DATELINE–Miami Beach, Fla.

In the wake of relentless, coast-to-coast Cunanan coverage, an unseasonable chill has descended upon Miami’s exclusive and happy-go-lucky gay enclave: South Beach.

This cosmopolitan metropolis once known as the “northernmost capital of Latin America,” has recently seen its sun ‘n’ fun image eclipsed by the harsh and unforgiving lights of a national media hellbent on discovering this year’s O.J. Simpson.

For better or worse, South Beach Miami has been officially “outed” as the unequivocally homosexual hideaway of one equivocally identified Andrew P. Cunanan.

It was in South Beach, after all, that the infamous “spree” killer supposedly met his living end. But contrary to popular belief – and relief, – the real Andrew Cunanan is not yet dead.

Indeed, under expert scrutiny the only available evidence indicates that Andrew Cunanan may never have existed in the first place.

On Thursday, July 24, 1997, the alleged body of the suspected killer (Cunanan) was discovered, literally faceless, on a houseboat in Miami.

It was then and there that local and federal enforcement agents appeared to have finally caught their “chameleon” killer. But, yet again, they were denied a good look at Cunanan’s true colors: the body of the homocidal enigma was now without a proper face.

But even with a face, Cunanan was widely held as a chameleon. Why?

Was it because he was an exotic and invisible Asian man? Or was it simply because Cunanan was an even more absurdly incongruous figure: a man who unabashedly loved other men?

Asian or gay? Both or neither? Was he really ever dressed up like a woman? Was he really a real man?

As the FBI slaps “FOUND DEAD” banners on its “10 Most Wanted” posters across the country, onlookers and intimates alike can only wonder: “Was there ever an Andrew Cunanan?”

As Cunanan’s picaresque wends its way to a violent, inevitable end, his fable turns out to be not so much a puzzle but a crudely constructed collage.

How else could Cunanan have made his way across the country from San Diego to Miami undetected? The only logical explanation: he was not one man but many men – indeed, many persons all at once.

Televised snapshots were said to depict him alternatively as both stout and slender, grizzly and hairless, masculine and feminine, Caucasian and Asian.

Racist and homophobic slips on behalf of the media or simply factual statements?

And what of the singular motives of this multifaceted – yet mute – public figure?

After being labeled a “shapeshifter,” members of the gay community publicly postulated that Cunanan had embarked upon his killing spree after being notified that he was HIV positive. According to this contagious logic, Cunanan came to embody the carnage ushered in by the AIDS epidemic – a spectacle of repetitive ceremonial death no single gay man had been able to accomplish before him.

Even the dramatically ineffectual Miami Police Department attempted to pin their very own homophobia on Cunanan, arguing, in so many words, that “If this fag had outrun our Law it was only because he was disguised as a woman.”

Cunanan: a model minority gone awry or a changeling of preternatural origins?

Cunanan: superhuman criminal genius or your average, intelligent gay man and a cold-blooded killer, to boot?

In this mass-mediated game of double jeopardy, the press and the police have thus far disguised their helpless queries as frightening and bizarre answers.

Any true explanations of the Gay O.J. that never was will come only in the form of blunt questions.

Andrew Philip Cunanan, we hardly knew ye.

DATELINE–The Campus

Microsoft announced the institution of its own IRS – Internet Referral Server that is. Netday News attributes the following striking confession to Brad Chase, vice president of developer relations and marketing at the Evil Empire: “Using the Microsoft Internet Referral Server, users can get immediate access to the Internet without the delays and confusion that often accompany the selection of an Internet service provider.” With the incorporation of the IRS into Internet Explorer browsing software, Microsoft can automatically assign users to local Internet service providers that have been selected, approved or purchased by the company. The software does not currently have the ability to switch the user’s long distance carrier, but only time will tell how sticky Bill Gates’ fingers are.

While Kaiser Gates swears on a stack of DOS manuals that Microsoft isn’t attempting to create an information technology monopoly, the marketing elves are hard at work doing His bidding.

Once Microsoft has consolidated its vise-like grip on the vertical market, technology and media consumers will be relieved of the “confusing” burden of choice.

In related news, the SttF legal department is reportedly researching the use of RICO to prosecute marketeering infractions in order to arrest Microsoft’s spiralling control of the digital economy.

DATELINE–The Electronic Ghetto

In an unprecedented showing of co-operation between public and private sector interests, a new public works consortium based in San Jose, Calif., will address the lack of technology access within America’s poorest communities.

“Wired In,” the nation’s first non-profit organization to be funded by both high tech corporations and the U.S. government, will concentrate its initial efforts on housing and urban redevelopment. According to WI’s spokesperson, Mr. Corey Bussier, the consortium will target “the infrastructure needs of tomorrow’s communities” by providing access to the Internet as well as other emerging information markets.

At a black-tie gala held last weekend in celebration of WI’s first announced public works project, Silicon Valley CEOs hobnobbed with such Washington luminaries as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, the Vice President and top-level Justice Department officials. The networking opportunities were a big draw,” said the CEO of a well-known microchip manufacturer, “but the feeling that we are improving the future of America’s poor is the real reason we’re all here.”

A scale model of WI’s first initiative greeted the gala’s attendees, among whom were invited members of the national press corp. Code-named “Small Big House,” the urban housing project will integrate high tech gadgetry with modern architectural design in order to connect low-income residents to the same public venues and opportunities currently available to the middle class.

“We need to insure that the next generation of Americans, regardless of their financial standing, will be prepared to live in a high-tech world,” said Bussier. “On the level playing field of technology, the small can become the big, and differences can be turned into advantages.”

For years, advocates of the poor have pointed to the increasing disparity in technological know-how between middle- and low-income families as the makings of a potential national crisis. The “Wired In” consortium promises to put an end to that trend by placing cutting edge audio-visual components and computer terminals in every nook and cranny of future public housing units.

“The kitchen will be smart, the living room will be even smarter, and nowhere will there be an absence of information gathering and processing devices,” bragged one of the middleware engineers responsible for the “Small Big House” design. “Basically, these families are going to be networked like no one else on earth.”

Networking is nothing new to the project’s main contractor DiPannopti & Co. The centuries old family-owned business has built such revolutionary housing structures as the still controversial Petaluma State Penitentiary.

“Wired In” is scheduled to complete the first 120 “Small Big House” units by the end of 1998.

DATELINE–Havana, Cuba

After two bombings rocked Havana’s burgeoning tourist district on Saturday, July 12, 1997, Cuban authorities first claimed that the bombs were from the United States. But as the dust settles outside of the scarred Hotel Capri, the prime suspects appear to be Communist Cubans who live on the island.

Saturday’s explosions, both of which were planted in hotel lobbies, took place only hours before the remains of Ernesto “El Che” Guevarra were returned to Cuba after being disinterred by an Argentinean anthropologist several months ago. The tourism-related blasts also transpired minutes after Cubana Aviacion Flight 787 crashed into off the eastern coast of Cuba, killing an estimated 44 passengers.

Exactly two years ago, to the day, General Arnando Ochoa, the celebrated hero of Cuba’s disastrous military campaign in Angola, was tried and executed on Cuban national television. Publicly, Gen. Ochoa was accused and convicted of helping to smuggle drugs through Cuba – a remarkable feat considering Cuba’s highly aggressive stance towards “domestic security.” Privately, however, it was speculated that Ochoa had become too popular – undercutting the singular figure of General Fidel Castro, Cuba’s “jefe” for the last 40 years.

Indeed, almost four decades ago, the third leg of the Cuban Revolution, Camilo Cienfuegos, was also killed in a mysterious plane crash by the eastern capital of Santiago de Cuba. Cienfuegos had been Fidel Castro’s right hand man during their paramilitary campaign against then dictator Fulgencio Batista.

After his death, Cienfuegos became the first state-sanctioned martyr of the Cuban Revolution and is today revered as one of the four founders of the new Cuban state, along with Che Guevarra, Fidel Castro and Fidel’s brother, Raul. Of the four, only Fidel and Raul Castro are still alive and in power as the acting heads of the flailing Cuban state.

In recent years, Cuba has experienced a series of economic crises due largely to their longtime dependence on the Soviet Union. For the small island nation, the end of the Cold War has also meant the end of subsidies, petroleum, and of their largest trading partner. As a result, the Cuban government has begun an international public relations campaign to promote its tourism industry in the hopes of attracting European and American investors.

While the Cuban Revolution is celebrated throughout the world as a defiant check against the forces of imperialism, its recent emphasis on tourism and apparent disregard for a dramatic rise in prostitution and the tremendous discrepancy between tourists and its own citizens has garnered mild criticism even from its most staunch supporters.

Analysts speculate that the two bombings which took place last Saturday may, in fact, be the work of disgruntled revolutionaries who fear that the country is returning to its pre-revolutionary state as an exotic watering hole for well-to-do foreigners.

The recent popularity of “World Beat” music and a concurrent increase in “eco-tourism” has made Cuba the new Nepal for the affluent and xenophillic. Forty years ago, a similar taste for all things Cuban had reduced the island and its inhabitants to a series of consumable cliches.

Today, those cliches are newly draped in the mystified remains of Che Guevarra, a beacon whose mute light overshadows the mysterious disappearance of Camilo Cienfuegos. Guevarra’s remains will be interred once again this week in a specially designed mausoleum near Santiago de Cuba. And in the brave new world of politics as a tourist attraction, Cuba’s long history of terrorist bombings and tragic disappearances may be its best bet for a brighter economic future.

The Revolutionary Cuban government will celebrate its 38th anniversary in two weeks.

DATELINE–Department of Corrections

As most U.S. citizens celebrated America’s 221st Independence Day this past weekend, a group of California correctional facilities were preparing to wrangle with the U.S. Supreme Court over the issue of prisoner’s rights.

The outcome of this week’s Supreme Court case, “Esteban Caliban and Ed Douglass v. the California Department of Corrections,” will determine whether or not prisoners are constitutionally entitled to have access to personal computers.

For more than two years, a diverse group of prisoners serving life sentences in California state penitentiaries as a result of the state’s unique “Three Strikes” law –whereby defendants who have already been imprisoned twice are automatically sentenced to die in prison– have redirected the focus of their right to counsel, eschewing a possible retrial for themselves in order to put their prisons on the stand.

While the recent rush to settle Cyberspace enters a period of cruise control, America’s fastest-growing minority population, U.S. prisoners, are starting to catch up with the Joneses. In California prisons, computers are not available for prisoners to use during recreational hours. Instead, men who enter the penal system –a disproportionate number of whom are African-American and Latino–are encouraged to “work” on their bodies.

The result is gang-related tattoos, bulging muscles, and, in some cases, female hormone treatments. Michelle Foo-Kwo, one of the lawyers representing Caliban and Douglass in this week’s Supreme Court case, argues that this “exclusive emphasis on the prisoners’ bodies” is a violation of the same human rights charter perennially touted by the U.S. in critique of such repressive regimes as China, Iraq, and Cuba. “A prisoner in the California penal system is just another body to restrain,” says Foo-Kwo, “there is never a person behind bars.”

While recreational access to computers may not automatically assign a face and an emotional history to every inmate, advocates of the Caliban-Douglass case believe a de facto prohibition on a certain kind of social development within prisons is largely to blame for the increasing wedge between America’s “minority” and majority populations.

“There are two systems now,” says Esteban, one of the two prisoners whose name appears on this week’s Supreme Court proceedings, “there’s those systems Whites administer and make money off of and then there’s the system that takes us Blacks and Latinos in and never let’s us out again. All we’re asking is that the two be networked together.”

Although Mr. Caliban is not formally trained in computer science, like many other imprisoned Americans, he has witnessed the rebirth of the Information Age from a critical distance. Caliban feels that America’s prisoners are particularly suited to benefit from the thousands of virtual communities the Internet has reportedly created within both the U.S. and abroad.

“I am not permitted to live beside other Americans, Americans who are not prisoners, because of the crimes I have committed,” the 27 year-old Esteban continues, “but why don’t I have a right to learn from and talk with people outside of prison?”

In an era of gated communities, the concrete boundaries between those sentenced to a life of repression and those bestowed with the privileges of free expression grow more ponderous by the minute. Ironically, none of the “free” speech proponents who have recently waged a high-publicity campaign on the Internet using electronically painted blue ribbons and the word “netizen” have made any mention of this disparity between those who have access to the media and those for whom the media is just another White ghetto.

“Writing e-mail isn’t going to take away the pain of being separated from my family,” writes Douglass, in one of the documents to be reviewed by the Supreme Court this week, “but being able to use a computer now means being able to read and write…and I am not going to lose my right to speak in this country.”

Whether or not free weights will be replaced by free speech in California’s burgeoning prison cities will be decided in late August by the Supreme Court.