A red and gold top with jagged edges decorated with glitter and a matching skirt.
That was Giselle ‘The Wassi One’ Blanche’s first masked outfit at the age of 14 during her first Miami Carnival in 1988.
Blanche looks back on her first carnival with great pleasure and calls it exciting. “My mother and I made the costumes ourselves. We designed and created that and to this day, 36 years later, it is still pretty much the same,” Blanche said of her carnival experience.
She will be among 100,000 people enjoying the 40th anniversary festivities of the Miami Carnival, a three-day event spanning the Columbus Day weekend that celebrates Caribbean heritage and culture with pageantry, music, food and arts and crafts. The event was still scheduled to take place, although many thought it would be canceled due to concerns about Hurricane Milton.
“Honestly, it should be more,” Miami Carnival marketing director John Beckford half-jokingly told the Miami Herald of the turnout. “Forty years later I wish there were half a million.”
Beckford rattled off like an auctioneer what to expect at this year’s Carnival: over 40 artists and local DJs, a dancehall zone, Caribbean cuisines and the list goes on. This year, 21 Mas bands are competing for $10,000, including Blanche, who started her own Mas band called Wassi Ones.
This year’s festivities kicked off last weekend with the Miami Junior Carnival and continue with the main event, a three-day program that begins Friday with the Panorama Steel Band Competition. On Saturday, guests will be treated to Jouvert and on Sunday, the Mas Band Parade and concerts with Trinidadian singer Patrice Roberts and Saint Vincent artist Lyrikal.
The Panorama Steel Band Competition is an ode to the steel drum, one of the first instruments created in the 20th century. Jouvert is a celebration of calypso and soca bands as people follow them dancing through the streets.
The Parade of Bands will feature more than 18,000 masqueraders and more than 20 mas bands dancing along a parade route, followed by a judging of the bands. Each band also has a theme that they portray with intricate costumes in vibrant colors.
Longtime Carnival employees and artists such as Trinidadian musician Machel Montano and radio personality Mike Andrews, who was one of the DJs for the first Miami Carnival, will be honored at Panorama. Montano will also be honored during the Parade of Bands and Concert.
Andrews remembers the impact Miami’s first Carnival had on Caribbeans living in the northern states, where October can be cold. “We’re still warm here, and for the few visitors who came down to be able to be outside in shorts and T-shirts, sandals and sneakers and enjoy the Caribbean music, hang out with friends and eat – it was an experience they thoroughly enjoyed.”
A growing carnival for a growing community
Today, Miami Carnival boasts sponsors such as Monster Juice and Red Stripe, along with help from The Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau and Miami-Dade County.
But Beckford says in its infancy, the founders often had to come out of their own pockets to get the carnival going. “At the time, they used their personal money and got a second mortgage on their house,” he said.
The first Miami Carnival – then known as West Indian American Carnival of Miami – took place at the corner of 183rd Street and Seventh Avenue in what is now Miami Gardens. Miami Carnival is considered the last stop of the carnival season, which kicks off in February in the Caribbean and follows the carnivals in Toronto and Brooklyn, New York.
The founding members consisted of about a dozen people, including Miami Carnival founder and chairman of the board Ruthven Williams, who has held multiple positions within the organization over the years.
“It was a little tricky because at one point we had a bill to pay and we didn’t have the money,” Williams recalls. “And during that time we get paid with checks.”
The festival has been held in many locations over the years: Miami Gardens, Miami, North Miami, Opa-locka and Hialeah. In the early 2000s, the carnival split into two separate organizations — one in Miami-Dade and another celebrated in Broward — for several years before merging back together in 2009, according to an article in the Miami Herald.
“Organizers competed for revelers,” the Herald reported. “Miami enjoyed the cachet, the history and the name recognition. But Broward had the growing Caribbean community. The two sides also competed for sponsors and popular bandleaders.”
“I think both sides realized that if we keep doing this, people might get frustrated and turn away from even coming,” Williams said. What led to the two parties reuniting, the Herald reported, was the economic crisis that began in 2008.
The festival has partly fueled South Florida’s growing Caribbean population, said Marlon Hill, general counsel for Miami Carnival. “These were the early days of the development of the Caribbean community, and more specifically that of Trinidad and Tobago, which has a longer tradition of carnival culture,” he said. According to the US Census Broward and Miami-Dade counties have a combined Caribbean population of more than 342,000.
Hill, who is originally from Kingston, Jamaica, said he attended his first carnival in Miami along Biscayne Boulevard in the early 1990s. “It was great to have the carnival on the streets,” he said. “It’s a regular Caribbean Carnival experience because when you have Carnival in the Caribbean, the whole country celebrates Carnival. It’s not a specific city or a specific province. The whole country is involved.”
Hill emphasized that the music, the artistry of the masquerade and costumes, and the steel drum are all essential to the carnival. But he noted that the richness of Carnival is its history: “Carnival was born from a historical context around resisting oppression to express ourselves as Black people,” Hill said.
“Many people forget that historical context,” he said, “and get distracted by the euphoria of attending the carnival or the spectacle.”
Beckford also emphasized that Carnival is not all “beads and feathers” and said it is a celebration of Caribbean culture, saying he was excited about Sunday’s festivities.
“There’s so much to do: you have your dance hall zone. You have the masband stage where the bands cross paths. You have the concert stage, you have the food court, you have the arts and crafts pavilion. You have the corporate pavilion where people give out free stuff,” he said. “I mean, it’s only 12 hours of entertainment.”
If you go:
What: Miami Carnival
When: October 11-13
Where: Central Broward Park, 700 NW 11th Pl, Lauderhill (Panorma, Friday and Jouvert, Saturday); Miami-Dade County Fair Expo, 10901 SW 24th St, Miami (Carnival, Sunday)
Costs: Panorama, $30, Jouvert, $65, Carnival Day, $50
Info: https://miamicarnival.org/
