Miami’s Tower of Babel
As is expected of every investment, the 1,000-foot tower that will be built in Miami’s urban center (allegedly for observation) is expected to produce huge dividends. To begin with, it is expected to create 7,100 new jobs during its construction and about 17,000 after it’s opened. It is also expected to attract 3 million tourists per year.
And it is also expected that Miami Arquitectónica, the firm in charge of its design, will make the tower look like a space-rocket launching site and that this visual scandal will rise behind the Bayside Marketplace and that the SkyRise (its proposed name) will be the highest structure in Miami.
Logically, it is expected that Miami voters will approve the project next August, because otherwise the designers wouldn’t have calibrated every element of the building to the point that it looks like a detailed dream.
Have you seen capital founded on fantasies? I haven’t, so I can speculate that the project will be approved in August and in three years, by mid-2017, we’ll have a new tower among us.
Remember Babel? “Let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven […] And the Lord said, […] let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech.” That one.
Anthony’s chance
The Heat lost the crown, we know that. And if anything became clear after that fact — observed as a discreet funeral in Miami, maybe because everybody is enjoying the soccer World Cup — is that LeBron is not enough.
The man can score 35 points in a game and then, in pain and suffering from cramps, see his team defeated. Or he can score 31 points, as he did the last night of the championship against the Spurs and still be sent to the showers. In other words, the issue is not LeBron. The issue is that LeBron is not enough.
Maybe that’s why, having faced a hypereffective San Antonio in these finals and facing the fact that the other Heat players don’t score, the possibility of bringing the great Carmelo Anthony to Miami, explored for a while now, is gaining, after the defeat to the Spurs, greater urgency, a kind of decisive priority. We’ll see.
The fact is that the New York Knicks star, who will become a free agent this summer, this season averaged 27.4 points, 8.1 rebounds, and 3.1 assists per game.
About the decision to raise a child in Miami
After examining 150 cities, personal finance website Wallethub maintains that Miami is the second worst U.S. city in which to raise children. According to the rankings — “Family Activities and Fun,” “Health and Safety,” “Education and Child Care,” “Affordability” and “Socio-economic Environment” — Miami has been negatively outstanding in two essential indicators: lowest median family salary (the lowest in the country, after Newark, N.J.) and least affordable housing (very high.)
The desertion of a verb
There is a definition of “to desert” — a verb that has caused family splits and literary tales — that may be understood as the abandonment of an army by a soldier. This definition has prevailed in the past in the imagination of someone who leaves Cuba, then breaks his compass and decides to live in another country, or maybe more than one other country.
But this definition of abandonment, where the army would be Cuba, has prevailed especially in the mind of the Cuban who stays and then sees that those who leave, leave, flee when push comes to shove and leave him alone and by himself in an army that always, or almost always, pushes and shoves.
Less lamentable than curious is the fact that that definition prevails also in Telemundo (Channel 51), which announced as a “defection” the decision of seven Cuban dancers, former members of the Cuban National Ballet, to perform this Sunday in Miami-Dade Auditorium.
