Editor’s Note: Thank You, Dan Brown, for Improving the Stereotype

Abstract

During the postwar years, a spectacular building boom in Miami and Havana, much of it financed with Mafia money, was documented by the photographic team of Annette and Rudi Rada. Their dynamic pictures appeared in popular magazines and tourist brochures, emphasizing the luxurious baroque modernism of the new hotels and beach houses, presenting South Florida and the Caribbean as idyllic playgrounds for American consumers of the 1950s. Victor Deupi evaluates the work of the Radas and reveals their lesser-known images showing the poverty of the region, including Seminole chickee huts in the Everglades and the sprawling shantytowns that encircled Havana.