Miami Exilio de los Cubanos

Miami 1964 cortesia de
travelfilmarchive

Florida in the Twenties

The Florida Bubble
by Paul Sann
In the early twenties the vision of riches
wonderful , sudden boundless riches
turned south. For there lay Florida,
nested under a powder - blue sky,
baked by the soft sun, caressed by
tropical breexes wafted in from the
West Indies. There she lay , an Ameri-
can Paradise, right off the paved road,
there for the taking . No, not just a
place to thrive a low - cost land and
low - cost year round sunshine ( no heat-
ing bills ), but also a place to grab off a
fortune . If you moved fast, you could buy
a piece of land for a few hundred or so
and sell it for fifty times that much as
soon as the promoters arrived, bearing
blueprints for a drean village.
The paper, were full of stories like that.
Coollidge Prosperity was fanning out from
the stock market to the sticks: you could
make it even faster in Florida. And there
was room for everybody.
You could take your life saving into Miami
( " The Fair White Goddess of Cities ), Coral
Gables, Boca Raton, St. Petersburg, Orlando,
Hollywood By The Sea. Name it. They all had
the same climate and they were all close to
wherever you were - New York, Cleveland,
Fort Wayne , any place . If you were a peculiar
sort and didn`t want to speculate, why not
just pull up stakes and go down there and
build yourself a house for, say, eight or
ten thousand dollars. The same house would
cost you twenty to twenty - five thousand in
the Northeast, what with the high cost of labor
and land.
The people went.
All roads- paved , as noted led to the blooming,
bustling Florida on the Sea. Somebody compa-
red it to the opening of the Cherokee Strip in
frontier days , but the Florida land run was mo-
re orderly . You didn`t need going there was
a man waiting with the deed; you staked you
claim with Mr, Waterman`s pen and some money.
It was legal and clean from start to finish:
After that the decision was all yours.
You could settle down and stuck in the dream
climate ( no winter clothes to buy ) or you could
sell to the guy who was snapping up lots build
a bigger and better community for tomorrow`s
arrivals.
For the late starting American who needed a
little more salesmanship Florida has some live
walking and talking exhibits. The developer of
Coral Gables " America`s" Most Beutiful Suburb"
has none other than William Jennings Bryan, in
person lecturing the masses on the climate, If
you needed even more persuasion , once the
pearly tones of the Great Orator subsided, there
was a dance by Gilda Cray. Other ballyhoo car-
nivals of the same nature , tent show style,were
put on across the state.
Naturally , there were some catches in the balmy
Florida story.
By 1924 the Get- Rich- Quick legion had begun
to suffer some casualties. Some long distance
buyers found that they had bought swamps or
palmetto groves , no land to build on or resell;
you couldn`t give it away. Some found that their
lots " outside of Miami Beach " were seventy miles
from any community . Some found their little piece
of the dandy future tucked away to deserts where
there would be no water or electricity or anything,
else for years to come.
But Americans gave up slowly in the New Era.
The boon ran through 1925 and values continued
to soar. It wasn`t until the next year that the bubble
burst. By them, the Everglades State had hopelessly
oversold itself and values dipped. The two great
hurricanes of September and October of 1926 didn`t
help , either; hundreds of investments were wafted
away in the suddenly angry tropical breeze. In another
year the boom was a forlorn memory ,not just for the
little men who had rushed to the seaside El Dorado
with their life savings, but also for some of the shrewd
and experienced operators who had taken millions of
dollars into Florida.
But that was 1927
There was still the stook market.
Nothing wrong with that if you wanted to turn a fast
dollar. The stock market went only one way UP.


Pura nostalgia. Los serenos movimientos de la cámara, la música, el acetato, los colores deslavados y mordidos por los hongos, el locutor y el texto, todo de una autenticidad y armonía estéticamente exquisita. Yo alcancé a ver Miami Beach todavía un pueblito dormido, con los viejecitos judíos sentados en los portales de los hotelitos en sus butacas de tubos de aluminio y cuerdas verde chillón de nylon con las escupideras al lado para depositar los esputos de sus bronquitis tropicales. Hoy es una ciudad imponente, con rascacielos firmados por arquitectos célebres y hoteles de gran lujo. Gracias por tus generosas palabras vertidas aqui que recibo, en mi caso, más como prueba de cariño que como merecimiento. Un abrazo
B T

Dedico este video a

Bernardo Trujillo

Esteban Luis Cardenas

Daniel Fernandez

Lazaro Morua

Miguel

Jose Soroa

Juan Jose Alonso

en especial al cubano fuera de serie Rosendo Rosell