Features

I've found myself on the battered edge of Little Havana, focal point for a community of over 300,000 Cuban exiles who've been making their way here since the Sixties.

This isn't the Miami of Crockett and Tubbs, of high-rolling coke dealers, rolled-up jacket sleeves, turquoise espadrilles and polished-steel Berettas.

The scene is low rise, low glamour, and accompanied by the heady scent of shrimp and jalapeños frying up for lunch. In places it's hard to tell if the destruction came before or after the hurricane.

The reactions from other road users are even more open than before, only now the questions are flowing fast in Spanish: "Cuánto cuesta?"; "Es rápido?"; and even, "Se compra con el dinero de las drogas?"

I've no choice but to shrug my shoulders, force an auto-blip of the throttle with a downshift, and let them hear just what this car's all about.

Sitting on display in the low, wide Gallardo, there's no escaping the sensation that the roads in this district are rough - not in terms of any imminent certainty of a car-jacking, but the battered condition of the surface we're driving over.

Disguised below that traffic-halting, mixed aluminium and carbon-fibre exterior, the sills and A-pillars have come in for considerable extra reinforcement, while pop-up roll-over protectors have been engineered in behind each of the occupants' heads.

Road scars and potholes like Little Havana's would soon show weaknesses in the structure of a convertible that had been poorly modified, yet no shakes or shudders intrude; the Spyder's remarkably rigid.

In fact, this is simply a remarkable car - dynamically, in many respects, Ferrari-good, even. Heading finally away from the centre of town and over the steeply arched causeway towards Key Biscayne, the traffic quietens and the road begins to snake through a forest of mangrove trees with bizarre, convoluted roots exposed to the air.

A massive, swirling congregation of hawks has gathered overhead, watching this alien, vibrant blue object spearing across the marshland below.