On Election Day, under a somber gray sky in Pembroke Pines, a line of voters snaked from the entrance of the Pembroke Shores Park gymnasium to the parking lot. A six-foot-four, paunchy, hazel-eyed Cuban-American walked the line, shaking hands as a cameraman from América TeVé recorded the scene. Dressed in…

It’s a blazing late-May afternoon at Nathaniel “Traz” Powell Stadium near Opa-locka. The 29 members of the Miami Fury gather at the 50-yard line, dressed in their shiny aqua uniforms. On the running track that surrounds the field, near the locker rooms, the Pure Funk DJs from 97.7 FM blast…

It happened in 1996. Mario Lavandeira Jr. can’t recall the exact date, but it was late in his senior year at Belen Jesuit Preparatory School, the all-boys Catholic institution that relocated to Miami from Cuba in 1961 after alumnus Fidel Castro overthrew Fulgencio Batista. Educators, parents, and students filled Belen’s…

Early one afternoon in June 2003, a bushy-haired, 28-year-old sergeant from Miami sat down on the hard floor of a steamy, furnitureless room in Ar Ramadi, one of the most dangerous locations in Iraq’s Sunni Triangle. The space, on the second floor of the city’s government center, had been previously…