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The Cuban exile paramilitary organization known as Alpha 66 was first organized and founded in Puerto Rico in 1961 with 66 men. The group was created with the intention of maintaining the fighting spirit of the Cuban people after the Bay of Pigs Invasion. General Secretary Andrés Nazario Sargén was a founder of Alpha 66 along with other prominent anti-communist fighters such as his older brother Aurelio Nazario, Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo and Antonio Veciana.

Other organizations joined this armed struggle against Cuban communism, and thus began the first movements and incursions into the Cuban coast. In 1962, the Second Escambray Front (Segundo Frente del Escambray – SFE) and Alpha 66 became one, with Veciana as a coordinator and Gutiérrez Menoyo in charge of the military training. Later, Alpha 66 joined forces with the Revolutionary Movement of the People (Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo – MRP) in the Revolutionary Alliance (Alianza Revolucionaria).

In 1964, the Revolutionary Alliance executed “Plan Omega” that involved situating a well-equipped guerrilla force inside Cuba. Delegations from California, Florida, New York, Puerto Rico and Venezuela assembled a War Council carrying out propaganda and finance operations with the slogan, “El Plan Omega está en marcha” (“The Omega Plan is in motion”). The central goal was to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba.

“El Plan Omega” failed, and Ernesto Díaz, Pedro Rodríguez, and Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, were captured along with three other Alpha officers: Domingo Ortega, Ramón Quesada Gómez, and Noel Salas Santos. After their capture, broadcast and propaganda campaigns were launched to gain release for these political prisoners. Their failure and imprisonment affected many of the rebel groups in Cuba and the Cuban exile community as a whole. The previously fiery enthusiasm diminished, and the Revolutionary Alliance split up, reduced once again to merely The Second Escambray Front and Alpha 66.

In 1965 El Correo, Alpha 66’s bulletin, announced that the new commander in chief would be Dr. Armando Fleites Díaz, who was dedicated to continuing the fight and rebuilding military strength. The renewed force initiated new paramilitary campaigns and fundraising for ships and military and radio equipment. Alpha 66 persisted in organizing and executing military operations, sabotages, and creating clandestine cells on the island. Many officers and members were killed during these infiltrations. In 1970 Coronel Vicente Méndez died in combat, and Aurelio Nazario was captured and executed.

After the 1970s, Alpha 66 restructured its underground network. New members were recruited and political activities implemented. The organization established the “Plan Máximo Gómez” in 1980 to promote internal destabilization in Cuba. As of 2010, Alpha 66 continued to operate from its headquarters in Miami, continuing to advocate for an armed civil uprising in Cuba.

Esther Herrera was a leader of the Cuban exile community in Los Angeles, particularly active in the 1980s. She worked with several exile organizations, including the Sociedad José Martí of Hawthorne, California, and Comité Pro-Acto 10 de Octubre.

Caridad Svich is an award-winning playwright, director, actor, composer, translator, and educator. She is considered one of the most prolific contemporary Latinx American playwrights. Svich was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. on July 30, 1963 to Cuban-Argentine-Spanish-Croatian parents. She notes that her frequent moves from Pennsylvania to New Jersey, Florida, North Carolina, Utah, New York, and California among other travels and “living between cultures” has “instilled a nomadic strain” in her, which “has become an inevitable part of [her] writing vision.” She says that, “visions of migration (both physical and spiritual) dominate the plays, which have become, in turn, documents of internal diasporas. As a playwright, songwriter, editor and translator living between many cultures, including inherited ones, the idea of departure has always been not only an actual or metaphorical basis for writing the work.” In fact, during her career Svich continued to travel throughout the United States and internationally to places as varied as Traverse Theater in Edinburgh and the Royal Court Theater and Paines Plough Theater in London, Greece, Argentina and the US-Cuba Writer's Conference in Havana.

Svich earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1985 and her Master of Fine Arts at the University of California, San Diego in theatre-playwriting in 1988. In 1988, she became a student of María Irene Fornés’ Latino playwriting workshop in New York, followed by playwright residencies at INTAR, Theater Communications Group, Lake Placid Institute for the Arts, and a 7-year residency with the New Dramatists in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, N.Y. In 1990, Svich directed a production of But There Are Fires for INTAR Hispanic Playwrights in Residence Laboratory Festival. In 2000, she acted in a production of Scar at Perishable Theater in Providence, Rhode Island. She also created the Original Score for Alchemy of Desire/ Dead Man's Blues (Text with Songs) which was performed at the Hal B. Wallis Theater in Evanston Illinois and William and Mary Theater in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Svich has written over forty full-length plays and fifteen translations as well as other short works. She says that “Explorations of wanderlust, dispossession, biculturalism, bilingualism, construction of identity, and the many different emotional terrains that can be inhabited onstage form the basis of my plays and other writing projects.” Her full-length works produced include: Agua de luna (psalms for the rouge), Alchemy of Desire/Dead-Man’s Blues (a play with songs), A Little Betrayal Among Friends, Any Place But Here, Archipelago, Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter, The Booth Variations, Brazo Gitano [text with songs], The Breath of Stars, Corazon Eterno (always in my heart), DE TROYA, Fugitive Pieces (a play with songs), FUEL, GERTIE AND ALICE BY THE SEA, Guapa, Hide Sky, The House of the Spirits/La Casa de los Espiritus, In the time of the Butterflies/En el tiempo de las mariposas, Instructions for Breathing, Iphigenia Crash Land Falls on the Neon Shell That Was Once Her Heart (a rave fable), JARMAN (all this maddening beauty), Love in the Time of Cholera/El Amor en los Tiempos de Colera, The Labyrinth of Desire, Magnificent Waste, The Orphan Sea, RED BIKE, Sanctuary (American Psalm), SPARK, Thrush (a play with slaughter songs), TOWN HALL, The Tropic of X, Trouble in Kind, Turn the Dark Up, Bow Down, This is a Hymn, Twelve Ophelias (a play with broken songs), Prodigal Kiss [text with songs], The Way of Water, Wreckage, Upon the Fragile Shore. She has also adapted for the stage novels by Mario Vargas Llosa, Julia Alvarez and Jose Leon Sanchez, and has radically reconfigured works from Wedekind, Euripides, Sophocles, and Shakespeare. Her plays have been directed by Annie Castledine, Maria Irene Fornes, Lisa Peterson, Neel Keller, William Carden, Nick Philippou, Annie Dorsen, Katie Pearl, Stephen Wrentmore, Daniella Topol and Jose Zayas, among many others.

About Svich’s work, Lillian Manzor writes: “The themes, styles and concerns that shape Svich’s dramaturgy are: a critique of the American Dream and a constant search for home through the prism of diaspora and migration; the mixing of rituals and traditional cultural elements from the Americas with global pop culture; obtuse treatment of love and desire; and a poetic and nonrealistic use of language and musical elements.Svich’s characters survive by becoming “professional” nomads. Like their creator, they find themselves at the intersection of identities. As hybrids or transcultural beings, they live in a United States that is figured as the borderlands, a consumer society inhabited by nomads and the dispossessed. She writes from the position of a Latina, and there is a Latina sensibility or affect in all of her oeuvre. Her plays, however, defy and question the simple categorization or easy boxing of Latinas and Latinos both in content and in form. She stages the drama of her characters in such a way that they become an expressionistic allegory of the uncertainty of post-modern times: displaced human beings reconfigure the maps of home in a nonlinear fashion so that we can inhabit our imagined and imaginary communities of Mexico-Hollywood-Buenos Aires-Granada-Havana-New York.” (Oxford Encyclopedia of Latinos and Latinas in the United States. Volume 1. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005 (184-6)

In 2003, while Svich was a TCG/Pew National Theatre Resident Artist at INTAR in New York City, she founded NoPassport, an unincorporated, artist-driven, grass-roots theatre alliance & press devoted to cross-cultural, Pan-American performance, theory, action, advocacy, and publication. NoPassport exists as a virtual and live forum for the exchange of work and dreams, a network between theatres and the academy, and a mobile band of playwrights, directors, actors, producers and musicians and provides mentoring for young artists. Early stages of NoPassport developed in New York City and Brooklyn at Little Theatre at Tonic, Low Bar and BRIC, and at the Playwrights Center of Minneapolis, the latter where Svich had done a residency post-MFA. She has also published over twenty titles with NoPassport Press by authors as diverse as Todd London, John Jesurun, David Greenspan, Carson Kreitzer, Rinde Eckert, Lenora Champagne and Octavio Solis. NoPassport has also responded with creative action to incidents such as the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the US Gulf region, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting, and Climate Change. For example, with the work After Orlando: an international theatre action, a collective of over seventy playwrights from the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom (England and Wales), Australia, and Uganda. Women, men, genderqueer playwrights, LGTBQ, Latinx, Latin@, playwrights of many colors and ethnicities was presented at more than thirty theatres and colleges, universities, and high schools across the U.S. and UK in the fall of 2016. In addition to her work with NoPassport Press, she is the Associate Editor, and Editor of BackPages, Contemporary Theatre Review theatre and performance journal in the UK, and since 2004, a Contributing Editor to TheatreForum, an international theatre and performance journal, UC-San Diego and the Drama Editor of Asymptote literary translation journal.

Svich has maintained a career as a theatrical translator, chiefly of the dramatic work of Federico Garcia Lorca, published in Federico García Lorca: impossible theater: five plays and thirteen poems; in new translations by Caridad Svich (Smith & Kraus, 2000), Lorca Major Plays Volume I, and Lorca: Major Plays Volume II (NoPassport Press), as well as works by Calderon de la Barca, Lope de Vega, Julio Cortazar, Victor Rascon Banda, Antonio Buero Vallejo and contemporary works from Mexico, Cuba and Spain. She is the editor of a number of publications including Conducting a Life: Reflections on the Theatre of Maria Irene Fornes, Smith & Kraus, NH (1999), Out of the Fringe: Contemporary Latina/o Theatre and Performance (2000), Theatre in Crisis? Performance Manifestos for a New Century, Manchester University Press, UK/Palgrave Macmillan, USA (2002), Trans-Global Readings: Crossing Theatrical Boundaries, conversations on media, culture, language and performance, Manchester University Press, UK/Palgrave Macmillan, USA (2004), Divine Fire: Eight Contemporary Plays Inspired by the Greeks, Back Stage Books (an imprint of Watson-Guptill), NY (2005) Emerging Territories: Latino/a Theatre and Performance, special issue eds. Caridad Svich and Maria Delgado, Journal of American Drama and Theatre, Vol. 16, No. 3, CUNY Grad Center, NY (Fall 2004), Popular Forms for a Radical Theatre, special issue, Contemporary Theatre Review, Vol.16, No. 8, Routledge, UK (2006), Out of Silence: Censorship in Theatre & Performance, Eyecorner Press, Denmark and USA (2012), The Breath of Theatre 2003-2013, conversations with artists and critical reflections, NoPassport Press, CA (2013), Innovation in Five: Strategies for Theatre & Performance (2015).

In 2019, Svich was shortlisted for the American Shakespeare Center's Shakespeare's New Contemporaries Prize. She won both the Ellen Stewart Award for Career Achievement in Professional Theatre from the Association for Theatre in Higher Education (ATHE) and a Tanne Foundation Award in 2018. Other theatre awards and fellowships include the National Latino Playwriting Award (2013), OBIE Award for Lifetime Achievement (2012), Edgerton Foundation New Play Award (2012), American Theatre Critics Association Primus Prize (2011), and HOLA Award for Playwriting (2009). Earlier awards include the Whitfield Cook Prize for New Writing at New Dramatists (2007), National Latino Playwriting Award (2003), TCG/PEW National Theatre Artist Residency at INTAR (2002-2003), Radcliffe Institute fellowship at Harvard University (2002-2003), Jonathan R. Reynolds Playwright in Residence at Denison University (2002), Thurber House Fellow at Ohio State University (2001), NEA/TCG Playwriting Residency at the Mark Taper Forum Theatre (1996-1997), and Rosenthal New Play Prize at Cincinnati Playhouse (1994).

Darío Espina Pérez was born in Limonar, Matanzas, Cuba on October 25, 1920, to a family dedicated to beekeeping. He received his elementary education in public school and through exams received a scholarship from the Ministry of Agriculture to study to become an agricultural sciences teacher at the Alvaro Reynoso Principal Agricultural School in Colón, Cuba. After earning a bachelor of science degree, he attended the Faculty of Agricultural Engineering at the University of Havana, where he graduated with the degree of Agricultural Engineer in Sugar Chemistry. He later returned to the University of Havana to earn his law degree.

Espina's activities in Cuba were centered in the banking and agriculture industries. He was part of the accounting department at the Banco Continental Cubano, chief of construction for the Public Works Ministry's "Via Blanca" project, a math professor in the Alvaro Reynoso Provincial Agricultural School, inspector at the Provincial Schools of Agriculture, held various posts at the Banco de Fomento Agricola e Industrial, was consultant and deputy administrator at the Banco Núñez in Havana, manager of a branch of the Banco de la Construcción, professor and Dean of the Faculty of Agricultural Engineers of the University of Havana, professor of the Faculty of Law of the University of Pinar del Río, chief of the appraisal department at the National Institute of Agrarian Reform in 1959, and finally, officer of the Banco Nacional de Cuba until he left Cuba in 1961 during a scientific congress in Spain.

In 1961, Espina was granted asylum in the United States. Outside of Cuba, Espina continued to be an active professional through his position beginning in 1962 as sector specialist, consultant, and project manager with the Interamerican Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, D.C. Espina worked and lived in various countries in Latin America, including Honduras, Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Ecuador, Haiti, and Costa Rica.

In 1981, Espina retired from the IDB and settled in Miami, Florida, with his wife, lawyer Hilda Díaz Espina, and their three children, physicians Hilda Tejero and Darío M. Espina and management and information technology specialist Carlos Espina.

Espina authored nearly forty technical and literary books and co-authored several more, all edited in collaboration with his wife, Hilda. In 1989, he founded and directed La Academia Poética de Miami literary society. His writing has received various awards, including Premio Garcilaso de la Vega in 1995, given by the Instituto de Cultura Peruana for his poem La Naturaleza and the Premio Carlos Márquez Sterling in 1992 for the best journalism article on the reconstruction of Cuba. Espina has received many other numerous awards for his engineering work. These include: the Víctor M. Peraza award (1948), recognition from the Municipio de Guamacaro en el Exilio (1989), the Primer Poeta Épico award given by the Colegio Nacional de Pedagogos en el Exilio (1992), the Alvaro Reynoso award from the Colegio Nacional de Ingenieros Agrónomos y Azucereros Cubanos (1992), the Premio Certamen Poético García Lorca (1995), and the Premio Instituto de Cultura Peruana (1995). In 1995 Espina was recognized as the teacher of the decade by the Cuadratura del Círculo Poético Iberoamericano.

Espina passed away in Miami on September 6, 1996.

Mariel, Revista de Literatura y Arte was a magazine published between 1983 and 1985 by a group of Cuban writers and artists who had arrived to the United States during the Mariel Boatlift. The magazine focused primarily on Marielista works and issues.

Elia Rosa Fernández de Mendia was a Cuban sculptor, potter, and clay worker. She studied ceramics in New York. She also started a studio in the Santiago de las Vegas area of Havana, Cuba. She had a ceramics exposition with three other artists, Amelia Pelaez, Maria Garcia Buch, and Rebeca Robes at the Lyceum y Lawn Tennis Club in 1961. She sat on the Directive board of the Lyceum y Lawn Tennis Club, heading the exhibitions committee.

Gina Pellón is a Cuban artist, educator, and poet. She was born on December 26th, 1926 in Cumanayagua, Las Villas in the province of Cienfuegos, Cuba. She studied fine arts at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes "San Alejandro" in Havana, and graduated in 1954. She then taught children for three years, from 1954 to 1957 at the Velado Polytechnic Institute. Of her few years of teaching, Pellón said that she “allowed children to express themselves freely, to tell their stories through colorful strokes of the brush. My painting is just that, a kind of multicolor graffiti. I believe that every artist has preconceived innate ideas; but when an artist goes into the world, the universe unfolds before them.”

In 1959, she applied for a scholarship to obtain a visa to study in Paris. She was one of the finalists, but didn’t receive the scholarship. Undeterred, she reached out to a steamship company to find a means to travel to Europe. They offered her a free ticket if she brought them the twelve scholarship recipients. In the end, she brought 50 people. Pellón arrived in Paris in 1959 and did not return to Cuba after her 3-month visa expired, drawing the ire of Cuban cultural attache in Paris, Roberto Fernandez-Retamar. She ended up living out the rest of her life in Paris, working as a successful artist and displaying her work around the world, as well as publishing collections of poetry.

In 1961, she had her first solo exhibition at Gallery Kasper in Lausanne, Switzerland. She noted that, “When I arrived with my tropical colors to the sober and gray tranquility of Scandinavia, it was as if I had brought the sun to them.” In Europe, she interacted with the surrealists in Paris, and then joined the COBRA group, a European movement of innovative abstract expressionism. Her work was also displayed in many exhibitions in cities in Europe and Scandinavia, including Paris (1968, 1986, 1990, 1999), Lausanne, Brussels, Amsterdam, Toulouse, Silkebour and Copenhagen (Denmark), Larvik (Norway,) and Spinea-Venezia, Italy in 2002, and Albisola Marina, Italy in 2003, as well as major cities in the Americas, such as Miami (in 1981, 1991, 1994, 2001) New York, and Caracas (1975).

In 1978, she received the Order of Arts and Letters in France and won a CINTAS Foundation Fellowship in New Jersey, United States in the same year. Pellón was a prolific painter, using intense colors, abstract forms, and often painting figures and faces of women. She noted that “I paint every day… from sunrise to sundown. In this process, I have the need to create, to portray emotions, and once I am about to complete a work, I get the urge to attack another.” She also made collages and prints. Her work has most recently and also posthumously included in collections and catalogs by Cernuda Arte gallery in Coral Gables, Florida. She died on March 27, 2014 in Paris, France.

William Lyman Phillips was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, June 11, 1885. He attended Harvard University and graduated with a Master in Architecture degree. Phillips was employed by the Olmstead Brothers Landscape architecture firm of Brookline, Massachusetts where he worked for twenty two years. He designed Balboa on the Panama Canal and lead the Mountain Lake Project for the Olmstead Firm. In 1922, the firm sent him to Europe to study the landscape styles and increase his knowledge of the subject matter. While studying in France, he met Simone Guillot; they got married and had two daughters before her death in 1948. The early thirties became a busy time for Phillips. While working for the National Park Service and the Dade County Parks Department, he designed Fairchild Tropical Gardens, one of his most well known works. During this time, he also completed some design work for the University of Miami. Phillips' last major project was the design of Crandon and Baker's Haulover Parks in the mid forties. Phillips' contribution to society will long be noticed; he created beauty and awareness from his simplistic style and order.

Professor Ross Beiler graduated from Allegheny College in 1937, and completed graduate study at the State University of Iowa in 1950. He taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Vermont, Lawrence College, and joined the University of Miami

government department in 1945. Beiler also acted as consultant to radio station WCKT, providing election predictions and analyses of returns, and also served as a panelist for the Florida Forum.

Beiler's research interests included relations between social aggregates and government in southeast Florida as well as the role of media in politics. Beiler published "Links to Government in

Greater Miami: The Experience of Three Ethnic Aggregates," a study conducted through the university of Miami Urban Studies Center. Beiler also wrote "The Use of Local Facilities in Political Science

Research" published in The Polls and Public Opinions, and several of Beiler's articles appear in journals and other publications.

Bernhardt Emil Muller was born in Fremont, Nebraska on December 27, 1878. He studied at L’Ecole Des Beaux Arts in Paris from 1903 to 1905, then traveled and studied for a year in Italy, France, Austria, and Germany. He began his career as a draftsman for the New York architectural firm of Trowbridge and Livingston in 1906. In 1909 he became a designer for the firm of Robert J. Reiley. Mulller moved on to the firm of D. Everett Waid in 1912 where he was also employed as an architectural designer until 1914, when he opened his own office in New York City.

Muller’s earliest known work in South Florida dates to 1923 when he designed a number of Mediterranean and Spanish-style houses in the Miami area.

In 1925 Bernhardt Muller met Glenn H. Curtiss, the owner and developer of Opa-Locka, at the recommendation of Mr. Curtiss’ mother, Mrs. Lua Andrews Curtiss. In a 1927 article appearing in the Opa-Locka Times, Muller relates the story of how he visualized the new development. He decided that an opportunity was at hand to make an architectural theme for a new community from a literary work. One night the architect read a copy of The One Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights. Muller was fascinated by the descriptions of the Tales, and he said that he re-lived the fantasies in his dreams that night. The following morning he wired Curtiss with his ideas. Later, they met at the site that was to become Opa-Locka, where Muller described his concept for the city’s architectural design, derived from the individual stories of the Arabian Nights. Curtiss agreed that the Arabian Nights theme would make for a unique and exciting development.

During November of 1925, from his New York office, Muller designed several of the prominent buildings which would form the new town, including the Opa-Locka Company’s Administration Building, the swimming pool (Bathing Casino), and an Archery Club. The Richter Library’s collection has records of eighty-six of Muller commissions; although it is not known exactly how many buildings Muller designed, it is estimated to be about one hundred. As construction progressed and sales increased, Opa-Locka was incorporated as a town in May 1926.

Following the devastating hurricane that struck Miami on September 17, 1926, the Florida Land Boom went bust and progress at Opa-Locka slowed. Glenn Curtiss decided in the summer of 1927 to put all un-built plans for the young city on hold until the economy improved. As a result of further decline in land sales, the ensuing Great Depression of 1929, and Curtiss’ death in 1930, virtually no buildings were executed after 1928. Muller, who remained in New York, went on to do other work, particularly in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

In 1942 Muller retired from full-time practice, closed his office, and went to work for George M. Sharp, Inc., as the interior designer for luxury ocean liners. This association lasted until 1955.

A member of the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Maplewood, New Jersey, Bernhardt Muller designed a number of Christian Science churches, located mostly in the state of New York. The American Architect Directory of 1956 lists his most notable designs for these churches as those in Brooklyn (1918), Hempstead (1924), Forest Hills (1925), Bronxville (1929), and Flushing (1930), all in New York, as well a building for a new congregation in Opa-Locka (1930). Muller was noted for his design of small suburban houses in Short Hills, Maplewood, and Millburn, New Jersey, mostly of the Tudor English motif, which was characteristic of his own home in Millburn.

Muller was elected to membership in the American Institute of Architects (A.I.A.) in 1924; he was a member of the New York City chapter. Muller attained the status of Emeritus member of the A.I.A. in 1952. He was also a member of the Summit (New Jersey) Art Association.

Little of Bernhardt Muller’s personal life is known. He was married in 1919 and his wife died in 1958. The couple had no children. According to Frank S. Bush, a friend of Muller’s, he was known as a man of great foresight, unimpeachable reputation and integrity, in addition to being thoughtfully creative.

In 1959, at age 80, Mr. Muller returned for a “Pioneer Days” celebration in Opa-Locka, his first visit to the city since the late 1920s. In an interview with Opa-Locka’s newspaper, the North Dade Hub, Muller explained the original intent of his scheme for Opa-Locka:

In planning the city, our [Muller and Curtiss] idea was to avoid the only too-well known checkerboard idea of development with the visual square boxes planted on each lot, making a composite of architectural abortions with which we are surrounded on all sides in America.

What Bernhardt Muller found upon returning to Opa-Locka were not the charming, beautifully-designed Moorish Revival buildings he had created. In addition to many altered and demolished buildings of his design, he found a collection of plain, unappealing structures, much like any other American town could exhibit, which he sought to avoid in his work. In an address to the city’s Chamber of Commerce, Muller attempted to convince its citizens to continue pursuing Curtiss’ dream: to make a distinguished, livable city, unique character. His speech warned the city’s officials to prevent Opa-Locka from becoming a “meaningless jumble of unrelated buildings, painted in hideous colors.” While Muller’s intent was to inspire the city to action, local officials were offended by the architect’s criticism.

Muller left Opa-Locka, the city of his dreams ruined; he returned to Short Hills, New Jersey, where he continued his architectural practice until about 1962. At age of eighty-five, Bernhardt E. Muller died in September, 1964.

The site of the present city of Opa-locka was originally a hammock inhabited by the Seminole Indians called “Opatishawocka-locka.” As Europeans arrived in South Florida, the hammock was variously named “Cook’s Hammock” or “Ford’s Hammock” by settlers. It came into the hands of James H. Bright, a West Dade cattle rancer, around 1917.

During the Land Boom of the 1920s, Bright’s partner, Glenn Curtiss, chose the site of Opatishawockalocka for development of a suburb. Curtiss shortened the Indian name to “Opa-locka” in 1921 for use as a street name in Hialeah. Late in 1925, the Opa-locka Company was formed.

Curtiss learned from his two previous city building ventures, Hialeah and Country Club Estates, that if he created a planned community where residents would live, work, shop, and play, his real estate development would be a success. His concept paralleled the “Garden City” movement of Britain’s Ebenezer Howard, who, in 1898, advocated the construction of new, self-sustaining towns outside large cities to alleviate congestion and uncontrolled growth.

To make his development profitable, Curtiss decided a distinct character was needed, something different from George Merrick’s Coral Gables and other new developments in Florida. Curtiss hired Clinton MacKenzie as the town planner; MacKenzie had earlier designed the street arrangements for Coral Gables and Country Club Estates. Burnhardt E. Muller of New York City was employed as supervising architect.

Muller’s thematic proposal was the fantasy style depicted in The One Thousand and One Tales of the Arabian Nights. Glenn Curtiss became excited about the idea for his new community, and allowed Muller to adapt the stories in the book to the development’s building plans. On December 11, 1925, the Opa-locka Company was formed, with Curtiss as controlling stockholder and his half-brother, G. Carl Adams, as president. Miami retailer Roddy Burdine also held stock in the company. Construction began in December 1925; the town was announced in local papers on January 14, 1926.

Bernhardt Muller exercised design control over the community’s building program. His assistants, Carl Jensen and Paul Lieske, were based in Opa-locka; they coordinated on-site efforts and reported back to Muller in New York. Muller personally approved all designs, specified the finishes, and suggested landscaping. He is said to have personally supervised the mixing of pains for principal buildings belonging to the Opa-locka Company. Muller also altered the plans of businesses and home-owners which Curtiss had forwarded to New York; Curtiss insisted these private designs fit into the Moorish Revival motif prevailing in Opa-locka.

On May 14, 1926, the Municipal Charter for the Town of Opa-locka was voted upon at the fire and police station, adjacent to the Opa-locka Company’s Administration Building; the vote for the incorporation was 28-0. The town continued to grow through the summer of 1926; the administration building was occupied late in July, and the town’s Chamber of Commerce was formed in August.

Progress continued at Opa-locka and slowed only slightly after the hurricane of September 17-18, 1926. Damage in the town was widespread but not severe; the only buildings reported destroyed were two portable wooden schoolhouses and some workmen’s housing. Other buildings suffered water damage, broken windows, missing tiles, and some toppled roof ornaments. With the relief and rebuilding efforts provided by Glenn Curtiss, Opa-locka took on a new spirit of building.

Late in 1926, civic improvements were completed, providing the residents with new facilities and services. The Archery Club opened and gave residents the unique sport of “Robin Hood Golf,” a game introduced by Howard Hill, where players shot arrows at coconuts mounted on stakes placed in the holes of the golf course. The Olympic-sized Bathing Casino became the site of weekly aquatic shows, extravaganzas that included  diving exhibitions there. The Zoo, Dade County’s first, featured an aviary and bear pit, attracting many weekend visitors. A fire department and volunteer police force was formed, a postmaster designated, and several clubs organized.

A special census taken at Opa-locka on December 15, 1926 put the town’s population at 251, but neglected to add 29 blacks counted separately, bringing the actual total to 280. Opa-locka grew little more after that, as the deepening economic depression and land “bust,” caused by the September hurricane, finally began to affect the town, despite generous financial backing by Curtiss.

The new year opened with the town preparing for the “Arabian Nights Fantasy,” organized in conjunction with the arrival of the first Seaboard Air Line Train. Curtiss diligently persuaded the railroad to build their line through his town, providing rights of way for tracks and a station. Dressed in Arabian costumes, the townspeople stopped the train on the afternoon of January 8, 1927. Turbanned horsemen riding white stallions, camel-riding sheiks and “women of the harem” greeted the train. John W. Martin, Governor of the State of Florida, and S. Davies Warfield, President of the Seaboard Air Line Rail Road, were presented with proclamations and a town-wide celebration.

On May 1, 1927, Opa-locka became a chartered city; by this, though, the decline brought about by the land “bust,” had set in. Home construction ground to a halt, and the railroad curtailed its schedule. By midsummer Glenn Curtiss decided that all buildings then under construction would be completed, but all future works would be delayed until the economy improved. Long-range plans that included an Egyptian section, Chinese section, and an English village were put on indefinite hold. Nevertheless, Curtiss personally financed the maintenance needed on the Opa-locka Company’s buildings for the next three years.

Glenn Curtiss’ death in 1930 and the concurrent Great Depression ended any immediate plans to continue development of Opa-locka. As the economy worsened, buildings fell into disrepair, and outside influences, particularly the United States Navy, began to change Opa-locka.

In January 1931 a naval reserve base was commissioned on the site of Curtiss’ Florida Aviation Camp, a bequest he made to increase employment in his city. However, the Navy had a far-reaching impact on Opa-locka that Glenn Curtiss would never have allowed. In 1932 the archery clubhouse was converted to the base’s officer’s club. In 1938 the Navy annexed the city’s golf course and Cook’s Hammock, bulldozing portions of the hammock Curtiss had set aside as a park, as well as the entire golf course. The Navy’s impact during World War II was even more detrimental; low-cost housing, not in keeping with the city’s Moorish style, was built for the base’s personnel to accommodate the population explosion from 500 in 1940 to almost 5,200 just ten years later. The repeated decommissioning and reactivation of the base created severe fluctuations in Opa-locka’s population, employment, and economic health.

By 1986 Opa-locka had become a city of 15,000 enveloped by the Miami-Fort Lauderdale megalopolis. The once-distant suburb now had all the modern conveniences of a large city but its problems as well. Yet a new spirit arose to revive what has been lost of Glenn Curtiss’ dream of the ideal city. The City Hall and the fire/police station were restored to their original conditions. The Hurt Building and Seaboard’s train station were also planned to be restored as part of the community’s resurgence. Eighteen building were selected for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places, based on their architectural significance, and another forty-five buildings are being locally designated.

IAt is hoped that the Library’s Muller Collection will be beneficial in assisting the restoration of Opa-Locka’s treasure of Moorish Revival buildings, the largest such collection in the United States.