Trump Avenue: Hialeah Stays True to Trump in Midst of Criminal Cases

Hialeah Mayor Esteban "Steve" Bovo and six city council members were showered with applause last month when they unanimously approved naming Palm Avenue after former president Donald Trump.

During the city council meeting, as seniors wearing red hats nodded, a nonagenarian paratrooper who served with Brigade 2506 – the CIA-sponsored group that attempted the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba – stood to be recognized.

But the chairs stopped creaking and the clapping halted when Hialeah Historic Preservation Board chair Ferny Coipel came to the podium. The dreadlock-wearing owner of a local recording studio praised Hialeah for its civic engagement before making a long-shot proposal.

"Tonight, I would like to present a street-naming designation on West 20th Avenue from 48th to 50th to 'Barack Obama,'" said Coipel.

"Absolutely not!" responded Hialeah Councilman Carl Zogby, Hialeah's former police public information officer, as Coipel walked off from the podium with a spring in his step. "Absolutely not."

Bovo, whom Trump vocally endorsed in the 2021 mayoral race, was quick to chime in and praise Trump's hardline stance on Cuba.

The mayor characterized the Obama-era attempt at normalizing U.S.-Cuba relations as a betrayal of exiles from the island — rhetoric that is echoed in speeches employed by Trump, Sen. Marco Rubio, and other Republican politicians as a tried and true strategy to court voters in South Florida cities with large Cuban-American populations, such as Hialeah.

"I wanna remind everybody that Barack Obama went and shook the hand of the devil when he went down Cuba," Bovo said. (He noted that he was regretful that Coipel, whom he called "the ponytail guy," had left and did not hear his monologue.)

The first ex-president ever to be indicted, Trump is facing criminal cases stretching from New York to South Florida, stemming from allegations of confidential-document hoarding, falsifying business records, and election interference.

In early December, a judge denied Trump's motion to dismiss the federal case in which D.C. prosecutors claim he spearheaded a scheme to overthrow the democratic process by lining up fraudulent electors in advance of the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.

"Whatever immunities a sitting president may enjoy, the United States has only one chief executive at a time, and that position does not confer a lifelong 'get-out-of-jail-free' pass," the judge wrote.

Still, if Hialeah city meetings are any indication, Trump is as beloved as ever in La Ciudad Que Progresa. The city is gearing up to pin his name around town as the prosecutions inch toward trial.

Miami-Dade County now lists Hialeah City Hall at 501 President Donald J. Trump Avenue – and residents recently noticed that Trump Avenue was registering as the name of the thoroughfare on search engines. An invoice obtained by New Times shows the City of Hialeah has ordered at least three Trump Avenue signs in the midst of his four pending criminal cases.

Through Thick and Thin

The designation of Trump Avenue was not Hialeah's first experience in naming key elements of the city after a politician accused of multiple felonies.

Hialeah City Hall – where council members resoundingly voted in favor of Trump Avenue – once was named after Raul Martinez, who faced racketeering charges in the middle of his more than 20-year tenure as Hialeah mayor.

Prosecutors accused Martinez of illegally profiting off deals with a local developer who was seeking to advance real estate projects in the city. Martinez allegedly received discounted lots in exchange for his help in getting city approval for zoning, re-platting, and variance issues connected to the developments.

Martinez, a Democrat, was convicted of extortion, racketeering, and conspiracy in 1991, but an appeals court ordered a new trial based on jury misconduct, noting that jurors "regularly brought newspapers reporting trial events" into the deliberation room, among other breaches. Two subsequent trials culminated in hung juries, and Martinez retained his spot at the helm of Hialeah. He won re-election during the legal saga and twice after, eventually stepping down in 2005.

In a 1993 New Times profile, Hialeah councilman Alex Morales said Martinez had a "personal charisma and a large group of loyalists who are almost fanatical in their love for him." Sen. Roberto Casas, a Hialeah Republican who served as Martinez's campaign treasurer in 1989, told New Times that in spite of the indictment, the mayor was getting more support than ever.

"People just don't think he was guilty," Casas said. "He did a good job as mayor. I have no doubt he'll be re-elected."

Hialeah City Hall was called Raul L. Martinez Government Center from 2005 until 2014 when the city council thought better of it and voted to remove his name from the building. He remained a popular political figure, hosting a radio show, "La Hora del Regreso," on Radio Caracol.

New Times reported a decade ago that to the east of Palm Avenue (now Trump Avenue), the city named a portion of SE 10th "Banah Sweet Way" after Banah Sugar, a company founded and run by a man once convicted of cocaine trafficking. The company, which he lined with executives who also had cocaine smuggling convictions, declared bankruptcy in 2013.

"Political Machine"

Hialeah's political and demographic landscape has shifted dramatically over the decades.

Before Raul Martinez was elected mayor of Hialeah in 1981, English was the primary language, according to Florida International University politics professor Dario Moreno.

"Before the Cubans, Hialeah was run by good-old Southern boys," Moreno tells New Times. "It was a political machine run by Milander."

Henry Milander, who served as Hialeah's mayor for three decades, has a park and auditorium named after him. Trump's rally last month – where Mayor Bovo took the stage with a big green sign in hand to announce the Trump street naming – was at Ted Hendricks Stadium, located in Milander Park.

Under Milander's tenure, Hialeah's industrial sector flourished, providing jobs for working-class families that had fled Cuba and arrived in South Florida. He offered a long-term tax break for new local businesses, and by the 1960s, the city had hundreds of manufacturing operations, according to the Miami Herald archive. The mayor was known for chatting with residents at his shop, Milander's Meat Market, where a sign read, "Cows may come and cows may go, but the bull around here goes on forever."

As it happened, Milander was convicted in the early 1970s of grand larceny after he was accused of using city funds to speculate in real estate. A local judge withheld adjudication of guilt, however, which allowed him to avoid jail and hold onto his mayoral position. He died in 1974 while still serving as Hialeah's mayor.
"When the Cubans came, that baton of a political machine with a strong mayor was passed to Raul Martinez, and he dominated Hialeah politics to the early 2000s. Even though Martinez was a Democrat, he would win re-election over and over again even after being indicted," says Moreno, who works at FIU's Cuban Research Institute.

The city has since elected a series of Republican mayors, including Bovo, a Queens, New York, native whose father was a member of Brigade 2506. He was a Hialeah city council member, Florida House representative, and Miami-Dade County commissioner before he became mayor.

"Stevie [Bovo] was part of the Hialeah operation," Moreno says. "He started out in politics as an aide to Sen. Roberto Casas, one of Martinez's loyal lieutenants."

Nearly a century after it was incorporated, Hialeah has one of the highest percentages of Cuban residents among large U.S. municipalities.

A city where more than 95 percent of residents identify as Hispanic, Hialeah has nearly 47,000 registered Republicans, around 22,000 registered Democrats, and more than 32,000 independent voters, according to Miami-Dade County Elections.

The conservative, working-class demographics of Hialeah make it ground zero for Trump supporters, Moreno says.

"Obama didn't win Hialeah, but he got in the mid-40s, mainly because health care was a very attractive policy for many of the people in Hialeah," Moreno says.

That's one of the reasons Coipel cited when he lobbied for Obama to have a street named after him in Hialeah. As Coipel noted, Hialeah reportedly sits near the top of the list of cities with the most Obamacare enrollees.

"Crush the Communists"

The stockpile of quotes from Trump over the years has grown so deep that it's hard to pluck from memory singular moments when he uttered a headline-generating word.

But one stands out in light of the multiple indictments.

"I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters, OK?" Trump said at a campaign stop in Sioux Center, Iowa, in 2016. "It's, like, incredible."

For the Cuban-American electorate in the Miami metro area, that should perhaps be amended to state that Trump could shoot somebody and not lose any votes so long as he takes an uncompromising stance on the Cuban regime.

During his presidency, Trump unleashed a barrage of sanctions on the island and re-designated Cuba as a "state sponsor of terrorism." He also activated Title III of the Helms Burton Act, which opened the floodgates for lawsuits against companies for doing business on property confiscated from Cuban Americans or their families during the Cuban Revolution.

Not all the measures were popular among voters of Cuban descent when polled on individual policies. But the general foreign relations strategy and tough talk won over older Cuban Americans, many of whom have conservative leanings and a lingering disdain for anyone and anything labeled as communist.

In the 2022 midterm election, Trump struck that nerve, equating Democrats with Communists and speaking to Cuban exiles' apprehension that the U.S. would ease pressure on the Cuban government. Republicans made remarkable headway in typically Democratic-leaning Miami-Dade County, winning the county vote in a governor's race for the first time since 2002.

"You have to crush the communists at the ballot box. If you want to save your rights and liberties, you have to start by dealing a humiliating rebuke to the radical left maniacs running in this election," Trump told a crowd at a November 2022 rally.

FIU professor and Cuba Poll investigator Guillermo Grenier told New Times after the landslide victory, "The 'Republican-ness' just about trumps everything else."

"The Republican Party says all the right things. It resonates here. The Democratic Party has not made any inroads," Grenier said of South Florida's political landscape in the Cuban community.

A moment before voting to name the street on which Hialeah City Hall stands "Trump Avenue," Bovo made mention of the former president's hardline approach to Cuban relations.

"In 2016, Donald Trump came to this community, Miami-Dade County in that case, and went to Casa de la Brigada, and he met with the brigade members, and he made a commitment to them that he was going to reverse the treacherous Obama policies toward Cuba," the mayor continued, claiming Trump is now the victim of political persecution.

Done Deal

Bovo has not responded to a request for comment on whether he has read the federal election-interference indictment against Trump.

Alongside the mayor, council members Jesus Tundidor, Jacqueline Garcia-Roves, Bryan Calvo, Monica Perez, Luis Rodriguez, and Carl Zogby voted in favor of honoring Trump with a street name.

Perez pointed to roads named after presidents in other cities: Joe Biden Expressway in Pennsylvania and Barack Obama Avenue in Opa-locka. "These streets of presidents are already in other locations. Why can't Hialeah have also a president that's recognized?" she asked.

One Miami-Dade resident who voiced her support for Trump during the street-naming session insisted the former president stands "against tyranny, terrorism, the communist Castro."

"I think, no, I'm sure, President Donald J. Trump has stood for everything that we've been holding dear to us, our Democracy and our freedom," the resident said. "I believe he's our president. He's already won. Nobody can go against him."

Coipel and the city's Historic Preservation Board previously voted against honoring Trump with a Hialeah street name, but the board's decision was not binding on the council.

As for Coipel's application to name a street after Obama, Bovo told him at a December council meeting, "It's sitting in a drawer in my desk, and I'll get to it when I get to it."

"It's something that's still being considered? Coipel asked.

"No, it's not," Bovo said. "You can let the press know."