Edition: U.S. / Global

Miami, the Hollywood of Latin America

Published: August 18, 1996

EVERY WEEKNIGHT AT 10 O'CLOCK sharp, a boyishly handsome young Peruvian named Jaime Bayly enters a darkened television studio in Miami Beach and sits at a desk that is bare except for two glasses of water. Thousands of miles away, in Caracas and Buenos Aires and Mexico City and Santiago, viewers are tuning in, waiting for the affable talk-show host to begin another of his deft interviews with one of the actors, singers, athletes, models, writers and other celebrities who make up the world of Latin American show biz -- known in Spanish as la farandula.

Mr. Bayly has been doing his hourlong interview show in one form or another for nearly a decade, and until February 1995, ''El Show de Jaime Bayly'' was broadcast from his hometown, Lima, Peru. But when he and the cable channel Sur decided they wanted to expand his horizons with ''a talk show for all of Latin America,'' Mr. Bayly said, they knew there was only one place he could go and be assured of elevating both his ratings and the quality of his guest list.

''If I want to do a truly Latin American program and reach an international audience, I have to be where the celebrities are, and that means Miami,'' Mr. Bayly explained recently. ''A good number of them live here, and even those who don't are always coming to work or to visit. So if there is any one place that can claim to be the entertainment capital of Latin America, I would say it is here.''

Julio Iglesias, the Spanish crooner who is one of the few figures from la farandula known in the English-speaking world, and Jose Luis Rodriguez, the dashing Venezuelan soap opera and recording star known to his female fans as El Puma, would undoubtedly agree. Both have left their native lands and settled in the Miami area, joining home-grown talent like Gloria and Emilio Estefan and their Cuban exile protege, the singer Albita. So too have such fixtures of the Latin American firmament as the Mexican actress and singer Lucia Mendez, the Nicaraguan salsa star Luis Enrique, the Dominican comedian Charytin and the Spanish singer Raphael, the Monster of Song, who has long occupied the Key Biscayne mansion that was once Richard Nixon's favorite retreat here.

But Miami is much more than just a tropical refuge where the richest and most famous names of Latin American show business can relax, enjoy the fruits of their success and socialize with one another at restaurants and nightclubs eager to treat them like stars. It is also the place where, increasingly, they must come to film television shows, make records, shoot videos, submit to the attentions of swarms of paparazzi and huddle with the executives who control their careers. In short, Miami has become the very heart of la farandula, a Hispanic Hollywood where entertainers from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego aspire to make their mark.

Both Univision and Telemundo, the two main Spanish-language networks in the United States, have their corporate headquarters in Miami, as do popular cable channels that are beamed all over the hemisphere, like MTV Latino and Gems. Latin America's top-rated television variety show, ''Sabado Gigante,'' is shot in a studio just west of Miami International Airport, not far from the set of the daily talk show of Cristina Saralegui, known as the Hispanic Oprah. And the makers of Mexican, Brazilian and Venezuelan telenovelas, or soap operas, have discovered that their ratings automatically soar whenever they include episodes set here.

In addition, both Sony Discos and WEA Latina, the Latin music divisions of the two largest record companies in the world, are based in Miami, along with most of their competitors and the songwriters, studio musicians and producers on which the industry depends. An affluent Hispanic population and a steady stream of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking tourists eager to spend money mean that Miami also offers Latin America's biggest singers and musicians a ready-made audience that can fill the house at two of its most prestigious concert halls, the James L. Knight Center and the Jackie Gleason Theater.

More than half of the two million people living in the Miami metropolitan area are of Hispanic descent. Cubans, who accounted for 90 percent of the area's Hispanic population 25 years ago, now constitute barely half of a much larger Hispanic population, and there are rapidly growing Columbian, Brazilian, Venezuelan, Central American and Peruvian colonies.

''We moved to Miami first and foremost because of location, location, location, as the real estate people always say,'' said Sergio Rozenblat, the Argentine-born managing director of WEA Latina, which relocated here from Los Angeles in 1994. For Latin Americans, ''Miami is what Rio de Janeiro is to non-Latins, a city that has a magical name, an aura,'' Mr. Rozenblat added. ''Whatever works in Miami is going to influence what goes on in Latin America.''

Though the MIAMI Film Festival introduced the actor Antonio Banderas and the director Pedro Almodovar to American audiences and continues to promote Latin American cinema, movies are not really at the core of la farandula, unlike its much more prosperous and better-known English-language equivalent. No studio or producer in Spain or Latin America has the means to compete with Hollywood, where it costs an average of $30 million to make a movie these days.