in front of the dingy corner bar with no name.

They were drinking beer and telling stories.

“You see this scar here on my head,” began one. “Let me tell you how I got this.”

“We were just standing here--I had a beer--and I looked over and saw a cop car pull up,” began another story about something that happened long ago. The listeners all knew what happened next.

These men had been there, on the corner, when a Latino police officer shot and killed a black motorcyclist Monday during a chase.

Died Instantly

The motorcyclist died instantly, sparking three nights of rioting and looting. A passenger died Tuesday from injuries suffered when the motorcycle ran into a car.

When Miami Mayor Xavier Suarez came to the corner Monday and started to talk to the angry crowd, bottles and rocks began to fly.

“He was here about an hour,” Brown said. “He asked us what could he do to calm the people down. I told him to give us a reason for the cops shooting us down in cold-blooded murder.”

“It was crowded down here, everybody was happy,” recalled another man of the scene Monday night before the shooting. “Everybody was having a good time and enjoying themselves, enjoying Martin Luther King’s birthday, until it happened.”

The black communities of Overtown, where the shooting occured, and Liberty City, have not been the same since.

The police are counting on a massive show of firepower to quell the unrest. The entire Overtown community was surrounded by police barricades Thursday for the second straight day. Police continually patrolled the areas where the most violence erupted. Some of their cars had cracked windshields, the result of earlier confrontations with rioters.

Bond hearings were held Thursday for 200 of the nearly 400 people who have been arrested so far. Police Sgt. Michael Mazur said things had quieted down somewhat Wednesday night because the courts “kept 250 dirtbags in jail. They didn’t release them.”

But while looting and violence have diminished since Monday, the outrage that sparked them has not gone away.

Overtown is a dismal place. A once-proud community, the neighborhood--which originally was called Colored Town--is full of boarded up buildings, garbage-strewn vacant lots, drugs, anger and despair.

Just a block from the corner where the men congregated sit double rows of shotgun shacks. One of them had been gutted by flames. An old man sat on the porch of the house next door, a half-empty bottle of cheap champagne by his side.

No, he said, the fire had not been started by the rioters. “Them dope addicts did it. They were living there. And I got dope addicts living on the other side of me, and in back of me, too. I complain, but they don’t put them out.”

The stories the men on the corner were telling Thursday were as ugly as the surroundings--tales of indignities suffered, large and small, that might make a man want to pick up a brick.

“What I wanna know is how come it’s always the Cubans that’s shooting the niggers,” shouted one man, a retired city health worker wearing a pin-striped suit over an open-collar shirt.

“The Cubans will shoot a nigger faster’n a cracker will,” said another man, a former police officer who dominated the talk. “It’s the banana republic mentality,” he added. The others nodded agreement.

“The problem in Miami is Ronald Reagan and Oliver North giving funds to the Contras, stirring all that unrest,” said the former policeman, Dan Washington. “Now the people can’t stay in Nicaragua; they want to get away . . .. When they get to the United States, big as it is, Miami is where they come. And Suarez is there to meet them at the bus station, just about.

“He’s telling them: ‘You want to come live in our stadium? You need jobs? Never mind the niggers sleeping in the streets--just step right over them.’ ”