Interview with Pablo Cantón

              Special Collections
Public Spaces in Miami: An Oral History Project
Interview with Pablo Canton
Miami, Florida, July 1999
Intervew IPH-0039
Interviewed by Aldo Regalado
Recorded by Aldo Regalado
Summary: This interview with Pablo Canton was conducted in July 1999. Mr. Canton is administrator of the East Little Havana Neighborhood Enhancement Team (NET) office. He was born in Cuba and immigrated to the United States in 1961. He graduated with a Bachelor of Business Administration from the University of Miami and a Bachelor of Science in Construction Management from Florida International University. His working experience for the City of Miami also includes directorships at the Department of Community Development, Citizen Response, and Building and Zoning. Mr. Canton talks about growing up in Little Havana, his education and his work for the government.
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 Pablo Canton
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Aldo Regalado: This is Aldo Regalado interviewing Mr. Pablo Canton in his East Little Havana NET office. It is July 16th, 1999 and we are beginning the interview at 8:49. The topics of discussion will be public space issues, the neighborhood, and Mr. Canton’s work with the NET office in general. I’ll place this over here so we could get you on tape easier. Okay, I’m going to start off just asking you for about five minutes some of your background information, where you grew up and all of that. So let’s just begin from the beginning, what’s your date of birth and where were you born?
Pablo Canton: Okay, November 25, 1945 I was born in Havana, Cuba. I came to the United States on August 27, 1961. I went to high school in Havana in LaSalle High School. I finished here also in LaSalle in 1962. Later on I went to Miami-Dade Community College. I went to the University of Miami. I have a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from the University of Miami in 1969. I went to the Army for a couple of years, active Army as a first lieutenant infantry 101st airborne division. I went to Vietnam 1970 to 1971. After I came back from the service I worked for an insurance company, Liberty Mutual, as a claims adjustor for five years. In the meantime, I went back to school and I got another degree, Bachelor of Science in Construction Management from Florida International University. I was involved in construction for several years. I worked for different companies, M. R. Harrison, Edward J. Gerrits, and I was on my own also for a couple of years. I started to work with the City of Miami in June 14, 1987. I started in the Department of Community Development, Association Director, in charge of some of the construction including the Manuel Artime that was going through some remodeling. I was also in charge of festivals, special events, and another section called Citizen Response where people would call with all kinds of complaints and we would refer it to different departments. That’s the system we had back then on complaints. People would call Citizen Response and we would refer the complaint to the other department. Later on I was involved with the problem of crack houses, very much involved with demolition. And then City Manager Cesar Odio transferred me from Community Development to Building and Zoning and in charge of code enforcement and that was in 1989, October 1989. At that time I was in charge of a group of about twenty-some people including the inspectors, code-enforcing inspectors, and we targeted specifically abandoned buildings. At the time that I was there, we averaged about one demolition a day, over one a day because there were more than three hundred and sixty-five demolitions a year. I was there for about two and a half years. In 1992 when the NET concept was started, they took the inspectors, Pablo Canton
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code-enforcing inspectors, and sent them out to the different areas. That’s when they divided the city in eleven different areas, because we had eleven inspectors, that’s the reason they divided in eleven. And I was given the position of NET administrator and given the choice as to where I wanted and I chose Little Havana. At the time Little Havana was only one big area and a couple of years later, back in 1994, the City Manager decided it was too big and in order to give the people in the area better service, he divided the area in two: East and West. Then again, I decided to stay in the East and have been working with the NET in the East since 1994, as a matter of fact, since the inception in 1992. And as you know, the NET actually is a governmental office. We all work for the City of Miami, all the employees are from the City of Miami and we try to improve the quality of life of the people in the area. That’s basically our main purpose at the NET office.
AR: So, Little Havana, or East Little Havana, the choice for you, why did you make that choice?
PC: Well, at the time when they started dividing the city, I figured Little Havana, I won’t say grew up in Little Havana, but when I arrived from Cuba, that is where I lived. I lived right here on Second Avenue and Southwest Seventh Street. Again, looking at the whole city itself I couldn’t find a better place than Little Havana to work at. Now, when they divided the area into two, I considered East Little Havana to be a little bit more challenging, a little bit more problematic than the West, and I liked that. I’m not here just to have a nice time or enjoy the position, but I’m here to try to make a difference in the area and that’s why I chose East Little Havana.
AR: So I have two questions from that statement. One, you said that you found, I mean, you couldn’t think of a better place to work. What made it the best place to work? And the second question is, when you mentioned that East Little Havana seemed more challenging, what were the reasons it was more challenging?
PC: More problems, you know. As a matter of fact, I had choices of going to many other areas. As a matter of fact, a year and a half ago when we had the change of leadership in the commission, I was kind of ordered to go to Flagami. Again, Flagami, compared to East Little Havana, is like talking about Coral Gables. There’s not much going on in Flagami, they don’t Pablo Canton
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have that many problems in Flagami. I definitely did not like the change. A lot of the people in the area were upset about it and they voiced their opinion. I voiced my opinion to my immediate supervisor and I guess I won. So I stayed here, you know. The reason I’m saying a little bit more challenging is common problems.
AR: What would you identify as the biggest problems then, when you made your choice in Little Havana, and how have they changed? And what are the biggest problems now?
PC: There are problems everywhere. There are problems in every part of the city, you’re going to find problems. Now, in some areas you have a little bit more than others. You have more homeless, you have more illegal units, you have more crime, you have more drugs, you have more of the negative things that can affect a neighborhood. I don’t think there’s any neighborhood in the City of Miami that is completely clean. They all have their little problems. But Little Havana is definitely one of the worst as far as, the amount of problems that we have in the area are definitely more than Flagami, and the Grove, and Shenandoah, Coral Way, or some other areas of the city. So that’s why we’re so busy here. Sometimes I don’t even have time to have lunch or go to the bathroom.
AR: From your perspective, the most progress you’ve made in the past seven years has been in what areas? And what is your next set of priorities?
PC: Well, we’ve always had priority number one as the crime situation. That’s the number one priority. We have two officers here, they’re called neighborhood resource officers, working together, from our office, together with the lieutenant. Now we have Lieutenant Mike Perez who is in charge of the police for the whole area. That’s priority number one. I don’t think any area can develop, any area can move forward until we can control the crime situation. The only way you can bring people to start investing in the area is if you have your streets under control. Otherwise, if you have homeless and you have people selling crack on the streets or whatever, the place is a dump, no one is going to invest into the area. And that’s what we had several years ago. Based on that, we have been pushing for more police protection. We have been pushing for the police to take more aggressive actions. I have my up and downs on convincing some of the police to be that aggressive. Some of them have been here for years and are used to doing some things Pablo Canton
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the way they’re used to doing it and it’s just reactive. They will only take action when somebody calls for whatever reason, for a problem. Otherwise, most of these people, or mostly patrol officers will go by and they may be doing anything on the streets and if it’s not completely obvious that somebody is selling crack, or they have a little note saying “I’m selling crack” they will not stop, they will keep on going. So it’s been taking a while to get the aggressive effort to have the whole team in movement. We’ve had some success stories on getting specific specialized groups of officers to target this problem. Like right now, it’s the fifth month that we have a group of undercover officers, only six, but we have been able to talk to the police department and convince them of the need for additional police patrols and police action. So we have a group of six police undercover that have targeted specifically drugs and prostitution. They have done an excellent job and they are still working on it, hopefully they will be here for a few more months. This is something that cannot be eradicated from one day to the next. Big problem we’re having is we arrest them today, couple of hours later they’re out. Most of these people that we’re arresting don’t care, basically. It’s not like you and me that if we get arrested for whatever reason we think it’s the end of the world. We’re going to have to get an attorney and see how we can expunge the record because we don’t want to have anything negative in our record. But these people don’t care. They’ve been arrested on several occasions, numerous occasions. Most of them live on the streets. Most of them if you arrest them and they place them in jail for a couple of weeks or three weeks, you’re doing them a favor, because they have a place where they can eat and they can sleep. So the deterrent for some of these people is not there. They’re going to try to keep on selling drugs in order to feed their own habit and their own addiction. They don’t care about the system. They don’t care about law, they don’t care about justice. These are the same people that will mug, will burglarize, will break into a car, do anything to keep on feeding their addiction. So it’s not that easy, it’s very difficult. And the whole idea behind this whole thing is making their life difficult. I’m not saying impossible, but you could use that word too. The idea is, if they’re trespassing on private property, even if they’re not doing anything, they may just be sitting inside a lot, we have some empty lots around here, and some of them may just be sleeping under a tree, I’ve been telling the officers, and I’ve been doing it myself, I’m kicking them out. If they cannot produce that they’re the owners of that property, they cannot sleep in there. That’s private property, they cannot be there. Abandoned buildings, same thing. They cannot go in any of these buildings. I’m trying to get the police even to arrest some of these people. And I’ve had a little confrontation because we are not seeing eye to eye on this. The police, as I mentioned, don’t Pablo Canton
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want to take these additional steps on arresting for trespassing on some of these private properties. So I had my due discussion there with some of the sergeants. Problems with shopping carts. Every month we pick a hundred and fifty shopping carts, an average of a hundred and fifty, sometimes more than that. I am also trying to get the police to start arresting people for possession of shopping carts, which is against the law. You cannot do that. We have been hitting the boatyards, the Haitian boatyards. They only have a license to load and unload the boat, they have no license to buy anything. So we’ve been hitting them for that. We’ve been giving them five hundred dollar fines for breaking the law. We are hitting the illegal units. Illegal units are bringing additional people into the area, people that are not paying taxes definitely. There’s usually a single family residential home, and they’re paying taxes for a single family and, in fact, they are using it as a multi-family duplex, triplex, or rooming house. That increases the amount of individuals in the area that are not counted on anything, as I mentioned, they are not paying the taxes you are supposed to for city services and still we have to provide them with services. Most of these locations are problem locations where you are not going to find families living in a rooming house. Only time you are going to see single men living in an illegal rooming house and most of them already have criminal records. So that’s not the type of people that we are trying to bring into the area. Rooming houses and illegal units are one of our top priorities. Last year we came with an ordinance which has helped at least with the exterior façade. It’s what they call the Commercial and Residential Façade Ordinance. Where before there was nothing we could do if the paint was chipping or the person has not been in his house for twenty years, there was not much we could do. Now we passed this ordinance and we have been enforcing it, sending letters to the people requesting these people take care of their buildings. And we’ve had great success and hundreds of properties that have been painted because we have been sending letters and kind of scaring them that we’re going to take them to court. And we will take some of them to court if they do not paint their homes or businesses. Again, one of the other successes that we’ve had is we’ve had a good rapport with the community. I hate to say that we are reactive, but to a certain degree we are. We use the community to be the ones that tell us what their priorities are. So we are constantly sending fliers, we are constantly talking to different people in the community telling them that anytime there is a problem to give us a call. We have fliers indicating that whenever they see a crime being committed either to call us or to call the police dispatcher with information so that we can send a police officer to handle it right away. Illegal units, same thing. We’re all telling people whenever they see something next door, or across the street, or whatever Pablo Canton
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that doesn’t seem right, to give us a call. In other words, we are trying to enforce the law a hundred percent. That’s the motto of mine.
AR: You gave me a great sense of the problems, and the progress, and the community. How about in terms of parks, and I guess we can start with Jose Marti Park which we’re so close to, historically what has been the problems with parks? And you’ve been here since the Sixties so what are your recollections, if any, of the park back then and how has that developed over time?
PC: Well one of the big problems we have with parks I think, number one, Little Havana is the area with the least amount of parks in the whole city. We really don’t have enough parks in the area. We have them all concentrated here: Jose Marti Park, Riverside, and Henderson. Those are the only three that we have. But, they’re not that big and, as I mentioned, we are the area with the least amount of parks in the whole City of Miami. The problem that we have with parks is we do not have the funding. Every year, whenever the city is strapped for cash and we have to make cuts, the cuts are usually made in parks. We cut most of the maintenance in some of the parks. We do not have anyone at Henderson Park and Riverside Park. We send a maintenance crew every week. Now I’ve been able to convince them that they come in twice a week to clean the park. They’ll come in twice a week maybe for a couple of hours, they’ll clean the park, and they’ll leave. But we have no employee, no one that stays there and takes care of the park the whole day. We don’t have any programs in any of these parks. Except now in Jose Marti Park, yes we do have the summer program and the pool is open. But, there is nothing in Henderson, there is nothing in Riverside. We need more programs in these parks. We need to be able to have a soccer league, or basketball league, or baseball league, or so forth. Organized sports, or kids if they want to play, they can play and feel safe. At the same time with having an adult, responsible adult there in the park, without getting called or take action if something happens. Also these parks, as I mentioned, they’re all by themselves. Some parents are scared to send their kids over there. In the past several months, we have been able to clean up the parks a little bit from homeless because the law changed. November 1998 the law changed where it is illegal for anyone to be in a park after hours. In other words, most of the homeless that used to sleep at these parks cannot do that. That is another battle that I have been fighting with the police department, is to make sure that we keep the pressure and do not allow anyone to sleep in the park after hours. Some of these people before November 1998 had taken certain areas of the park and camped out, Pablo Canton
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and there was nothing we could do back then. Now it’s against the law, so now we can kick them out. We can offer them help. I don’t want to sound too harsh and say kicking them out. We actually try to help these people and offer them help all of the time.
AR: In what way?
PC: Shelter. There’s not a single homeless in this area that has not been approached and offered shelter. Any homeless that we have in the area, they all know that there is a shelter that they can go to. They all know that they can come over here and we’ll refer them to a shelter. It’s just that some of them, most of the ones that are on the street right now, like that type of life and it is very difficult for them to go to a shelter and stay at a shelter. Some of them have tried, but some of these people do not want to abide by any [unclear]. They like the freedom of being on the street and being able to go to bed at anytime they want, or wake up at ten o’ clock in the morning if they want to, do drugs and prostitution, like some of them do. They cannot do that in shelters. It’s not as simple as people think, “take them to a shelter and put them to work”. It’s not that simple. Some of these people will not change their lifestyle for a normal lifestyle, that we consider normal: getting a job and working. They like the streets. They have been there, probably, for several years and it’s very difficult to break that routine, on addiction or prostitution, and get a job. A couple days ago, I had a male prostitute, a male transvestite that works as a prostitute right here on Flagler and Thirteenth Avenue, I talked to this guy on several occasions trying to make him change until finally, because of the many times that we have arrested this guy, the guy is kind of saying “I give up”. He came to look for help. He came to look for help to see what we could do to help him get a job. Number one, it is very difficult for this guy to get a job, even though he’s over six feet. But the mannerisms and so forth come right through. And this guy was actually looking for a job as a security guard. That’s going to be kind of rough. I told the guy, I said, “This is going to be a little difficult, I don’t think that it’s going to work.” As a prostitute she can probably make, or he can probably make a lot more money than any regular job. That’s the main problem with prostitution. We have several here that we have tried to help and there’s no way. It’s very difficult. I’m not saying it cannot be done but it is very, very difficult. All we can do is make their life difficult so they can find another area or, again hopefully, another trade. But the best we can do is just hit them once and once again and tell them we’re not going to allow prostitution or drugs in East Little Havana. Now, if they can get help, if they can get rehabilitated, Pablo Canton
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if they can change their lifestyle, great. But the idea is to send them a message: “we do not want you here in East Little Havana, not as long as you are breaking the law”. And that’s what we have been trying. We have an area here we call Prototype, Prototype Area. We are trying to putting all our efforts into improving that particular area. Actually it’s north of Flagler and east of Twelfth Avenue. It’s like a triangle and the river is the other part of the border. We have placed signs encouraging people to call the police. We have passed out fliers in the area. We have concentrated our police effort into cleaning up the area. We have made hundreds of arrests. We have run into some of the houses where we know there is drug dealing and done full, complete inspections of the area. That’s another thing, whenever a police officer makes an arrest, for example, this one here, the reason I have it here is because I’m going to send a letter to the owner of where this guy lives. We want to make sure that the owners of these properties know who their tenants are. The main problem is that most of these people are arrested and nobody knows about it, not even their next door neighbors. But we want to make sure that at least the apartment building owner knows about it. I send them a little letter with a copy of the arrest warrant basically telling the guy who he has there. Most of the time, they get them out. Where do they go to? Hopefully some other area away from East Little Havana. Maybe West Little Havana, [unclear], I don’t care, the problem is to get them out of the area. We have been successful in this effort of getting rid of some of these people. You cannot keep them in jail forever, you cannot kill them, so the best you can do is just relocate them. In the past several months we have seen an improvement of the area. We have seen investors coming in, buying properties in the area. I have several investors that are coming from Miami Beach that are very interested in buying properties in East Little Havana. And they have bought properties in East Little Havana. These people, and I do too, they believe that there’s going to be a boom in construction in the East Little Havana area, and not very far away. That is already started. We have seen some of this construction going up and already started and some of these people are actually aggressively buying everything that they can find for a good price.
AR: Construction you mean mostly in terms building businesses and that sort of thing?
PC: Buying apartment buildings, buying businesses on Eighth Street. I know there’s one that all he wants to do is buy properties on Eighth Street. He won’t look at anything else, he would just Pablo Canton
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buy on Eighth Street. I’m talking about a guy that had millions of dollars. He had purchased several properties on Eighth Street and that’s all he was looking for.
AR: What do you see the future of parks in this if—you mentioned Little Havana has so little parks now—do you see provisions being made to use some of the space for—?
PC: Right now, the future of parks in the area, talking about Henderson. I don’t think there is much that is going to happen in Henderson Park. As you know Henderson is not that big. Most likely the only thing that we’re going to do is probably fence the park. We already had a children’s playground installed there several months ago. Hopefully we’ll have some programs in the park and that would be something that I would also like to see in Henderson. Riverside Park, as you have been reading in the paper, the Ada Meritt School is going to be—actually construction should have already started. They haven’t, but hopefully they will start construction, and they will take over the park. They do not have enough space at the site and they want to use the park also for the kids. It’s an elementary school and what they’re going to do is get rid of the street actually, of the avenue, which is actually Seventh Avenue, and make Riverside part of the school. It will be kept as a public park, it’s not going to be used specifically for the kids in the school. We will do some kind of a contract with the school board where the kids will be able to utilize the park during the daytime and then after school hours it is a public park and anyone can use it. I think it’s going to be good for the city, be good for the area. Hopefully the school may have some after school programs at the park and it could be utilized a little better. The only problem we have right now is by a gentleman that has been doing this for twenty years. He has a little baseball league. Kids from ten to fourteen years old, they play baseball there and he takes care of the diamond, the baseball diamond. Other than that there’s not much been going on in the park. We also placed a children’s playground about seven or eight months ago in Riverside. Now, as far as Jose Marti Park. Jose Marti is the biggest one of all the parks that we have in the area. We have some monies to expand and buy some additional land to make the park bigger. Some people, including Sally Jude who has the Miami River Inn and has the property right across from the park, she wants to see the park extended to the north. In other words, we have a [unclear] and a big waterfront. She still wants to extend the waterfront area. Big problem because, number one, the man who has the business there does not want to sell, we cannot take over the property as eminent domain. All we can do is just offer him, you know— Pablo Canton
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[Tape Breaks]
AR: This is Aldo Regalado interviewing Mr. Pablo Canton in his East Little Havana NET office. The date is July 22nd, 1999 and we are beginning the interview at 9:08. The interview will basically be a follow-up about the neighborhood, public space issues, and that sort of thing. Thank you again, Mr. Canton.
PC: Okay, Aldo.