I was digging around the electronic archives of the Miami Herald (for free thanks to the Miami-Dade Public Library system) and found a remarkable and fascinating piece written by John Dorschner almost exactly 20 years ago for the paper’s now defunct Tropic Magazine.
The piece was written as if looking back from 2008 to 1988. In other words it was Dorschner’s idea of what would happen over the next two decades. The piece is more than 7,500 words long so I’m going to split it up into sections and add some running commentary. Some of the predictions came uncannily close to what really happened. Some, not so much. But I thought it would be interesting to look back and see what came true and what didn’t.
Here’s an intro to the piece that explains how it was written.
Part 1:
MIAMI 2008 HOW A CITY CAME OF AGE
Miami Herald, The (FL) – May 22, 1988
Author: JOHN DORSCHNER Herald Staff Writer
Editors’ note: In the tumult of recent events, with the world press once again gathering in Miami — first for the deathwatch, and then for the game of wait-and-see focused on murky events 228 miles to the south — a frustrated media corps inevitably has turned its attention to one of its favorite topics: El Nuevo Culture of South Florida. The result is the most important examination of the area since 3 books about Miami were published in the mid-’80s. “Miami was called the ‘City of the Future’ in the ’80s,” concluded The Washington Post in a recent 3-part series, “and so it remains.”
For all of us who have lived “the future,” it is sometimes difficult to put it all in perspective. With that in mind, Tropic looks back at the 2 decades that have made South Florida what it is at the end of the 1st decade of the 21st Century.
THE CUBAN BASEBALL CAPER
It happened with such astounding speed: At 5:33 p.m., Saturday, April 25, 1998, at Valenzuela Stadium in Mexico City, players of the Cuban baseball team had just started walking from their bus to the locker room when a tan HondaFord van appeared. Suddenly, the van’s rear doors swung open and 7 Cuban players jumped inside. As the team’s bodyguards stared open-mouthed, the van sped around a corner and disappeared. Elapsed time: 47 seconds.
The rest, of course, is history: The LearNissan jet ride to Miami, the press conference at Joe Robbie Stadium, the signing of Flamingos contracts, the 1st workout for the 4 who were immediately placed on the major-league roster, and then the 1st game, in which new 3rd baseman Omar Linares homered in his 1st 2 plate appearances.
The first prediction was a mass defection of Cuban baseball players. A “caper” as Dorschner called it. This is a scene that has repeated itself countless times in the last 20 years, most recently it was Cuban soccer players that disappeared from their Tampa hotel and reappeared in West Palm Beach asking for political asylum.
Honda and Ford did not merge and neither did Learjet and Nissan. Ford does have a long-standing relationship with Mazda and Learjet has been part of the Canadian aerospace company Bombardier since 1990.
In 1988 South Florida did not have baseball. Dorschner rightly predicted the Major League Baseball would expand to South Florida and the team would play in what was in 1988 still called Joe Robbie Stadium. He was off on the name, of course. In April of 1993 the Florida Marlins, not the Florida Flamingos, took the field for the first time against the Los Angeles Dodgers at what by that time had been renamed Pro Player Stadium.
Omar Linares never defected to the United States. Instead he remained loyal to castro and Cuban national team until he was permitted to play in Japan in the twilight of his career.
The results were immediate. After languishing in the cellar of the National League East for the 1st 6 years of their existence, the Florida Flamingos**1 soared in the standings in the dizzying weeks that followed. The people of South Florida — Hispanics, Anglos**2 and Blacks — united as never before in cheering on their “Fabulous Flams.” Journalists from throughout the country flocked to Miami to describe how the “Cuban Baseball Caper” had brought a new harmony to a town that had been so bitterly divided. How fitting, they noted, that this event so crucial to the history of Miami should have started on foreign soil.
Through August and September, the new unity persisted, and even at the end of the season, in that last-day, heartbreaking loss to the Braves that cost the Flamingos the pennant, the people united in their mourning.
Caption: Joy in Mundo-ville: In only their 9th year, the Flamingos downed the Yankees 5 games to 3, to win the ’00 World Series. The starting line-up included 4 players born in Cuba (Jose Canseco and 3 originally from the Cuban national team).
The year was 1997, not 2000 and it was a Cuban pitcher named Livan Hernandez who propelled the Marlins to the playoffs where they defeated the Braves for the pennant and then on to the World Series where the “Fish” not the “Flams” beat the Cleveland Indians. I guess Dorschner was either not aware that the world series is a best of seven series or perhaps he was predicting that the format would change by 2000.
Incidentally, Hernandez did abandon the Cuban national team in Mexico but it was in September of 1995 in Monterrey. It was a caper of sorts as Hernandez was almost hit by a vehicle as ran to get into the awaiting car of sports agent Joe Cubas.
The Marlins would, as we now know, go on to win another world championship in 2003 but that time it was a Venezuelan (Miguel Cabrera) a kid from Oakland (Dontrelle Willis), a Puerto Rican (Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez), and a Cuban-American born in Puerto Rico (Mike Lowell), that would lead the team to victory. That year, the championship would come against the Yankees.
All in all, Dorschner was pretty damned close in this first part of the piece.
Part 2 here
Footnotes:
1. The Flamingos were first mentioned in an April 27, 1980, Tropic story in which major league team owners discussed how South Florida was a natural area for baseball.
2. Few non-Latino whites like the word “anglo” which journalists use because it’s a simple one word description, in an earlier version of this story, the author attempted a substitute, NoLaWhi, a shortening of the cumbersome phrase “non-Latin White”. The Anglos who read that version hated the term. But several linguists interviewed could suggest nothing better.