The Melding Americas : Society : Miami: A Laboratory of Social Change : The migrant stream from Latin America and the Caribbean, coupled with 30 years of white flight, has pushed the city to the frontier of the urban future.

By MIKE CLARY

Sept. 27, 1994 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

MIAMI —

This sun-spangled city on Biscayne Bay is just 200 miles north of Havana, or 260 miles closer to the Cuban capital than it is to Florida’s capital--Tallahassee.

That’s only the geographical part of the story. But in a way that’s all you need to know.

Over the last 30 years, Miami has been the crucible for demographic drift, a subtropical impact zone where North meets South--not with a bang but with an abrazo , a hug . Bilingual, bicultural and by itself, Miami is the only truly Latin city in the United States.

“Miami has undergone the most dramatic ethnic transformation of any major American city in this century,” said Guillermo J. Grenier, a Florida International University sociologist. “The downside is that the continued flow of immigrants has strained the social safety net. But for Americans, coming here is like going to another country without a passport.”

The migrant stream from Latin America and the Caribbean, coupled with 30 years of white flight, have pushed Miami to the frontier of the urban future; it’s a laboratory of social change. One-third of greater Miami’s 2 million residents are foreign-born, and even in a year when 40,000 Cuban rafters are not trying to sail in, as they are this year, the population still grows by 20,000 Latin American migrants annually.

There is not much Deep South in America’s southernmost major city. One only need arrive at Miami International Airport, step into a cab, enter a hotel or walk the streets and overhear conversations to appreciate that this is a place unlike any other in the United States.

Both Los Angeles and New York have larger numbers of Latino residents, but in no other major American city do Latinos make up a larger percentage of the overall population--50% in greater Miami--and in no other is Spanish so widely used and heard.

When he moved from Detroit to Miami five years ago, for example, David Lawrence Jr. quickly realized that he needed to learn the local language. So he started studying, eventually traveling to Uruguay for an immersion course. And despite a telltale accent, today Lawrence considers himself a fully functioning, bilingual citizen of Florida’s largest city.

The fact that Lawrence is the publisher of the Miami Herald, an English-language newspaper and one of this city’s oldest Anglo institutions, only serves to underscore the reality of life here.

“You do not need to know Spanish to make it in Miami,” Lawrence insists. Nonetheless, he oversees the publication of El Nuevo Herald, the largest Spanish-language daily in the country (circulation: 101,000 daily, 126,600 Sunday). And he speaks Spanish regularly over the telephone to Herald subscribers and in person to civic groups. While it is still possible to get along here without hablando espanol , it is often inconvenient.

Non-Latino whites still control most major corporations here and occupy a disproportionate number of influential civic roles. But six of the 13 Dade County commissioners are Latino, as are two of Miami’s five commissioners, while the county manager, the City of Miami manager and the mayors of Hialeah and Coral Gables are all Cuban-born.

Just as the prevailing breeze in Miami comes from the southeast--the direction of Cuba--so too do the city’s rhythm and cultural influence. Of the 1 million Latinos in Dade County, more than 59% trace their origins to Cuba, and most of Miami’s eight Spanish-language AM radio stations and two Spanish-language television networks gear their programming to a Cuban audience.

Yet the size of the Cuban majority among Latinos has declined over the last 20 years--it was 90% in 1970--as thousands of migrants from Nicaragua, Colombia, the Dominican Republic and other nations poured in.

So while Little Havana remains a highly visible, vibrant neighborhood of grocery stores and small restaurants, monuments to Cuban heroes, Domino Park and the only McDonald’s serving Cuban coffee, the Cuban-American majority in Miami lives everywhere, surrounding Little Nicaragua, and Little Haiti, and the Puerto Rican neighborhood of Wynwood, and areas populated by French Canadians, and yes, even an enclave of European Jews on Miami Beach where, as the in-line skaters swerve in and out, shouts of “Watch it!” go up in Yiddish and Russian.

As recently as 30 years ago, Miami was primarily a winter destination for Americans from the northeastern states. The typical visitor came from New York, and he and his family stayed on Miami Beach, where they went swimming in the Atlantic Ocean, ate lunch at Pumpernik’s and went home after a week or two with their annual sunburn.

Today, Pumpernik’s is closed, and the typical visitor comes from Caracas or Buenos Aires. He and his family stay in the Intercontinental Hotel, or maybe in a condominium they own on Brickell Avenue. They come here to shop and conduct business, and the only time they see the ocean is when they glance to the east some night when departing a South Miami Beach club.

Once called the Magic City, now Miami is the capital of the Caribbean, or the City of the Future, the New Casablanca, Paradise Lost or Paradise Found.

“Miami is a gateway city, an entry point to the U.S. where visitors from Latin America can deal with the U.S. without feeling culture shock,” said Mayco Villafana of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau. “We get a lot of people who bring the family, enjoy the beaches, go shopping and also do business, all in their own language.”

Indeed, so friendly has Miami become for Spanish-speaking vacationers and business people that this year for the first time visitors to greater Miami from Latin America will surpass the domestic total, said Villafana. The numbers are revealing: In 1989, 1.2 million of Miami’s 7.7 million visitors came from Latin America, which includes South and Central America and the Caribbean. Domestic visitors represented 61% of the total.

Last year, when the total number of visitors reached 8.8 million, Latin Americans accounted for 3.4 million, a number equal to the domestic total. Europeans and tourists from other parts of the world made up the difference.

Part of the changing trend is due to Miami’s image problems. Fear of crime, and what Villafana calls “the perception that somehow things here are too foreign,” have resulted in a sharp decline in domestic tourism to Miami. Most Americans who take family vacations in Florida never get south of Orlando and the Magic Kingdom.

Fueling the perceptions is a volatile vat of reality. Crime, especially sensational killings and assaults on tourists, has scarred Miami’s reputation. And many of those travelers who come anyway often express surprise at the look and feel of Miami, hot and hectic and abuzz with the sounds of Spanish and Creole.

But while greater Miami’s $7.2-billion tourist trade has stalled, the area’s importance as an international trade and banking center is picking up speed. Thirty percent of all U.S. trade with Latin America, valued at $21 billion in 1993, goes through Miami, according to the Beacon Council, a development group. More than 60 international banks have offices here, along with 28 binational chambers of commerce, 20 foreign trade offices and 50 foreign consulates, including one from every nation in South and Central America.

The trigger for the transformation of greater Miami--from a vaguely Southern metropolis populated by refugees from the north, arriviste developers and a seasonal tourist traffic to a colorful salad bowl of ethnicity--was the Cuban Revolution. Within two years of Fidel Castro’s 1959 triumph, the Cuban middle class began to flee, and by 1973, about 400,000 refugees from communism--mostly white, urban and educated--had settled in the United States.

The migration precipitated a Miami make-over, changing the feel of the urban area from a hodgepodge of 20-odd municipalities without much of a defining character to a sprawling Havana Norte, the second largest Cuban city in the world.

In 1960, Dade County had 935,000 residents, 80% of whom were non-Latino whites. Blacks accounted for 13%, and Latinos were just 4% of the population.

By 1994, the population of Dade County has more than doubled, to an estimated 2 million people. And in those 34 years the percentage of Latinos shot up to 50%, and blacks now represent 21% of the total. Non-Latino whites are down to 29%.

The result of that sea change in ethnic composition has been to turn Miami into a unique experiment in what sociologists call “acculturation in reverse,” in which those Anglos and African Americans who have not already fled the Latinization of Miami succumb to it.

“There is no mainstream” in Miami, argue Alex Stepick and Alejandro Portes in their book “City on the Edge: The Transformation of Miami” (University of California Press, 1993).

Instead, they say, what has flowered here is a biculturalism made up of parallel social systems, one Latino, one non-Latino, that overlap and form a hybrid into which most immigrants--from north or south--are assimilated.

“Cosmopolitan, a true plural society,” said Anthony Maingot, a sociologist with the University of Miami’s North-South Center. “And the fascinating thing is that I don’t think what has happened in Miami can be replicated anywhere else. Miami was lucky.”

According to Maingot, Miami lucked out because that first wave of Cuban immigrants was white, educated and middle-class, precisely the type of people who would have been successful in New York, Madrid or Paris.

These immigrants’ skills and work ethic made it easy for Miami’s Anglo-Jewish Establishment to accept them, Maingot said, and together they created the network that would support those less-educated Cubans who followed.

“What that early integration left us with is a city that functions and is flexible enough to absorb substantial numbers of immigrants who continue to come,” Maingot said. “Miami works.”

Alas, it does not work for everybody. The Latinization of Miami, and the relative prosperity of Cuban emigres, has caused resentment, especially among many African Americans. Competition for jobs between blacks and Latinos grows. Three times in the 1980s, black neighborhoods in Miami erupted in riots, and contributing to each uprising were bitter feelings of exclusion.

Dade County’s Miami

Dade County covers a 2,000-square-mile area (the size of the state of Delaware) at the southeastern tip of the Florida peninsula.

Miami is only one of 27 municipalities included within Dade County. These municipalities contain about half of the county’s estimated 2 million inhabitants. The other half lives in unincorporated Dade.

Population

Non-hispanic, White, African American, Hispanic, and Others:

1950: 495,000

1960: 935,000

1970: 1,268,000

1980: 1,626,000

1990: 1,937,000

1994: 2,000,000*

* Estimate

Source: Metro Dade County Planning Department

Hispanic population by country of origin

1970: