Almost
everyone knows someone who has gone shopping in Miami. When a country is enriched
or the government inflates their currency value
in comparison to the U.S. dollar, the middle class makes frequent shopping trips to that city. They also have secondary objectives such as
Disney World, the Seaquarium, and Universal Studio, but the bulk of their
vacation time is spent inside the shopping
malls.
Miami
Airport is one of the most hostile places for foreign visitors in the whole world. I have been an imperial citizen for a long time, and I get treated badly. So
I imagine the ordeal they face going through immigration and customs in Miami must be almost as bad as what one goes through leaving Cuba, or Venezuela.
US Passport control provides an unusual experience to would be visitors
But
once the ordeal is over, and one escapes to the hotel or into the arms of the waiting relatives, it´s like visitor
heaven. Why? Because Miami has shops
full of everything and the prices are phenomenal.
I
think the people who go shopping in Miami don´t care that much about the price, they worry more about the method they will use to avoid losing the
suitcases full of goodies, and how to disguise what was purchased to avoid the obscene customs duties some countries
charge.
My
first shopping trip to Miami was quite different.
I will tell you that when
I went to the United States from Spain I went to live in a Jewish village in
the New York suburbs. When
I was in Spain I told the boys that I
wanted to go to America, join the army,
and go to Viet Nam to help fight against the communist threat. But when I got to New York all my classmates were Jewish so I decided that I would get into the Israeli army
to kill Arabs.
Israeli Army Bulldozer kills Rachel Corrie
while demolishing Palestinian housing
(from Freerepublic.com article defending the Israeli side)
Lest
you think I'm a psycho looking for excuses to kill someone, at that time I had lived through the civil war in Cuba, then moved to Spain where one could still see
legless Spanish Civil War veterans. And in America it´s considered normal to fix things using guns. So I thought that
killing someone was a natural act one could use to impose political views. But
let it be clear, I already passed through that stage and luckily
I didn´t get to kill anyone before I was
cured of that madness.
That was distracting and off subject.... Anyway, eventually my mother came from Cuba with my sister
and I traveled from New York to Florida to live with them. I had been working in a golf course and had saved money, but my my savings didn´t last long after we rented an apartment and paid first, last and one month security deposit, plus phone, electricity, and something to eat
until my mom cashed her first paycheck.
That
first month was very hard: we had almost nothing in that apartment. We bought a bed and we put the mattress on the
floor. We had our meals sitting on the floor. We didn´t have an alarm clock, no curtains, and every
penny was counted so we could stay alive until the exact day when my mom got
paid.
But
eventually came the happy payday, and my
mom decided it was time to buy meat. We were in a fairly rare condition, we were Cubans who lived in Fort Lauderdale.
And Fort Lauderdale at the time was a small town. We could see cows on SW 9th
Avenue and Davie. Right at State Road 441, where
today we see the oldest part of Plantation, was the frontier of human
civilization. Where today there are clones of the typical Florida suburbs was
terra incognita.
And I mean it.Places like Westonzuela didn´t exist on the map. We called it "The Swamp", and the only ones who
entered that area were lost drunks, or the Seminole Indians.
The Everglades swamp, now known as Westonzuela
So, right after she got paid, and because
Ft Lauderdale was quite ritzy for our refugee economic status, my mom decided to buy
the cheapest meat available: we would go in the public bus all
the way to Miami to buy in a Cuban meat market on SW 8th Street.
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Typical meat market in a country no ruled by the Castro dynasty
I
can´t remember the outgoing trip, or
buying the meat, because all that seemed
a girly thing, I had gone to carry the meat on the return
trip.
My
mom got very excited when she saw the prices. She had arrived from Cuba a
few weeks before and she hadn´t eaten a good cut of legal meat in many years (in Cuba our family ate meat purchased on the black market, but
that could be dangerous, for
example, my aunt was jailed for carrying
a lump of black market meat).
The old
lady decided we were going to eat meat, and in huge quantities. She bought nearly 10
kg (22 pounds). She bought beef steaks, ground meat for picadillo, and also pieces to
make meat and potatoes.
But
we had a problem. That butcher gave us the meat wrapped in paper. My mom had no experience shopping in the Cuban
quarter in Miami, and forgot to buy a big bag to carry her purchases. That didn´t
stop her, she was going to eat meat. She bought it, and gave me the large paper bag
full of meat, each individual cut wrapped in in its own piece of paper.
We
were lucky, the bus arrived fast, and then we made a good connection to a bus coming
up US Highway 1. What screwed our timing
was the incredible amount of traffic
lights and all those bus stops all the way from Miami to Fort Lauderdale.
I
was feeling happy, sitting on that bus with
my bag full of meat, when I realized that the blood oozing out of the meat was leaking through the paper and was dripping on the floor. People started
looking at me and making weird faces, and then I realized that my pants were
getting stained with cow´s blood.
This
led to a family conference, and my mom decided we'd get some packages and each of us would carry one in each hand. This didn´t work very well, and gradually the paper got
drenched in blood, and dissolved into
small pieces.
We sat in the back, where we could let the blood gush in peace. But people stared and stared. Our fellow passengers came over and then backed off. Other passengers
climbed aboard the bus and jumped back from the shock when they saw the three of us
dripping so much blood. If in those days there had been mobile phones and the
internet we would have been the
protagonists of a viral video on YouTube.
Eventually
we reached 17th Street in Fort Lauderdale and got off the bus. Now we had to
walk from Highway 1 to the house, passing right in front of Broward General hospital.
This worried my mom a lot because she hadn´t worked there very long, and didn´t want people to think that we were Cuban savages who walked down that fine looking street dripping blood. But we had no other way to go, so we went as fast as possible. By then all the paper around the parcels I carried had disappeared, so I decided I had nothing to lose, and I hung steaks over my shoulders.
Broward General Hospital, the old
building facing Andrews Avenue
This worried my mom a lot because she hadn´t worked there very long, and didn´t want people to think that we were Cuban savages who walked down that fine looking street dripping blood. But we had no other way to go, so we went as fast as possible. By then all the paper around the parcels I carried had disappeared, so I decided I had nothing to lose, and I hung steaks over my shoulders.
And
so we ran and walked as fast as possible to reach the apartment. Upon arrival
my mom was hysterical with laughter. I
think she felt that to buy several weeks´worth of meat, then get on that bus
and sit there with the blood dripping all over, and to have done it without going to jail was a huge
feat. Then I realized that in her mind
she hadn´t arrived fully in the U.S.,
and thought she was still in Cuba.
And
that was my first shopping trip in Miami.
