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The Good, The Bad and the Ugly in Bimini Developement.

“As your driver, I advise you that this is a bad neighborhood,” said Matt Choufany as he let me out at the Opa Locka Executive Airport. He sped away and I thought, Bimini can’t be any worse than this. I’d spent the past five years as a journalist covering the volatile streets of Miami and had lan-guished the three years before that as a writer in rough Central American venues. I figured Bimini rated somewhere between that and the Bahamian paradise that public relations firms tout."

Federico Arocena, the pilot and project manager of Bimini Heritage Ltd., one of the firms currently developing properties on Bimini, flew the four-seat prop plane to the tiny island only 50 miles from Miami. The sun was starting to set when the two PRs (public relations executives) and I arrived at the airport in South Bimini. Aro-cena took us through customs as the peacocks strutted around outside. The customs official stamped my passport and waved me through with a wink.

Although tropical, Bimini has a dis-tinctly deciduous, rugged feel. The island is rimmed by mangroves and white sand, and surrounded by clear, blue water. Bimini is only seven miles long and about a thousand yards wide. North Bimini has had legendary residents like Ernest Hemingway and exiled Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, as well as visitors like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Bimini is the place where Hemingway wrote his posthumously published novel Islands in the Stream. The “fourth act” of the novel became The Old Man and the Sea, which won Hemingway the 1954 Nobel Prize for Literature.

It’s a 10-minute ferry ride from the airport to North Bimini. Although the water is clear and the views are gorgeous, there’s a mood on the island that feels like an impending car crash. Bimini seems to be an idiosyncratic place where everybody knows everybody, but where everything is about to change. Anva Roberts, the daughter of the operations manager, checked me into Big John’s Hotel. “We hope you enjoy Bimini,” she said with cat-green eyes and a big smile. I immediately perched myself on a stool at the outdoor section of Big John’s Conch Shell Bar. The Kalik was cold. The marina tranquil. Gas-powered golf carts puttered by outside. I was roused from my trance when Ashley Saunders, Bimini’s official historian, patted me on the shoulder. “You’re the guy, right?” he asked.

As I would soon find out, Ashley is one of those people who knows everyone. He has written several books about the island. Educated at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Harvard University in the United States, Ashley is a slight man with distinct features. His demeanor tells you two things: he’s highly intelligent and he has only a pragmatic tolerance for tourism.
He seems mid-life. In Bimini that could mean 60, but I can’t say for sure because people on the island routinely live to be 100 years old. Edward “Chipper” Davis, the is-land libations specialist, would later tell me that the reason Biminites live to such an age is due to the gumbo limbo tree. He shaved a piece of the bark with his knife and put it under my nose. The scent was pungent enough to burn my nostrils. “We make it into a tea and that’s our secret,” Chipper said.
Ashley and I were soon whisked away by PR practitioner Nathalie Alberto on one of those golf carts. I scribbled furiously in my Moleskine notebook (the same kind Hemingway used). “There are two Biminis separated by a dirt road,” Ashley said. That is a fact. At the northern end of North Bimini is the brand-new Bimini Bay Resort, a vast condo/casino/golf development plump with American money and influence. It’s a far cry from the southern area of North Bi-mini that has venues like Nat “Piccolo Pete” Saunders’ place and exudes the Bahamian vibe, which, according to Ashley, is “Do your own thing.” While bouncing along on the golf cart we saw several shipwrecks, as well as the ruins of the Compleat Angler, which burned to the ground in January 2006. We stopped at the Public Library in Bimini, the oldest in the Bahamas. It’s never locked. You can pick up a book, but if you want to keep it, then you must leave one.

The livelihood of the island, Ashley said, has always been about shipwrecks and smuggling. In the 1800s, many vessels were wrecked because of Bimini’s shallow waters, treacherous reef structure and shoals. The salvage of the cargo became a business. The proximity of Bimini to America - largest consumer of everything – and the island’s history of lax law enforcement, have always made Bimini a smuggler’s paradise. “During Prohibition it was booze. In the ’80s it was drugs. Now, it’s people,” Ashley said. He reported in his first volume of the History of Bimini that over 18 metric tons of cocaine and marijuana were seized in the Bahamas in 1989. Bimini today is a central point for alien smuggling, Ashley contended. You get the sense that the island has always survived off the spoils of what-ever washes ashore.
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It’s only been 34 years since the Bahamas gained independence from Great Britain, but the tourists in Bimini are almost exclusively American. Later that first night, Ashley, Nathalie and I scooted across King’s Highway, the dividing line between the old and the new Bimini, to have dinner at the nascent Bimini Bay Resort Hotel (and future) Casino with Arocena and the other PR. The resort is being constructed by the Hilton Hotels Corp. and the Capo Group. Once seated I took a gander around the room and intimated that I need not dine with portly Caucasians rife with money and mistresses, or hell-bent on catching a blue marlin in order to experience the island. Ashley let out a guffaw. “This could be any place in South Florida,” he said. We discussed the nature of the new development over a couple bottles of Kalik and some overpriced lamb chops. The Bimini Bay developers say the resort will be the most massive in Bimini’s history. It will undoubtedly bring money to the island, but in a self-contained way. Later, the PRs, the pilot and I headed back over the dividing line to the End of the World Saloon. You can write your name anywhere on the place, which is constructed from local wood and has a sand floor. Manager Sara Pinder cornered me. “Where you from, boy?” she asked. I told the truth. “I’m from Arkansas,” I said. “Yeah, the way you keep sayin’ ‘ma’am,’ I believe it.” Then, she promptly put Lynryd Skynyrd on the stereo. I drank more Kalik and felt at home. You could get used to this, I thought, and hoped the bar might survive any changes to Bimini.
Ashley and I ended up hanging out for three of the four days I was “in country.” This included him inviting me on a boat tour of Bimini with the Miami Dolphins Cheerleaders. He took us to a shipwreck that was used during Prohibition (courtesy of the Volstead Act) as a “floating liquor store.” This prompted one of the cheerleaders to tilt her head and ask, “So why did they stop selling liquor from it?” Ashley and I exchanged glances. I chortled. “What's funny?” the cheerleader asked. “Prohibition ended,” I replied. My name was mud after that. Yet, it was on this short tour that I got a feel for what people in Bimini actually think about the new development, especially Bimini Bay Resort. Antoinette Stuart, the manager of the Bimini Tourist Office, said that the Bimini Bay project was “too big for this island.” The proposed golf course would wipe out a great deal of mangroves, which fish use as a nursery environment.
The Bahamas Coalition, an activist conservation group, addresses the controversy on its website (www.restrictbiminibay.org).They claim Bimini Bay will “…cut down, fill in and destroy the rich mangrove eco-system of Bimini, so they obliterate the very habitats on which Bimini’s biological richness and true economy depend… Bimini Island possesses the only mangrove ecosystem on the entire Northwest Ba-hama Bank, and is responsible for replenishing fish populations not only in Bimini but over thousands of square miles of coral reefs and seabed…The Bimini Bay Resort is destroying fish nurseries and habitat that will cost the local people their livelihoods.” The website made Bimini sound important. As Ashley and I toured the island I saw the man-made structures being built for future houses. Destruction in the name of progress is not only a threat, it is eminent. Around 8:45 the next morning, Arocena knocked on my door. “Your fishing guide is waiting for you.” It was time for my tour/fishing trip with the legendary bonefisher-man Ansil Saunders. (Coincidentally, he’s Ashley’s brother.) Ansil is 74 years old. “Just a boy, really,” he said. I grabbed my $30 six-pack of Kalik and stepped aboard one of his 15-foot handmade skiffs to go sight fishing for bonefish. The skiffs are made from Honduran ma-hogany, white oak and horse flesh (a local tree in Bimini) and are called “Bimini Bonefishers.” We visited Nixon Harbor, Field Point and East Point, the southern-most tip of North Bimini. I caught a couple of bonefish, three barracuda, and saw sea turtles and lemon sharks. During the excursion, Ansil took me to “The Bonefish Hole” in the tranquility of the mangroves. This is also the same place he took Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. only three days before King was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tenn. Ansil recited his “psalm” as he’d done for King. A moving oration, the psalm had come about because Ansil had orchestrated his own “sit-ins” at the Bimini Big Game Club, which did not serve Blacks during the 1960s.
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With the onslaught of Bimini Bay bearing down, it seems the most pivotal player concerned with historic Bimini is Stanley Levine, the president of Bimini Heritage Ltd. Project. Levine’s preservation creden-tials are impressive. He is known for being the founding Chairman of the Miami Beach Cultural Arts Council (CAC), Secretary/Trustee of the new Miami Performing Arts Center and a past President of Board of Trustees for the Miami Design Preservation League. Anyone familiar with the Design Preservation League knows their ideas about preservation border on religious fervor. Levine was also Chairman of the Lincoln Road Partnership that was responsible for the revitalization of Lincoln Road on Miami Beach, now one of the premier pedestrian-friendly streets in the US. My editor and I had joined him for brunch on Lincoln Road a couple of months prior to my trip. Though my editor was distracted by pedestrians, I listened to Levine talk about Bimini. Levine had been visiting Bimini throughout his life. His passion for the island was obvious. A self-described Renaissance man, Levine believes maintenance of culture unites a community. He wants Heritage Village Ltd., which is to be constructed just over the dirt road from Bimini Bay, to be Bimini’s main community revitalization project. He envi-sions the island’s historic allure and architectural design being a catalyst to economic development. Big John’s Hotel is being renovated as part of Bimini Heritage Ltd. as is the new Browns Hotel and Marina, a small boutique project. The marina was completed in June 2007, and Browns Hotel is scheduled to open in August 2008 * * *.
On the last day my flight was rain-delayed.I sat at the bar at Big John’s and drank Kalik as I looked out over the marina. The rain poured so hard and so dark that I wasn’t sure I would make it off the island. Anva’s father, Greg Roberts, and I spent a couple hours talking. He’s the owner, and now lesser, of Big John’s Hotel to the Bimini Heritage Ltd. “There was a time in the’80s when you could be walkin’ down the street with not a dime in your pocket and if you knew somebody with a boat, then you’d have five or ten thousand dollars by day’s end,” he said. Greg explained the drug trade was such that smugglers often dropped bales of marijuana or kilos of cocaine before entering customs if they thought they were at risk. I thought of the shipwrecks and salvage of the past. We got a call that my flight would indeed leave the island. Better late than never. A while later the storm passed and I boarded the ferry back to the airport. It’s not clear where Bimini is headed. Expansive development versus alien smuggling versus the historic culture is a conundrum that no one can unravel. Levine is trying and the inhabitants are trying, but nothing is certain, other than change. Bimini is a place where you can give golf cart rides to the locals, walk around at night with only slight apprehension, and generally feel safe. Development, however, on any scale other than the “boutique” type would divide the island into two worlds and eat up mangrove shoreline. As you speed through stretches of American money and abject poverty, as I did, this becomes apparent. Based on money and scale, big development will usurp the status quo and the past. Maybe Hemingway wrote it best when he penned, Winner Take Nothing.