Tag: Written

They call Miami “the Magic City,” which is fitting, because it’s always able to reinvent itself.
I was born in Hialeah Hospital in 1981. History is full of eras, but this specific moment was the beginning of change, an almost traceable line of demarcation.

My mother fled Cuba in 1969 when she was 19 with her sister and my grandmother; my grandfather, a political prisoner, joined them five years later. She met my father after he arrived here in 1979, after 20 years as a political prisoner in Cuba.

I belonged to two worlds. I was an American, but at the same time, I was Cuban. I didn’t quite fit either group. In many ways, my story is the story of the city in which I was born: Hialeah is part of South Florida; yet, it feels totally different from Tallahassee, or Tampa, or Titusville, and worlds away from “the South.”

Hialeah, like South Florida, isn’t just one place, it is many simultaneously. As such, every major street carries at least three names. Red Road is Northwest 57th Avenue, West Fourth Avenue, or la cuatro.

In 1981, South Florida was just barely recovering from a riot and an influx of Cubans that arrived on the Mariel boatlift – events that shaped public discourse, policy, and dinner table conversation for years.

My parents’ first home was in a community called Lago Grande. It was so new that there was nothing nearby and it seemed like it was in the middle of a forest.

My grandparents lived in East Hialeah, back when there were no Spanish-speaking neighbors. To visit, we passed the Holsum Bread factory and the smell of bread filled the car. We passed Hialeah Racetrack, filled with photographers taking their iconic pictures of Quinceñeras in their poofy white gowns, among the pink flamingos and peacocks. There was a viandero who drove by and sold yucca and chorizo, as well as an ice cream truck whose Pink Panther ice cream bars with gumball eyes always tasted better than those at the store.

Vendors walked up and down 49th Street selling fresh churros – coated in fine granulated sugar that always managed to make a mess, making them contraband inside my father’s car – and little white paper cones of roasted peanuts.

There was a Jumbo Supermarket, where Cuban bread disappeared as soon as it was out of the oven, a Latin American restaurant – where I first saw ham hanging from the ceiling – and a new McDonald’s where I met Ronald McDonald and had my face painted.

Ocean Drive wasn’t as popular as it is today, but the beach was always full of visitors. I bounced over waves – wearing pink floaties and building sand castles on beaches – wearing Coppertone sunblock, because that’s what the little girl on the billboard used. We parked at Penrod’s, today’s Nikki Beach. And one of the major rites of passage into teenhood was taking a leap off the South Beach pier.

Everyone loved the Dolphins, Don Shula and Dan Marino. Everyone remembered their perfect season. All this started to change in the 1990s.

When I was 5, we moved, and our family now included my new little brother. I enrolled in a new school, Ben Sheppard Elementary. In third grade, the family moved to Miami Lakes. This was the edge, the newest part of town – again, right next to the “forest.” Everything south of Northwest 149th Street was filled with dense trees. As kids, we rode our bikes into “the forest” and half believed we’d find monsters, wild animals, and maybe even Tarzan. Those were the trees eventually plowed down for new homes and for Barbara Goleman Senior High.

In the 1990s, Art Deco became cool and South Beach was the place to see and be seen. The University of Miami Hurricanes became champions in football for the fourth time, we got a basketball team, and there was a struggle to protect decency: Sheriff Navarro banned a 2 Live Crew record, and Palm Beach banned female street hot dog vendors wearing thong bikinis.

Like today, there were plenty of political scandals; somehow, hundreds of dead people voted in a mayoral race. There was a flood of immigrants – thousands of Cubans braved the sea on rafts, tires, and just about anything that would float, prompting President Clinton to enact the Wet Foot / Dry Foot policy.

Hurricane Andrew arrived on what was supposed to be my first day at Miami Lakes Middle School. Other than downed trees, we were fine. But other parts of South Florida weren’t as lucky. School was delayed almost two weeks and many kids were displaced, left homeless by the storm.

Eventually there was a building boom and Miami’s skyline changed. . At that time, my mother was a vice president at Capital Bank and excited to move into a modern building in the “new” downtown, and even more so when it appeared in the movie “Bad Boys.” But after 5 p.m., downtown died. Stores and businesses closed for the night.

I attended Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High before the FCAT, when kids carried beepers, not cellphones. Football was big. Everyone attended the game versus Hialeah High, our biggest rival. The coveted T Trophy always resided at HML.

After graduation, I attended UM and completed a double major in journalism and English. My husband and I, high school sweethearts, married and moved to Miami Lakes. I teach at Miami Lakes Educational Center and he is a CPA with a small firm in Hialeah.

We stayed close to home. But home keeps changing. The Miami of my childhood doesn’t exist anymore, but neither does the Miami of 10 or even 5 years ago.

But some things remain unchanged. You can find anything that you need in Hialeah and all the streets there still have three names, although la doce, Ludlam Road, 67th Avenue is now also Flamingo Road, but that’s a whole other story.

I reached to pull the yellow lever that would release our glider’s tether to the noisy silver crop duster that was towing us to 3,000 feet over Homestead at the edge of Florida’s Everglades.

This lever — and the towrope that connected us to the plane — was our only link to the powered flight. If I tugged the lever toward me, we’d be on our own in the ether, no engine, just a narrow white cylinder with wings relying on elusive warm updrafts to keep us aloft. My new boyfriend, sitting behind me and piloting the glider we had rented for an hour, had instructed me to release us from the crop duster — but I hesitated.

The origins of my fear of flying are a mystery to me.

I’d suffered life-long psychological paralysis surrounding air travel. Maybe this fear was the result of an association between flying and becoming motion sick at 7 years old as an unaccompanied minor on a flight from Miami to New York. Perhaps the dread was the due to being tossed around in a seaplane in a terrifying lightening-rife storm halfway to the Bahamas from Miami. Maybe a clue to my irrational fear could be found in the panic attack and vomiting episode just after take-off from Miami International Airport after drinking too many dirty vodka martinis in the airport bar in an effort to quell my terror of jetting to Philadelphia.

I didn’t fly anymore. Period.

Over the years, I’d ridden almost every rail Amtrak travels. I’d taken the Queen Mary 2 to Europe and back over the North Atlantic, avoiding air travel and eating a lot of shipboard scones. I turned down free vacations to places in corners of the globe where it would have been impossible to travel expediently by land or sea. Amtrak doesn’t go to Malta.

The irony of my fear is that I’m an exotic-bird enthusiast, expert, and rescuer. I’ve written more than 30 books and hundreds of magazine articles on the care and training of parrots, canaries, finches, and doves. I’ve been a fan of birds since I was a little girl when my grandfather taught me how to charm pigeons to eat from my hands in the coop he built in the backyard of our South Miami home. Birds are the only animals with feathers, structures so strong they can lift a wearer many times her weight into the air for flight across oceans.

But I wasn’t a bird.

I found comfort in the terra firma. So how was I gliding over palm tree nurseries and sawgrass prairies at the edge of the swampy Miami wilderness in an engineless aircraft, being asked to pull a lever that would set the glider free? I hovered my hand over the T-shaped bar with its chipped canary-colored paint and thought about the risks of becoming unanchored and set adrift. What if the sky couldn’t sustain us? We were, after all, heavier than air, and unable to flap like birds.

My paramour is an officer in the Coast Guard based at the Opa-locka air station whose job is to fly helicopters over the South Florida seascape to spot Cuban migrants, save people from sinking boats, and pluck heart-attack victims and pregnant ladies in labor from the decks of cruise ships. He earned a medal for rescuing people from rooftops after Hurricane Katrina, an honor for which he is too humble. He teaches people to fly small planes and gliders and has a 4-seater plane of his own. There could be no one better with whom to share the sky.

I wanted to pull the yellow lever. I have a vague understanding of how wings work, but for the most part, keeping a 10,000-pound hunk of metal airborne seems like magic to me. What if I pulled the lever and we plummeted like a pelican into the sea?

The yellow lever was warm as I grasped it and eased it toward me. With a clunk the glider lost purchase on the towline and we separated from the noisy tow plane, leaving us alone with the only sound of the air whooshing over the clear plastic hood above our heads. Below us, houses with blue backyard pools gave way to tomato fields, which yielded to vast swaths of wetlands.

No hyperventilating into the vomit bag he had brought for me. No crying or hiding my face in sweaty palms. No whispered foxhole prayers that if I made it back to the ground alive I’d never eat bacon again.

“Let’s fly with the birds,” my boyfriend said, turning the glider sharply toward the hazy blue Atlantic.

He knew my weakness. He had told me that a great way to find updrafts—the fuel a glider uses to stay airborne — was to follow turkey buzzards as they swirled beneath the clouds, rotating inside an invisible funnel of wind. We flew toward three buzzards, their black wings outstretched, feathers gleaming in the sun. I forgot about being half a mile above the earth, instead focused on how close the birds allowed us to them, the communion we shared up there in the firmament. I forgot about gravity. I forgot that I was afraid.

Maybe my fear of flying isn’t about plunging to the ground at maximum velocity in an exploding tube filled with fire, as I had once believed. Maybe I just hadn’t met anyone until that moment that made flying fun, someone with whom I wouldn’t mind being set adrift. Experiencing flight with him had become, in a single gesture, with the pull of a yellow lever, more important than my anxiety.

My father was a fisherman, as were his fathers, and since I followed in their footsteps, I am a fisherman, too.

He fished the streams of Scotland as a boy and, when he came over to Orlando, he fished the freshwater lakes and Indian River, catching bass, trout and flounder. Later, one of his outstanding Metropolitan Tournament winning catches was a 25-pound redfish he caught while fishing with his brother-in-law, Carl Lauer, at Flamingo in 1962.

In 1963, my father retired from Southern Bell and went to Freeport, Grand Bahama, to manage the telephone company for a few years. Then he consulted for a few independent telephone companies around Florida until he died in 1970 at 67 years old.

My family and I first moved to South Florida in 1945. As a kid, I remember winning some fishing contests, then identifying fish on an outdoor radio show in Jacksonville. I fished the Palm Beach Inlet Dock with my father and, in the evening, jacks and snook would chase schools of mullet onto the beach and the rocks. A large moray eel lived in a pipe by the dock, and there was only one building to be seen across the water on Riviera Beach (a nightclub?).

I came back in the 1960s to fish the mullet run each fall, becoming the only Miami member of the Jetty Conchs fishing club.

In 1946, we moved to Coconut Grove and kept our boat in a canal near the end of Southwest 22nd Avenue. This area east of Bayshore Drive was all mangroves at that time. I remember fishing off Key Biscayne before they built the bridge, and in the bay, we caught snapper, trout and mackerel using small surf rods with 36-pound squidding line. Boats would come into Dinner Key, and then people would load their car trunks full of fish.

After we moved back to Jacksonville in 1948, we often fished the bridges around St. Augustine, Matanzas Inlet and the old Mandarin loading-dock piling south of Julington Creek on the St. Johns River.

In 1954, my parents moved back to the same neighborhood in Coconut Grove and bought the house where my family and I live now. At this time, my father and I became interested in spin fishing. Our first reels were Garcia Mitchells, then Orvis 100s.

In 1955, I started working summers at The Tackle Box fishing store at Southwest 27th Avenue and U.S.?1, where I built custom fishing rods and repaired reels for the proprietor, Jack Primack. While working there, I met many people who were influential in my early development as a light-tackle sport fisherman. Some of the names I remember are: Eddie Miller, Joe Brooks, Lee Cuddy, Arthur Beryl, Buddy Hawkins, Capt. Bill Smith, Capt. Stu Apt, Capt. Gary Simmons, Capt. Bill Curtis, Chico Fernandez, Flip Pallot and John Emery.

In 1958, I went away to the Army and upon my return in 1961, I started surveying for the new Dade County Port of Miami. I also built custom bonefishing skiffs at the Glenncraft boat company. Eventually, I built my own skiff and went fishing most of the time. During this period, I developed innovations to the technology of sport fishing, some of which are still being used in the fishing community today.

Among the innovations I primarily created are: Inside/Outside Fly, Mutton/Cockroach Fly, Puff Permit Fly, Twenty-Times-Around Knot, wire-leader connection, Duncan Loop Knot, deep jig glow worms, boat side curtains and rod blank designs. Other innovations that I contributed to were: arrowhead jigs, inverted flies, loop-on fly tippits, Redfish Fly, sinking head fly lines, blue fly lines, red bandannas and the first fiberglass push pole.

I returned to college part-time, eventually obtaining an engineering degree from the University of Miami and several professional licenses. I have recently retired with 30 years of experience as a construction management engineer. I also became involved in several conservation issues, such as the creation of Biscayne National Park and the banning of commercial fishing in Everglades National Park.

Many things have changed now, but partially because Biscayne National Park was created at our doorstep, we still have fish in Biscayne Bay. On a recent trip, I caught a nice mutton snapper in park waters. I used the head and bones to make fish soup and the sauce for my quenelles.

I still look forward to fishing, although it is now a new era and there are fewer fish than there were back in the ‘50s and ‘60s. However, we can turn the tide if sport fishermen keep pushing for reforms in the preservation and conservation of our natural resources.

It was the summer of 2003; I was living in a very old and ugly apartment building between Biscayne Boulevard and Northeast 2nd Avenue, off of 33rd Street.

I had a bitter, mentally unstable landlord that walked around with a concealed weapon. I had a part-time gig at the Historical Museum of Southern Florida, now Museum of Miami. I would give guided tours of the permanent galleries and write historical theater scripts for their summer camp program.

Every afternoon of that summer I would arrive home from work, and I remember noticing really shady people coming in and out of my building — pimps and prostitutes — the same ones I would see walking the sidewalks while driving on the Boulevard. I also remember a particular barbecue smell circulating the hallways of the building.

This one time I was sitting in my writing chair, trying to figure out an ending to three of my stories when suddenly, the phone rang. I answered it.

“Hello?”
“Oscar?”
“Maybe…”
“Hey, this is your landlord.”
“What do you want?”
“What do I want? I want my rent, you punk!”

I hung up. Couldn’t really stand people cursing on the phone. Especially annoying landlords like mine. This was the worst landlord I ever had. Two days late from the first of the month, and he was already calling the cops on me.
There was a knock on the door. I picked up a bad reading on it, but answered it anyway. It was my neighbor, the stripper. She was 75 years old. She had a six-pack of beer, Heineken. I let her in.

She always wore a mini skirt, and the skin on her legs was all loose and hanging down. Her teeth were yellow and twisted. She always bragged about how in her younger years, she was the hottest stripper in Miami, but now she was old, sick, and very tired.

We drank the beer and talked about the poetry of life. I mentioned the aroma in the building, and how it always smelled like barbecue. She looked at me with frozen eyes, slowly pointed at my back window and said, “Oscar, there’s a smoky chimney out there…” I got up to see and there it was, a smoky chimney right outside my window. I didn’t ask her anything about it; I figured I would go down there and see for myself. After a while, she left. I kept on writing. The phone rang.
“Yeah?”
“Goddamn it, Oscar, I swear you hang up on me one more time, I’ll put a bomb on your door knob.” It was my landlord again.

“What do you want? You want my rent?”

“My rent! I want MY rent!!”

“Come pick it up.”

“At what time?”

“Come now, you lizard.”

“Oscar, if I go there and I don’t find you, I swear to God I…”

I hung up on him again. Couldn’t really stand people bitching on the phone. Someone knocked on my door. Someone knocked three times. I opened it. It was a giant lizard wearing funky sunglasses, shorts, sandals, and a funny haircut. It also looked like an iguana, but it was my landlord.

“What are you doing here?”

“Oscar, I had it up to here with you.” He told me, pointing at his stomach.

He was a very tall man. Always smoking a cigar. Heavy set, about 300 pounds. With a heavy breath. Minty breath. Tobacco minty breath. He looked insane and dangerous.

“Your rent is two days late, Oscar!” He screamed, taking out his .45 caliber. He pointed the gun at my left knee. I froze. I didn’t want to move. He walked around me, and now he was inside my apartment, pointing that thing at my back.

“I want my money, Oscar. Where is my money?”

“Look Pops, just take it easy.”

“I’ve been taking it easy for the longest.”

“Look man, I don’t have your money here in the apartment.”

“What?”

“We gotta take a drive to the bank on Coral Way, and my car’s out of gas.”

“That’s no problem, we’ll go in mine.”

We left the apartment. He drove his car and steered the wheel with his left hand, while he pointed the .45 at my stomach with his right.

We arrived at the bank. It was closed. Most banks closed around 5:00 in the afternoon; it was 4:45 p.m. The lizard made me knock on the front glass door of the bank. The employees that saw me knocking didn’t even look twice. They all just stood there counting their money. Thank God it was closed. My bank account was empty. Suddenly my chance to kick the gun out of his hand came my way. His eyes opened wide; he couldn’t believe I had just kicked that thing out of his hand. I couldn’t believe it either. I picked it up fast, and aimed it. I could smell it running down his pants.

“This is where you lose, lizard.”

“You got a bomb on your door knob, Oscar.”

“That’s why you’re going to open it for me.”

“In your wildest dreams!” He screamed, as he ran away from me with surprising speed.

I walked over to the lizard’s car. He had left the keys in it. Got in. turned it on, and drove off into the congested streets.

Back at the apartment building, I stood outside wondering about that smoky chimney. I walked around the block on Northeast 2nd Avenue to see what building was the one with the chimney. I looked and it read, “Van Orsdel Crematorium.” I stood there feeling shocked. It all made morbid sense. The dust on my window sill was no dust and the barbecue smell that circulated the hallways was no barbecue.

Growing up in Miami Springs during the 1940s was a sunny and happy experience if one was young enough to avoid the anxiety and trauma of World War II. I was one of the lucky ones because my dad was able to stay home and work at his job in telephone communications.

Each morning, he would drive downtown in his little gray Ford coupe, the blue gasoline sticker in the right window joined by the red one for Civil Defense. I was proud of his sense of responsibility working for Southern Bell Telephone. Most of us were still on party lines, but we felt good about reliable communication.

My classmates in second grade at Miami Springs Elementary were a mix of varied family situations. There were several dads overseas, but it wasn’t discussed by any of us at school. During this time, I happened to meet an outstanding grandfather of one of my classmates. Anne was my best friend .

The highlight of our friendship was the opportunity to meet her grandfather, an early engineer with the Florida East Coast Railway. It was a short walk to her house and, as we left school one September afternoon, she saw his bluish-gray car parked out front under the big pine tree and said, “You have to come inside and meet Choo-cha-bah!”

Taken aback by the name, I asked her tentatively, “Who’s Choo-cha-bah?”

She replied, “He’s my grandpa, and he’s real nice!” So I followed her into the house and there was a giant man, sitting in a big chair, talking with Anne’s mother and younger brother, Sonny.

Her mother met me with a big smile and introduced me to the visitor. “This is Anne’s grandfather, Choo-cha-bah. He works for the railroad!”

He then stood up, gave Anne a big hug and offered his hand to me. He had a kind manner and I felt comfortable. I didn’t stay long; I talked a few minutes about school, and then left for home. It was wonderful for me to have a new friend who looked like he could be anyone’s grandfather. Tall, strong, and gentle he was, and I was to learn he had made a valuable contribution to Henry Flagler’s progress in bringing the railroad down to Miami.

“Choo-cha-bah” will be referred to by his name, Fred A. Daniel, as I relate the rest of my story.

He grew up in the Palatka-Orange Lake area as a boy, where his father was a cattle driver and worked irregular schedules to bring in a salary. His mother worked as a milliner, which meant she would fashion hats out of available material and make a little money when she could. Historically, I’m placing them in the late 1870s. I’m not sure how many children were in the family.

Not much was going on in North Florida, other than what an individual could conjure up for himself. Cattle roamed freely, grazing where available, and offered an opportunity for individuals with a horse and good strong rope to bring home a starting source of beef. Smaller wildlife was available; quails and wild geese roamed freely, but you needed to be able to capture them and secure them. Small farm patches with greens, corn, and maybe a fruit tree could supplement the food needs.

Let’s get back to Fred.

He went to school for three years and then started looking around for more opportunities to help out. He got close enough to the Jacksonville-St. Augustine area to see that Henry Flagler had arrived and was making plans to use the Florida climate and his wealth to establish a new home base for his sick wife and his work interests. He had become a millionaire working with John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil in Ohio. Arriving in the beautiful sunshine of North Florida in the late 1800s, he and his wife both fell in love with the area.

Mr. Flagler worked to connect the railroad from Jacksonville down to St. Augustine. With that accomplished, he built the beautiful Ponce de Leon Hotel as their new residence. As you know, in business one thing leads to another, and he saw opportunities to spread the business in several directions. In 1888, he added the St. Augustine and Palatka Railroad to the St. John and Halifax railroads. At this point, he had a unified rail system down as far as Daytona Beach.

Do I need to remind you who was walking around this part of the state looking for miscellaneous work opportunities? Yes, Fred found the opportunity to work, carrying water for Flagler’s workers. That’s what he told us of his first job. Not very difficult, but very necessary to fire up the engines and satiate the thirst of the laborers.

Fred learned a lot by just being on the scene. Without qualifications, he was carrying whatever was needed from supply location to work station. No doubt, he learned quickly, for he advanced and continued to work for Flagler and the Florida East Coast Railway, even through the time the FEC lost its battle with “Hurricane 1935” in the Florida Keys.

Because of my older sister Gilda’s illness, my parents, Hedwig and Benjamin Goldstein, were advised in 1942 to move from the Bronx to Miami Beach, where we lived at the La Flora Hotel on Collins Avenue.

Every hotel was filled with Army recruits, who marched on Collins Avenue holding their faux rifles, which were actually broom sticks. As a 5-year-old, I used to dress up in my Cub Scout uniform and watch the soldiers, saluting them as they approached.

Shortly thereafter, my sister and I went to the Normandy Boarding School in Normandy Isle, where I lived and was in kindergarten. .

My parents then bought a house on Alton Road and 43rd Street, where my mom lived for 68 years. On Sundays, I would take my wheelbarrow with coconuts and coconut milk and sell them to the people visiting soldier-patients at the Nautilus Hotel, a military hospital that later became Mt. Sinai Hospital.

I was 6 years old at the time, and it was 1944. I was enrolled at North Beach Elementary, followed by Nautilus School when it opened in 1950, and Miami Beach High School, which I attended through graduation in 1956.

Between ages 11 and 14, my friends and I rode our bicycles everywhere. When I rode my bike for my newspaper delivery route, there was so little traffic I could literally traverse from one side of the street to the other with little effort.

My friends also rode their bikes to school, as well as to Temple Beth Sholom, where my parents were founding members and I was bar mitzvahed and confirmed.

Most of my friends and I earned our recreational money ourselves doing an assortment of odd jobs: delivering newspapers, bagging food at Carl’s, Food Fair and other local markets, and cleaning cabanas or the pool area at various beachfront hotels.

Where the Fontainebleau stands today was the old deserted Firestone estate. We often would catch sand crabs on the beach for bait and walk onto the jetty to fish. As we got older, we rode our bikes with our girlfriends on the handlebars back to that same spot behind the estate, and on a moonlit night it was very romantic.

Weekend mornings offered the opportunity to catch local crawfish as we walked along the sea wall behind houses along the various Beach canals. Today, we’d probably get shot or arrested for trespassing. But back then it was OK, and the residents of the homes who saw us always smiled and wished us luck. We would sell the crawfish to our parents’ friends for 50 cents.

While playing basketball for Beach High, and as captain my senior year, I made life-long friends with both Coach Milt Feinstein and Chuck Fieldson. About six years ago, along with teammates Dr. Richard Berger, Lou Hayes, and Donald Klein, I was fortunate enough to be invited to Coach Feinstein’s surprise 90th birthday party.

After college graduation, I played basketball on the championship Epicure Market basketball team, which even played at the Miami Beach Auditorium against the University of Miami freshmen, including the great All-American Rick Barry.

After graduation from high school, 10 Beach High graduates, including myself, enlisted in a special new Army program with six months active duty followed by seven years Army reserve.

I will never forget the train ride from Miami to Columbia, S.C. (Fort Jackson). It took almost 24 hours and stopped at every town along its path to pick up more recruits. This was 1956, significantly before integration.

Ironically, the boys from Miami Beach were all Jewish, and when we arrived at the barracks, the bulk of the recruits from North Florida, Georgia and South Carolina were unfamiliar with both African Americans and Jews. Our Miami Beach group assimilated easily and quickly with the African-American recruits. Our barrack consisted roughly of 10 boys from Beach High, five or six whites from West Palm Beach, and approximately 15 African Americans from Florida. We got along famously!

It was one of the most interesting and maturing experiences in my entire life and a great transition from high school to college. I returned from my Army service a different person.

Upon graduation from the University of Florida I went to work as a C.P.A. for my father. Our firm today has grown from Benjamin Goldstein, C.P.A. to Goldstein Schechter Koch, C.P.A.s, which employs 115 with offices in downtown Coral Gables and Hollywood. We still have many clients who have been with the firm for more than 65 years, covering three generations. We also have many clients who were my high school friends. Until 2007, three generations of Goldsteins worked at the firm: my mother, my daughter Laurie Adler, and me.

My mother retired at the age of 95, after driving herself four days a week from her home on Alton Road to our offices on Ponce de Leon Boulevard.

The reality is that I have never really left Miami Beach. Neither have most of my friends. Being a Beach guy is a unique distinction of which I will always be proud.

I was born and raised in Brazil.

I was 17 years old when I began my banking career there. In 1986, I was offered a job at a Brazilian bank to manage its Miami branch. I lived here for four years before leaving to work in London and Grand Cayman.

I returned to Miami at the end of 1997 and purchased an apartment in Key Biscayne, where I lived for two years. At the beginning of 1998, I was hired as financial director of a Brazilian company on Brickell Avenue.

In 2000, I was offered a job at an American bank to open a branch here in Miami.

In the meantime, I met Carmen Crespo, Cuban-born and educated in Chile. Carmen was a singer by night, financial consultant by day. Upon first meeting her, I was inebriated by her voice.

After dating for four years, we became engaged, and were married in 2008. Carmen is a big supporter. I am sure that her encouragement empowers me to continue to forge ahead, beyond any obstacles that we may face in our lives together.

For many reasons, I realized that I had to move from Key Biscayne. I sold the apartment and bought a new one in Doral. When I married Carmen, we bought a beautiful house in the city of Sunrise. We’ve been here ever since.

I worked at the American bank until 2010, when I left the banking industry to devote myself to writing.

In Miami, I participate in some cultural organizations and associations that allow me to expand my thoughts by writing essays on different subjects. I have written two books, with versions in Portuguese and Spanish.

My experience in Miami has shown me that here we have the opportunity to make relationships with many kinds of people. For example, at a meeting you can sit at a table with someone who is from Colombia, another from Venezuela, another from Chile, another from Asia, another from Europe. We have to maintain a diversified dialogue with people of different cultures who do things differently. This gives us ample possibility to be flexible with others and, at the same time, with ourselves.

And we have to accept or accommodate ourselves to those styles of life to be happy within the environment where we choose to live. We learn so much from this experience.

In my opinion, it’s not the people who should accommodate us. Instead, we should accommodate them. In terms of culture itself, I believe that in Miami we have the opportunity to come face to face with these situations.

In addition, if we explore, we can find many cultural events here. It’s a question of looking for what is most convenient for us. If we go to Miami Beach, for example, we can find a lot of events occurring on a daily basis.

We cannot talk about this city if we do not mention the beaches. We have to know how to use the beaches and to take advantage of them. It’s in the best interest of our health, too, because we know that the water from the sea has a lot of energy.

Simultaneously, we are among other people who want to share their time and experience with us, and it results in a beneficial situation for everyone. The same can be said for tourism. If we do not consider the tourism part of this community, we will be divorced from a visible reality.

We can note this when we are walking in downtown Miami or even in Miami Beach. We will see a lot of people with different clothes, different hats, different smiles. But everybody who appears in Miami comes with a purpose. They come here to be happy and to enjoy the sunlight that nature offers.

As residents, we should take advantage of all that Miami has to offer. We should enjoy it as the tourists do. We should be flexible — go to the beach, go to the museums, and know the cultures of other countries. We should also be on the lookout for the variety of events that the city offers. This is the integration that exists between ourselves and this cosmopolitan city that opened its arms to receive us.

This is Miami, a city to which I am deeply linked.

Every night after dinner, the four of us would gather around the cramped dining table in our apartment on Kendall Drive, quizzing one another, working on our English pronunciation, memorizing medical concepts, multiplication tables, SAT vocabulary — whatever had to be memorized — drying every stubborn tear because there was not a second to waste.

We were like a startup. When my parents decided to leave Cuba and moved us to Miami in 2002, they were determined to build our own future from scratch. My father, Héctor Chicuén, an electrical engineer, would find work at Florida Power & Light. My mother, María Victoria García, a pediatrician, would certify her medical degree. My younger sister María Cristina Chicuén and I would attend college. This was our business plan. What we lacked in resources, we made up for in drive, an unspoken no-excuse philosophy, an overabundance of togetherness.

Within our family enterprise, teamwork was essential. Whether at a Home Depot, a local Christmas tree shop or a cement factory, my dad would pack his weeks with two and sometimes three jobs in order to make ends meet so that my mom could devote her time to the medical certifications. Some days, when the orange juice disappeared from our kitchen as we ran out of money, when stress drove my dad to twitch his eyes like a flickering emergency light, my mom would close the textbooks.

“No es fácil,” she’d say as she grabbed a mop and drove the short distance to Pinecrest, where good cleaning services were always welcome at the ranch-style estates carved deep in the lush, tropical landscape. Or we’d head to a local gym together. My mother took care of toddlers while their parents exercised, and I prepared protein shakes at the gym’s cafeteria.

These were my high school years, which now blur in my mind, forming a mosaic of sleep deprivation, five-minute phone calls to relatives in Cuba and endless homework for as many advanced courses as I could fit in my schedule. On a rare occasion, as a reward for good grades or a promotion, as a little pause in all the hustle, we would treat ourselves to a family meal at Denny’s.

“Hi, hello, I would like a coffee with milk,” my mom would request in her rehearsed English version of “Hola, qué tal, un café con leche por favor.” The waiter, of course, would proceed to bring a glass of American coffee and a glass of milk.

We also used to rent movies from Blockbuster. We had given up on movie theaters since our first experience, on the release of the original Harry Potter movie. Dressed in our best clothes for what we thought was a special night out, we were baffled by the teenagers in shorts and tank tops — “hasta en chancletas” — flooding Kendall Regal Cinema.

Time had never been so precious to us. Every hour of my father’s work meant $6, $8, $9, $14, $18 to sustain the entire family. One more hour of study brought my mother closer to certifying her medical degree. One more hour at school meant my sister and I were more fluent in English, more prepared for a complex education system we were determined to conquer. That’s why we would arrive at family gatherings with a textbook under our arms, or pass on parties altogether if there was an opportunity for overtime work or a tutoring session.

We took advantage of every resource and free lunch. Even free dinners. On the morning of our first Thanksgiving, the staff from my sister’s elementary school gifted us with a sumptuous turkey we had no idea how to cook. “We’ll roast it like pork,” we thought, as we did in Cuba for every major celebration. Soaked in our traditional marinade of garlic and bitter orange, accompanied by yuca, fried plantains, steamed white rice and black beans, our own bicultural turkey was soul-nourishing. And we were deeply thankful.

Steady, we kept studying and working as hard as we could. It was well into our third year in Miami when the unmistakable light of good fortune crept through our windows. My father received the dream offer from Florida Power & Light. My mother passed her medical board exams and was accepted to a residency program at a prestigious hospital in New York. I received a letter of admission and a generous scholarship to attend Harvard University.

Miami refused to let us go. As we readied to embark on a new adventure in the Northeast, just a few weeks before my high school graduation, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer.

We would not give up. We had won the most difficult battles — separation from our family, poverty and unemployment, loneliness, the inability to express our most basic needs and feelings. We would not give in to illness.

For months, my mother fought through chemotherapy, radiotherapy and hours of surgery until she recovered and claimed the spot she had earned so rightfully at her medical residency. Today, she is a primary-care physician in Little Havana, an area of critical medical need.

My father’s career at Florida Power & Light spans over 10 years. As he has risen through different roles and departments, he has been able to coach other recent immigrants on successful applications for employment at the company.

My sister is now in her third year of college at Stanford University. Every summer, she returns to Miami, where she has interned with the Miami Heat and farmers markets to complement her studies in health policy and urban food systems. She is preparing herself to promote wellness in our city after she graduates.

I am at Miami Dade College. From my post in the college president’s office, I recognize in the faces of many of our students the same determination and thirst for opportunity that first brought my family to Miami, and which continue to drive every one of our individual and collective endeavors.

This city has given us a brighter present than we could have ever imagined.

It’s our turn to pay it forward.

Maria Carla Chicuén is the author of ‘Achieve the College Dream: You Don’t Need to Be Rich to Attend a Top School.’