Heaven and hell

By Varela

Neighbors in Miami are finding circles in almost every corner that imitate the floating gardens of Babylon. They are stone circles filled with nicely trimmed grass, exotic plants and colored lights. They have painted containers and pretty pedestrian-crossing signals.

Popular legend has it that they’re there to slow down traffic in residential neighborhoods and provide greater safety for the residents, particularly the children who ride bicycles or skates. So far, everything is lyrical and if you put the idea to music it will serve as a hymn in praise of City Hall. Except that the reality is quite different.

Each circle at each corner costs the taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars. They are designed to drain the money that you and I pay as taxes to the city whenever we go through a toll booth, put gas in the car, or buy a product – from a needle to a house.

And how do they steal from us? Through the contracts made by City Hall. The men who draw the plans, pour the cement, paint the containers, bring the soil, plant the grass, plant the palm trees, install the lights, connect the signals and maintain the little round gardens, all of them, allegedly make money approved through a contract auctioned off by City Hall.

Presumably each contract goes to the lowest bidder. Wrong. It goes to a friend of the man in charge at City Hall. Its amount is inflated, so the contractor may profit and slip a juicy commi$$ion to the politician who facilitated the deal. Otherwise, each politician would have to work for six months to buy his $3,000 suit, because politicians earn only $6,000 per annum.

But that’s not where I’m going. I’m going to something a lot sadder: a public school made up of trailers on a street near Brickell Avenue, near an impressive luxury hotel with million-dollar statues, indoor waterfalls, majestic columns and huge round windows made of fine crystal.

The contrast between the wooden school on stilts and the exuberant skyscraper goes from the Third World to the First in just a couple of streets. And remember that, according to our politicians, the Florida Lottery devotes much of its million-dollar earnings to education. I suspect that, if there were no Florida Lottery, our public schools would be right next to the Seminole reservation in the Everglades. And the roofs would be made of fronds.

But there’s more. Near the little school, the city has built a pompous Art-Deco lighted fountain, as a tribute to the hotel’s glamour, as a visual punishment to the school, and as a monument to the residential neighborhood across the street – “The Roads” – which pays exorbitant property taxes. I know this because I lived there for ten years.

I was always attracted by the austerity of the trailer school on one of the most ostentatious streets of Miami, so I once did a caricature about it for El Nuevo Herald. Heaven acts in mysterious ways, because days later I received a call from hell, from the school’s principal.

She thanked me for the caricature and told me that the school was for students with learning disabilities, attention-deficit disorder and other medical names given to children with educational handicaps. The principal told me that the students liked to draw and that the teachers showed them many of my caricatures in the paper, asking them for their interpretation. She asked me to share a morning with the students. I was impressed and accepted at once.

The day I went, I was shown many drawings the children had done and experienced one of the most shocking feelings of my life. In general, children draw their homes or their schools in simple ways, with vague strokes. But 90 percent of the drawings made by those students showed the hotel and the fountain near their school. They drew everything in great detail: the driveway, the parked cars, the statues, the waterfall, the windows, the columns.

I remember I told them I’d rather they drew their school, and they all responded (almost shouting) that they didn’t want to. They even asked me to draw the hotel and the fountain better than they did. An idea came to me, and I proposed it to them. I told them I would draw their school the way it would look after it was fixed. On the blackboard, I drew the school and placed the waterfall in the patio, the fountain in a corner, the statue next to it, the columns at the entrance, and large windows all around it. The ovation and applause were unanimous. The kids were so enthused that they began to draw their little school “after it was fixed.”

From that day on, I refused to walk down that street. I refused to see the detestable contrast in the landscape. I no longer admired the circular gardens, the neon lights, new bridge, exotic palm trees, boulevard lights or the boastful art of the so-called Miami Design District.

Nor did I choose to learn if the school stayed there, its students drawing the opulence of their surroundings. Because I was the liar who made them happy one day, telling them that their school would be fixed just the way they wanted.

Born in Cuba in 1955, José Varela worked as an editorial cartoonist in Miami for 15 years. for the magazine Exito (1991-97) and El Nuevo Herald (1993-2006). He is a publicist, television writer and member of the Progreso Weekly team.