Miami was selected last year as the home base for TIME's new Caribbean bureau, the only foreign bureau located within the U.S. The decision reflected the city's polyglot ambience and its emergence as a commercial and cultural center for Latin Americans. The members of the Miami staff hardly expected, however, that their home town would become their biggest continuing story this year, and a cover subject. In six weeks of intensive reporting, TIME's correspondents conducted more than 250 interviews, from the streets of the "little Havana" district to the refugee camps. They talked to Coast Guard officers, drug dealers, police, government officials, members of Miami's native-born Establishment and scores of troubled new arrivals. Often they gained astonishingly close access to fast-breaking events. Bernard

Diederich, who speaks Haitian Creole, was informed by telephone within minutes of a tense beating incident at the Krome Avenue detention center. Photographer Harry Mattison arrived in Liberty City just after police had shot a gun-wielding Cuban. Caribbean Bureau Chief William McWhirter accompanied an undercover narcotics squad for a raid on the leaders of a $25 million drug ring. Washington Correspondent Jonathan Beaty, who joined the Miami staff to report on the billions in narcotics money washing over South Florida, talked with young men just back from high-speed runs in souped-up boats loaded with marijuana and cocaine. "The journalist's first reaction to this kind of story," says McWhirter, "is always to question whether things are really as bad as they sound. The answer in Miami's case is unequivocally yes. An eruption of money and menace is permanently changing the area and its character."

The bureau's reports went to Staff Writer Jim Kelly, who wrote the cover story, and Reporter-Researchers Audrey Ball and Richard Bruns. Says Kelly, who has been writing about South Florida's growing problems with refugees, drugs and crime for 18 months: "For some time now, Miami has not been the peaceful, sun-soaked vacation and retirement haven we thought it was." He finds the area's attractions undiminished, however.

Sounding like a lot of shivering Northerners as winter sets in, he says: "Miami is unique in this country--a cityscape among the palm trees. It is still beautiful, still alluring."

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