Interview with Commissioner Bruno Barreiro

              Special Collections
Public Spaces in Miami: An Oral History Project
Interview with Bruno Barreiro
Miami, Florida, July 14th, 1999
Intervew IPH-0038
Interviewed by Aldo Regalado
Recorded by Aldo Regalado
Summary: This interview with Bruno Barreiro was conducted in July 1999. Mr. Barreiro is City Commissioner of Miami-Dade. He talks about growing up in Little Havana, his childhood experiences, especially as they relate to public spaces such as parks. Commissioner Barreiro also speaks of current initiatives that are being explored to enhance such spaces.
This interview forms part of the Institute for Public History (IPH) Oral History Collection, directed by Professor Greg Bush from the History Department and curated by the University of Miami Libraries Special Collections.
Copyright to this interview lies with the University of Miami. The interview recordings or transcript may not be reproduced, retransmitted, published, distributed, or broadcast without the permission of the Special Collections. For information about obtaining copies or to request permission to publish any part of this interview, please contact Special Collections at asc@miami.edu.
1300 Memorial Drive, Coral Gables, FL 33124-0320 * 305-284-3580 * 305-284-4901 fax 2
Bruno Barreiro
July 14, 1999
Aldo Regalado: This is Aldo Regalado interviewing Commissioner Bruno Barreiro at his Little Havana office. The date is July 14th, 1999 and we’re beginning the interview at 1:27. The topics of discussion will be public space issues, the Little Havana neighborhood, other Miami neighborhoods, and any other issues that come up as a consequence of that discussion. So, thank you very much Commissioner for doing this. We’ll start off with the basics. When and where were you born?
Bruno Barreiro: I was born in Clearwater, Florida in 1965. My parents came over from Cuba in the early Sixties and they settled in Clearwater, Florida. That’s the place where they had their first jobs. After that, after I was born, we moved to Miami-Dade County.
AR: What did your parents do for a living in Clearwater and also what did they do before in Cuba?
BB: My father was a nurse in Cuba and when he came over he worked as an orderly in nursing homes. My mom as a housekeeper in Clearwater, and my mother was a teacher back in Cuba. Since then my dad has gotten his registered nurse license.
AR: How would you describe your relationship with your parents and your childhood growing up?
BB: We’re very close. My parents, and I, and the family had a very close family. Not a big family, but close.
AR: Do you have any siblings?
BB: I have a brother, a half-brother, from my father’s. My brother is six years older than me and we get along very well.
AR: Were you guys close growing up? Did you do stuff together growing up?
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BB: We were close. We grew up together. Every summer he would spend with us and the family. He’s my half-brother from my father’s side. But, every summer he would come over and live with us at our house and we grew up together.
AR: When did you leave Clearwater, what year? And where did you move when you left?
BB: We left right after I was born, from Clearwater, and then moved here to Miami-Dade County.
AR: Where in Miami?
BB: In Little Havana.
AR: Little Havana. So you grew up there?
BB: My first couple of years we spent it on Fifth Street and Eleventh Avenue. We had an apartment there.
AR: So, how would you describe growing up in Little Havana? What was the neighborhood like? You childhood impressions?
BB: It was an immigrant community. A lot of Cubans were moving in at that time. My parents were working, both of them full time. My dad started a medical clinic and I remember going with him to work every morning and spending the day with him, all day.
AR: I’ve talked to a couple of people who, I guess, moved to the neighborhood at around the time that you did and they mentioned that it was kind of a community in transition, that there were sometimes tensions: ethnic tensions, or language barriers that existed. Do you remember any such experiences as a child?
BB: Not many. My parents tended to work with a lot of people from Cuba. And my dad, not knowing English fluently, worked with Hispanics. I had a very good childhood. I have good 4
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memories of it. I remember when the clinic would close I would help my mom clean the clinic. We would come in the afternoons when it was closing and we would help clean everything, the floors. In the sense of tensions between other [unclear], I never saw that. My dad got along very well with the landlords and they were very helpful. They helped my dad a lot in the beginning of his professional career here.
AR: And what was the school experience like coming here?
BB: In school, I went to Fairlawn Elementary and prior to that I was put in some day cares. And Fairlawn Elementary was very nice. There was a lot of transition, a lot of young Cuban children coming in and going into school. I remember, I didn’t know English until I went to kindergarten. And when I went to kindergarten my teacher was speaking to me in English, I go, bueno, what is this? That’s why I started learning English. And it was very interesting, but it was challenging. And we adapted with television, with music, with everything around you. And the youth were able to adapt fairly rapidly.
AR: That’s actually a question I was going to ask you, because coming here from an early age also from Puerto Rico, my father’s Cuban, I remember not speaking English, too. And I remember learning it, I don’t want to say the hard way, but I remember not being able to speak it. So I was going to ask you about that. Were you teased a lot at school for not knowing English?
BB: There were a lot of us in those years going in that didn’t know English. I think we were a big group. I wasn’t a separate case in the school that everybody knew English and I was the only one, there were a lot of us going into kindergarten at Fairlawn that didn’t know. So, we all coped and learned it.
AR: How would you describe the sense of community in those early years in Little Havana?
BB: I think a lot of people cooperated with each other. A lot of families cooperated. Sometimes they had to help each other or you’re supervising their kids when they had to do special, they’d have babysitters. There was a lot of cooperation back then in the early days.
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AR: Do you remember anybody in particular who cooperated with your family or anybody who your family helped out?
BB: Yeah, there were. There were friends of my family. There were a lot of friends that they knew each other back from Cuba. They sort of kept the same relationships here and they helped each other out. Whether it was trying to find jobs or trying to do their daily chores.
AR: Let me ask you a question about the neighborhood in terms of safety. When you were growing up did you feel it was a safe neighborhood, did your family feel it was a safe neighborhood?
BB: Yeah, it was definitely a safe neighborhood. We felt that way.
AR: So you felt you could walk around at night, let’s say, and not worry?
BB: Yeah. My mom didn’t have a car and my dad, well my dad had a car, but my mom didn’t. I remember walking around and it was fine. It was safe.
AR: You mentioned that you spent a lot of time at work with your parents, and obviously at school, but what did you guys do for leisure growing up, as a family?
BB: I remember going to the theater, to the local movie theaters. And we would also go down to the pier, Bayside, back then. There was a big marina there. Sometimes we would go to the beach. Family outings. So we would enjoy some of the facilities that were there.
AR: Going abroad, let’s say to the pier, what is now the Bayside area—actually we should take them one by one. What were the experiences of going to the pier, what sort of activities would you do there, what people would be there?
BB: We would go just to watch the amount of people going out in the boats. Obviously we didn’t have the means to have any of those things. But we would just go to enjoy and see some of those 6
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facilities. We would go to the beach a lot on weekends. I remember going to South Beach and I remember going to Crandon Park.
AR: And these were primarily family outings?
BB: Family outings.
AR: Would it just be the nuclear family or would you go with extended family or friends from the neighborhood, from the community, that sort of thing?
BB: Usually the nuclear family. But, sometimes we would go along with friends. You know, whoever was available or was interested. We didn’t have a big family so it was probably limited to four or five people.
AR: Did you watch a lot of television as a kid?
BB: We watched TV, we had a TV. My family permitted us to watch TV.
AR: This may sound like a trivial question, but in some ways it’s not. What types of shows would you watch as a family, and also individually, what were your favorite shows?
BB: Individually, sometimes I would watch cartoons as a kid, as a small kid. Later on when I grew up, regular sitcoms. Then later on, sometimes I watch novelas with my family. My father’s aunt would come to Miami, they lived in St. Petersburg, she would come every year for a couple months and I remember watching novelas with her.
AR: I did that, too, with my mom. It was a bonding moment in a lot of ways. Did you ever go to any parks as kids?
BB: We went to parks to play sports. I used to go a lot to Robert King High Park. Later on, after we lived for a couple of years at Fifth Street and Eleventh Avenue, we moved to a house on Sixty-eighth Avenue and First Street. And Robert King High Park was off of Flagler and Sixty-7
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seventh and I went there a lot. After school, I would enjoy playing sports. They had different programs: basketball, tennis. Then they built a racquetball court, a one-wall racquetball court, and I remember playing racquetball. So I enjoyed that park.
AR: So could you describe, again, the sorts of people that were there in terms of age groups, ethnicity, class?
BB: Middle class. Immigrant families. A lot of Hispanics, a lot of Cubans. I remember the park director, Shorty, he worked in the City of Miami Parks and Recreation for many, many years, thirty years at least. And he was very good, very helpful with us. A lot of kids from working families.
AR: How late did you go there in your early years in terms how old were you when you frequented the park?
BB: I went to the park even through my high school years. There was a park that was close by. I played a lot of sports in my school like basketball and track and if I wasn’t doing that after school, a specific sport and we didn’t have practice, I would sometimes go to the park myself or with friends and play and enjoy their facilities.
AR: You mentioned that they had, early on, programs. These were mainly sports programs?
BB: Yeah.
AR: Were they year-round?
BB: Year-round. Different teams. Whatever the sport that was in season, whether it was tennis or basketball or flag football.
AR: Did they consistently maintain these activities throughout your childhood and into your high school years? There was no change in terms of availability?
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BB: We saw it diminishing. Back towards the end of my high school years I saw a lot of the programs diminish. But I was also getting involved more in high school activities that kept me away also. But I saw that.
AR: Do you have a sense of why they were diminishing? Did you have a sense at the time of why and do you now looking back on it have a sense of why?
BB: I imagine it should’ve been probably funding that wasn’t available. That’s what I imagine, but I’m not sure.
AR: In terms of parks when you were growing there as a kid, again I asked you this about neighborhoods, but did you see them as safe places, places where you can go pretty much any time of day?
BB: Yeah, they were definitely safe. The parks were safe. There were attendants all the time, whether it was a park director or an assistant, there was somebody there.
AR: How about policing? Do you remember policing as a child?
BB: There was not much policing. I don’t think it was needed because you had the park personnel.
AR: And the sense of security, did that last throughout your high school years or did you also notice that to be changing?
BB: No, it stayed more or less within the same realm. It was secure throughout my high school years. I didn’t see a major shift.
AR: You mentioned that the parks were frequented mostly by a lot immigrant kids, I presume mostly Cuban immigrants. Was the park ever used by any other ethnic groups? Are they the Anglos or African-Americans?
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BB: There were. There were some different nationalities. There wasn’t that many African-Americans per se, but there were some Americans. But it wasn’t a large amount.
AR: Did the groups tend to do activities together, play together?
BB: Yeah, we all played on the same teams. It wasn’t like they had different sports and we had different sports.
AR: That’s interesting because I’ve been interviewing a couple of people about some other parks, and I haven’t dealt with Robert King High Park at all actually, but some of the other parks. And they’ve described, specifically in Gibson Park in Overtown, some very clear divisions in terms of what activities are played by which groups but we can talk about that a little bit later. We’ve dealt with parks, we’ve dealt with beaches. How about zoos, museums, or any other public spaces that you can think of?
BB: My parents took me a lot on weekends to different—you know, I went to Seaquarium. I went to the zoo back when it was in Crandon Park, the old zoo. My parents took me to different locations. Obviously they weren’t frequented but I did have the opportunity to attend, to go to some of these places.
AR: How about public libraries? Did you go to those with frequency?
BB: Yes. There was a fair amount of libraries. I think it’s still there, the branch, it’s on Eighth Street and Sixty-eighth. I went there and I remember every once in a while I had to do a major report and had to get something that wasn’t there and I had to go to the main library down on Biscayne Boulevard. But that was very rare. I attended, did my homework.
AR: Was it mostly for school or did you go there also for leisure?
BB: No, mostly for school.
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AR: Do you remember if they had any activities offered through the library that you may have partaken in?
BB: I think they had reading groups. I didn’t participate that much in those programs but I remember that.
AR: Well, wrapping up, then, this sort of segment on your early experiences, what would you say that these spaces: parks, beaches, zoos, museums, but specifically parks and, I guess, secondarily beaches. How did they affect your outlook on things, your life? What would a world without these places have been like, do you think?
BB: It definitely gave me an opportunity to meet friends, and to meet my neighbors, and experience different aspects of life. Whether it was the zoo or the beach. But, I think it was healthy also, the parks. I’ve always been into sports and I think it’s a very important part of life to be able to unwind from the work. They’re very helpful. Now when I meet kids, I tell them to get involved whether its sports or hard activities, I encourage them.
AR: Do you have kids of your own?
BB: No, I don’t.
AR: So do you use parks now?
BB: Yeah, I go walking a lot with my wife. I live on the beach, so I walk a lot on the beach. And I enjoy that.
AR: How would you say that now, beaches and parks, do you feel that they are the same place as they were when you were growing up? Have you noticed any change?
BB: I think, unfortunately, some of the parks weren’t given the proper attention from the government. We saw a lot of gangs taking over parks and a lot of crimes being committed at parks. But, recently, I’ve seen a minor change towards cleaning them up, and starting to bring 11
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families back in, bring sports, organized sports with directors, park directors. I’m seeing more of that. But I think it still needs a long way to go.
AR: Could you be specific as to where you see, in terms of the project anyway we’re dealing mostly with the parks in Little Havana and in Overtown. Can you sort of target the areas that you think have gotten worse and which ones you’ve seen improvement in?
BB: I think the park on Eighth Avenue and Fourth Street was really bad at one point. Jose Marti Park was bad. The area around the Orange Bowl, the park at the Orange Bowl, was bad. But I’ve seen them being turned around. I see Jose Marti is being cleaned up. You’re seeing more kids enjoying the facilities. I think the one on Eighth Avenue and Fourth Street the one where, unfortunately, the baby kid was shot by a gang drive-by a couple of years ago, but after that, seen more activities there. Groups coming in and forming baseball teams and using the facilities. I also think we’ve got to start gearing the parks toward the culture of the people surrounding the parks. For the Cubans, baseball fields were excellent. But you’re seeing a lot of, in the Little Havana area, a lot of South Americans, some different South American countries. And their primary sport is soccer. So I think we need to make sure that soccer fields are in place so they could use those facilities. Because if not they won’t be able to do their recreational sports, their sports that they like to do. And I’ve been asked by a lot of communities to see if we could do that, if we could somehow change the planning of some of these parks.
AR: Do you think there’s the political will for that amongst, I mean, you have that vision, but are there other people that share that vision and are aware of that need in terms of tailoring these parks to specific communities?
BB: I don’t know. I have it, I’m looking at it, but it has to be brought to the attention of the City of Miami Parks people. I’ve been trying to do that.
AR: What initiatives have been taken? I mean, you already mentioned that there’s been some improvement already at places like Jose Marti Park. What initiatives do you see that have led up to that improvement and what initiatives have been taken that might push things in a different direction in the future? 12
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BB: We’ve been targeting the gangs in the neighborhoods to get them off the streets. And that relieves the ability of them to go into parks. We’ve been working with the NET office so the police has a presence and they pass by the parks and they frequent the parks. Some initiatives have been, like Jose Marti was gated up so at night it’s closed so people don’t come in and vandalize the facility. We’ve been working with some organizations like the Orange Bowl to encourage some of the minor league baseball, peewee leagues, to keep them operating. Working with different groups.
AR: I want to come back to some of these later but first I would like to jump for a moment, correct me if I’m wrong, I read on your webpage that your district includes both Little Havana and Overtown?
BB: Yeah, part of Overtown.
AR: Part of Overtown, okay. I wanted to ask you a little bit about both of those communities now as neighborhoods. Obviously you grew up in Little Havana so you probably have a stronger understanding of this community as a neighborhood. But, I’d also like your insights into Overtown. How would you describe both of these different communities as neighborhoods in terms of community life, their greatest strengths, and also the greatest obstacles that they face, the greatest needs?
BB: When I talk, in Overtown specifically, the section that I have doesn’t have a lot of youth. It’s a lot of public housing projects and geared towards elderly. So there hasn’t been that huge demand. But, they have requested passive parks, those types of facilities. I’ve been trying to talk to—well the City of Miami has already gone through and they’re in the process of opening up Lummus Park and bringing that back. I think that’s going to be a very nice passive park that everyone can enjoy. We are talking to different groups and organizations, encourage along the river, the Miami River, like a boardwalk or a river walk, and that would encourage more people to use those facilities and enjoy the river. We’ve been working on that project.
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AR: Somebody brought it up to me when I mentioned this project that cities like Fort Lauderdale or San Antonio have great riverside spaces and I was specifically going to ask you about that, about why Miami doesn’t have, we have a river, so why don’t we have those spaces? Could you give me a sense of why historically you think that this has not happened?
BB: Well, the facilities on the Miami River, first of all it’s a working river. But also the properties along the Miami River have been privately owned so they haven’t been opened to the public. They’re private businesses or private homes. What we’ve been encouraging is to try to get some of those facilities to either turn them over to the public, or if they’re private, encouraging a program to see if we could create the river walks along the river behind private property so people could pass through and enjoy the river in its entirety. That’s a project that’s going on with the Miami River Commission that I sit on, and we’ve been trying to make that happen.
AR: What are the prospects do you think?
BB: Very good. There’s a lot of plans on the table and now we’re trying to get the funding, which is always an obstacle. But, I think we’re going to be able to accomplish it. We’ve been working also with Trust Republic lands to do these types of projects.
AR: This may be an impossible question to answer, given the way things go, but is there a timetable for any of these projects?
BB: We expect the City of Miami should have a piece of the river walk down by Lummus Park within a year or so. That’s what we’re working on, that project. And at the county, if we pass the transportation plan, there is a portion in there for greenways which also encompasses river walks and there will be funding there for those projects so it’s a good possibility there.
AR: Great. I was interviewing somebody from Overtown and they made the point, and I found it interesting, that parks are needed in Overtown, parks are important, but there are so many issues that are important as well: housing, maintenance of neighborhoods, policing, and she was talking about how all of these issues, including parks
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[Tape Breaks]
AR: July 14th interview with Commissioner Bruno Barreiro at his Little Havana office, the year is 1999, and this half of the tape we’re starting at about two o’ clock. So I was asking you about that greater need.
BB: There is a lot of need. In housing for, say, the county, there’s been a lot of dollars to create housing, but then the maintenance of those facilities, there wasn’t funding for that. And we’ve been working on revising some of those plans to include maintenance. It’s a combination of things. That’s just one area in particular, housing. But also job creation is vital, job training. We’ve been working on different family social issues.
AR: Do you get the sense, because the few people that I’ve interviewed in the neighborhood, have expressed frustration, a great deal of frustration, because so many different plans have been created over the years and they see very little progress made. Could you speak to that in any way? Why has that been the case and what is being done differently now, do you think, that could address those needs? When you mentioned how parks should be tailored to the different communities, one of the things they mentioned, and I was very interested to hear you mention something similar, is that Gibson Park has these baseball diamonds. They don’t play baseball though, they like football. And they don’t have any facilities to play football. So, not only is it that that there isn’t any movement, but sometimes they feel that what is provided historically hasn’t been tailored to their needs.
BB: That’s a big problem. We’re trying to work with that. You have to take into consideration the demographics of the neighborhoods when they go to build a park or refurbish a park. You know, you can’t put ice skating rinks in South Florida. We’ve got to work with what we have. I’ve been working with that. We saw the Parks Bond that was recently passed a couple years ago. We’ve seen a lot of improvements in parks due to that. People do consider it a major part of the quality of life in their neighborhoods. Do they have parks? Do they have adequate parks? Do the parks meet their needs in particular? In Overtown they like to play football, they like to play basketball and they’ve got to take those concerns into their planning.
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AR: And do you see that being done more now, and if not what are the obstacles to achieving that?
BB: You see more of that occurring. You’re seeing that neighborhoods, neighborhood associations are getting involved with the parks department and making sure that happens. You’re seeing a lot more activism from the neighbors. Never to the extent that you want, but you’re seeing a little bit of that.
AR: How about, jump over to Little Havana, in terms of, what’s Little Havana like as a neighborhood? Again, what are its biggest obstacles? What are its strengths? And how does the community hold together? Especially in light of the immigration over the last ten to fifteen years which has brought so many different new groups into the area. So how does that community hold together in those regards?
BB: I think the issue that Little Havana is a lot of rental, it’s like ninety-five percent rental, is a problem. We’ve been trying to encourage more homeownership in the area, homeownership developments, that would make people try to improve their neighborhoods. They would buy into the entire quality of life issue in our neighborhoods. You tend to see a lot of immigrants first coming into Little Havana, that’s the area of Miami-Dade County where a lot of them come into first, and then once they are able to get a steady job, they move out and they buy a house somewhere else. We’re trying to reverse that and see if we could encourage them to stay within.
AR: What sort of incentives are you trying to offer?
BB: We’ve been working with CBDG funding and non-profit groups to encourage homeownership developments: townhomes, condominiums that they can buy and afford.
AR: Is it working? Have you seen a change?
BB: It’s in its early stage but you see a lot of developers planning these types of facilities and starting to get the funding for them. I think within the next couple of years you’re going to see a lot of that, little projects coming to fruition, being built. 16
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AR: Again, both neighborhoods. In terms of safety, how much of a concern is that and what steps are being taken, both in Little Havana and in Overtown, to address the issue of safety, of crime, of policing?
BB: The issue of safety, I think the key there is to work with neighborhood police officers, the NETs, to make sure that they are attentive to different hot areas within the two neighborhoods. They’ve been doing their part, but they’re short in funding and staff. But we have to encourage that, that the proper funding is allocated to these neighborhoods. These neighborhoods have been, for years, the backbone of the City of Miami and we can’t let them continue to go to turn our backs on them. We pour all our money into, whether it’s Downtown or Coconut Grove, we’ve got to pour our money into these neighborhoods. It’s unfortunate, but we have to continue the battle of the issue of the gangs, youth gangs. You have drug dealers coming in taking advantage of these kids, some of them come from broken families, and they’re in a difficult situation.
AR: So how does one go about targeting or eliminating this problem? Is it just having police units that can concentrate on that issue?
BB: Yeah, police units and proper staffing of the parks. You have people there constantly at the park, full time, that’ll turn around.
AR: Do you think there’s a—and this will be the last question I ask, or the second to last—I’ve felt the tension between Overtown and Little Havana communities. I guess mostly I’ve sensed resentment from Overtown residents, I can’t say I’ve felt the same resentment from Little Havana residents. But a lot of Overtown residents have heard, say, that Little Havana gets priority on certain programs or it seems to them. Whatever the case, there appears to be a rift between the two neighborhoods. Why do you think that is? What do you think causes that?
BB: I don’t think there should be any rift between both neighborhoods. Both neighborhoods have been getting some help from different governmental agencies, so I don’t see them in competition, I don’t. The issue here is to bring the economic development, bring homeownership into these areas. 17
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AR: Would you say the initiatives in one community have been more successful than in another? Do you think the initiatives for creating homeownership in Little Havana and the same type of initiatives in Overtown, do you think one has been more successful than the other?
BB: No, I can’t judge that right now. But I don’t think it’s more successful. I’ve seen projects in Overtown being planned and gain financing through the county or city. I just don’t.
AR: Could you mention one?
BB: There’s one, it’s called New Hope on Sixth Street, Northwest, and Sixth Avenue or Seventh Avenue. That’s already been basically leveled. The property is cleaned out and they’re working on that. You’re seeing other projects coming on board. You see also a redevelopment agency that they created in Overtown, which has had its problems but I think they’re getting new funding and new administration and that’s going to be helping that area. I’ve been working to try to get them for Little Havana but it hasn’t occurred yet, the redevelopment agency. So, we’re working on it. Hopefully the residents don’t see each other being pitted against one another. The issue here is to make them both work and work on both areas. If anything, both of them should be looking to fight the funding against other neighborhoods which have traditionally received the funding and try to lower it back into their neighborhoods. If they ally, if you could work together.
AR: The people I have spoken to basically have said that they do see a need for that. There are probably barriers set up due to historical realities that may or may not be changing now, but they do see the need for that and there’s just the matter of breaking down those pre-existing barriers. So I think the will is there. I know you have to go so I won’t keep you any longer, but thank you so much for participating in this.
BB: Thank you for considering me as part of the project.