Miami: Where the Sun Shines Through the Pouring Rain

Miami has always been the city where people come to reinvent themselves. A city where people begin new lives. Where exiled dictators retire. Where criminals assume new identities.

For many, it is the end of the road. The southernmost city in the southernmost state. A city of immigrants, transplants, fugitives and retirees who are either fleeing past lives or finding new ones.

It is as far as you can get from the United States without leaving the continuous states. Or as close to Latin America and the Caribbean without being a third world country, although some would argue that it is a third-world country.

So where do the natives go when they need to do some soul searching?

For me, it was Europe. Then the Southwest United States, including New Mexico, Arizona, California.

But those places were never home for me. I never felt fully grounded there.

After ten years of living away from this dysfunctional hell of a paradise, I realized Miami is the only place for me. After all, once you grow up here, the rest of the world seems boring.

Why Did You Move Here?

A recent thread on the Miami Beach 411 forums titled “Nostalgia” had non-natives describing their expectations and experiences upon moving to the Magic City.

One of the commenters who grew up in Los Angeles wrote about how the L.A. he grew up in was stolen from him with its evolution. He felt he could no longer connect with his city. So he bought a home in Miami and feels connected.

Another commenter said she expected Miami to be more like New York but found it to be more fragmented than the Big Apple.

Another commenter said he ended up in Miami because it was the most fertile ground to pursue his dreams of independent success. Gus Moore is now operating one of the most successful tour companies in Miami as well as this website.

Another commenter who became notorious after launching a blog  criticizing Miami’s predominant Latin culture admitted that he couldn’t live anywhere else even if he tried.

Matt Meltzer describes Miami as the “hot girl who treats you like shit, but you can’t leave because you love her in spite of, and in some cases for, all her insanity.”

A Carpetbagger’s Dream Come True

The truth is, Miami is all of the above and more. It is a city of fast money and even faster losses. A city of brash dreams and crashed schemes. A city with more booms and busts than John Travolta’s career.

George E. Merrick came down to Miami from Pennsylvania and built Coral Gables, one of the most aesthetically designed communities in the country. He died a broken man mired in debt.

Al Capone came down from Chicago to expand on his bootlegging business. He ended up in prison for tax evasion and died of syphilis in his Miami home after his release.

Richard Nixon, who won his presidential nomination during the Republican National Convention on Miami Beach in 1968 and made his winter home on Key Biscayne, was said to have planned the Watergate break-in down here, which is not hard to believe considering three of the five burglars arrested were Cuban exiles from Miami. He resigned in 1972 in the most notorious presidential scandal of our time.

What It Takes To Fit In

To be a native, you need to have a healthy dose of cynicism. You need to always expect the unexpected. And not be surprised by the perpetual scandals and the constant chaos.

You need to expect thunderstorms on sunny days and cloudless skies on the darkest days.

Of all the movies that have been filmed down here, one of the ones that captured this essence at its purest was the 1969 classic Midnight Cowboy, in which Rico “Ratso” Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman) spends all his days in New York babbling about how life would be so much better in Miami. When he finally gets down to Miami with his friend Joe Buck (Jon Voight) on a Greyhound bus, he dies (that scene below).

That movie won numerous awards, including for best theme song, Harry Nillson’s Everybody’s Talking, in which he sings the following lyrics:

I’m going where the sun keeps shining
Thru’ the pouring rain,
Going where the weather suits my clothes,
Backing off of the North East wind,
Sailing on summer breeze
And skipping over the ocean like a stone.

The true Miami native appreciates the city’s glossy surface and understands its gritty underside and is comfortable drinking Cuban coffee on Calle Ocho and eating barbecue ribs on Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd. as he is in indulging in bottle service on South Beach. But he would probably allow someone else to pay for that bottle service.

Related Links: • Miami: America’s Most Transient City • The 1972 Democratic and Republican Conventions Related Categories: Living Miami: Local News, Carlos Miller is a featured writer at Miami Beach 411. He also operates Photography is Not a Crime, a blog about photographer rights, New Media and First Amendment issues. See more articles by Carlos Miller. See more articles by Carlos Miller Was This Post Helpful? Please Share It With Others! Tweet

5 Comments on

"Miami: Where the Sun Shines Through the Pouring Rain"

Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.

Discuss the surrounding area in our hugely popular Miami forum.