Miami

November 03, 2008

Alex Webb finds a voting fiesta.

MIAMI ON THE VERGE

“We are from Haiti, from Guatemala, from Nicaragua, here for the American Dream,” said Marleine Bastien, the director of Fann Ayisen Non Miyami (Haitian Women of Miami), speaking in Lemon City, a part of Little Haiti in northeastern Miami. “Every 100 years someone comes around. Obama came to change the course of history,” added Bastien, speaking to early voters lined up in front of the neighborhood public library. “We’re going to walk to the polls. We’re going to walk tall. We’re going to vote for change … . You need to be the change,” said Bastien. It was a few days before the election, and from the length of the line that stretched down the entire block, Marlene Bastien – and presumably others – had done their job well. Many Miamians were voting early in Lemon City.

The early voting lines outside both the North Miami Public Library and the North Dade Regional Library were even longer. At the latter, the voting had taken on a festive note, as music blared and a group of women, dressed in identical “Just Vote” gray T-shirts, danced to a thunderous bass beat. People were hawking Obama T-shirts, Obama hats, and even Obama sandals festooned with tiny heads of the Democratic candidate, two pairs of which one vendor claimed Spike Lee had bought earlier from her. One of the vendor’s children was dressed as a fireman for Halloween. (Later that evening I would visit the Lincoln Road Halloween celebration in the more-upscale Miami Beach where a group of Obama supporters donned McCain and Palin masks to mock the Republican candidates.)

Here in the Sunshine State, I seemed to be a very long way – and not just geographically – from that other swing state, Ohio, where I had listened to a litany of political and economic complaints, with their fair share of sarcasm and dark humor. By contrast, Miami sported an almost fiesta-like atmosphere, which was interwoven with political rhetoric. This part of southern Florida reminded me a bit of elections that I’d witnessed before in the Caribbean – in Haiti, in Jamaica and in the Dominican Republic. A friend of mine in Miami had an amusing explanation: “It’s the palm trees.”

Ultimately Miamian’s concerns, however, were not dissimilar to those of Ohioans. At the San Miguel barbershop in Miami’s Allapattah neighborhood, home to many new Latin and Caribbean immigrants, the Dominican owner told me business was terrible. When did it start to go bad, I asked. “Eight years ago,” he said. “I told everyone that when Bush got into office it would change – and it did. This place used to be filled with people,” he said, adding that he – and many in the neighborhood – were voting for Obama.