A Year In the Life of 2006

By Rebecca Wakefield

“Fidel Castro fell ill and turned over his power to younger brother Raul Castro, a spry 75-year-old with a love of drink, but blessedly, less inclined to speechifying.”

What a year this has been. 2006 will go down as the year the Godfather of Soul, James Brown, died. We lost the right to carry hair gel on airplanes, yet we got the runs on cruise ships. Election year jitters created, then derailed, a long-overdue discussion of immigration reform. Our vice president shot somebody in the face. The mid-term elections (and disgust over Jack Abramoff, Randy Cunningham, Tom Delay, Bob Ney and Mark Foley, among others) put an end to the Bush administration’s disastrous momentum in Iraq, leading to the dismissal of the universally hated Donald Rumsfeld.

And it got even weirder locally. For your holiday amusement, we present a look back at some of what has happened to us these past 12 months.

Local resident O.J. Simpson wrote a bestseller that never got published after even Rupert Murdoch realized speculative murder confessions were too much for Christmas. Hulk Hogan’s teenage son somehow managed to set fire to his yellow Lamborghini Diablo in Bay Harbor Islands, while his daughter assailed us with a record deal, and his wife was omnipresent on Lincoln Road.

The orishas of basketball smiled upon us after 18 cold, dry, hopeless years and the white hot Miami Heat won the NBA Championship. We’re not sure if there’s a pile of chicken corpses bundled into a Dwyane Wade jersey behind a strip mall in Kendall, but whatever Pat Riley did to appease the gods, let us hope he can do it again before turning over an aging Shaq to a secret lab in the basement of Jackson Memorial Hospital. (We can rebuild him. We have the technology.)

This year was a good one for the arts in general, culminating in the annual Art Basel assault of international wealth and unparalleled talent. The much-hyped Carnival Center for the Performing Arts finally opened. It did so years late and hundreds of millions over budget, but, damn, it is pretty cool, even if a few design flaws make old people stumble and fall.

On Miami Beach, a smoke-and-mirrors proposal to turn over the Jackie Gleason Theater to Cirque du Soleil (originally with Related Group’s Jorge Perez, Miami‘s Donald Trump of developer egos and bad hair) was stopped. Instead, the city did what it should have in the first place: bid the thing out.

The city also moved closer to cutting a deal with the New World Symphony to help fund a new Frank Gehry-designed music hall.

Ancient Cuban dictator Fidel Castro fell ill and turned over his power to younger brother Raul Castro, a spry 75-year-old with a love of drink, but blessedly, less inclined to speechifying. Miami went nuts celebrating. It’s clear that a bitter era is winding to a close, which can only mean good things for Miami’s ever-adaptive demagoguery industry.

The prime example of such was this year’s attempt by a handful of Miami parents, radio personalities and exploitative politicians to ban a children’s book called Vamos a Cuba, because it wasn’t sufficiently critical of Cuban life under the Castro regime. One good result was the failure of the crass utilization of this hot topic by school board member Frank Bolaños in his bid to unseat state Sen. Alex Villalobos (who ran afoul of his Republican overlords in Tallahassee after voting his conscience on education funding).

Marco Rubio, Miami’s fetching young state representative, was elected House Speaker, which will be good for us since we’re losing Jeb Bush‘s Miami ties -- if Rubio can remember to look past his governor’s ambition long enough to help out the hometown now and then. Probably the best news from Tallahassee, though, was the ousting of odious loudmouth Ralph Arza. Arza had a bad case of drunk dialing and got caught threatening another state lawmaker who’d complained about his use of racial epithets to describe schools Superintendent Rudy Crew. Arza is politically dead now, and good riddance.

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