MARGARIA FICHTNER Herald Staff Writer

I don't like this," he says, meaning this story. "I don't like it. The best way to succeed around here is to disappear."

Since Cesar Odio was appointed Miami city manager a little more than 2 1/2 years ago, he has taken great pains to fashion an image as a low-key, nose-to-the-grindstone, penny-pinching public servant devoid of flash and artifice. His style is to have no style, to be government's good gray man, unheralded and unnoticed, keeping the gears oiled while someone else toots the horn.

"The manager is not an important public figure in the city's context," says the man who shepherds Miami's 3,700 employees and $184-million budget, "but a professional managing the resources of the city on a day-to-day basis. You have to understand the power that goes with the position and be mature enough not to use it."

The recent verbal sparring matches between city commissioners and members of the administrative staff have emphasized more than ever Odio's role as the man in the middle.

"Elected officials have the right for us to be there when they want to ask questions and get the answers they're entitled to," he says, and in May he was already cautioning staff to be more prepared at commission meetings. "If I was the director of a department, I would know I don't need any notes to know how many cars I have, how many people work for me, how many are black, how many are Cuban. You know what happened with (one staff member) the other day. He didn't even know what his staff looks like."

Before Odio's appointment in November 1985, Miami had waded through five managers in five years, an appalling statistic even for a city that did not exist 100 years ago and might yet have much to learn about the value of continuity. Odio, who came to City Hall in 1980 as an assistant city manager, had worked for them all, from the pugnacious Joe Grassie to the affable, high- profile Sergio Pereira, "and I learned from each one. I remember what happened to each one of them in certain cases. I said, 'Oops, that's not where I'm going.' "

Where Odio chose to go was to the sidelines, the perch he deems appropriate for the $92,000-a-year team player he
considers himself to be. A lifelong sportsman who rises early enough most weekday mornings to row a punishing hour in Biscayne Bay before work, Odio cites over and over the eight-man crew as his model of efficiency. "If the oars go into the water together, the boat is very light and moves very fast, but if the oars aren't in the water at the same time, it's a very heavy boat, and it doesn't move."

It is Odio and his administration who must grapple with the nuts and bolts of the prohibitive fiscal realities of increased costs vs. such troubling factors as a municipal tax base that grows in single figures and the fact that cushioning federal
funds have simply evaporated. Within Miami's business community, there is concern about the city's financial health, but the manager's personal image remains that of a dedicated shopkeeper, competent if not excessively visionary.

"He's solid," says lawyer Martin Fine. "I think he's very good for the city at this time."

"He has the ability to get things done without creating a lot of furor," says banker Sonny Wright.

"My favorable opinions of him are not necessarily based on pleasant experiences," says educator Marvin Dunn, who has run for mayor and recently was one of a group of investors trying to redevelop a boatyard site in Coconut Grove. "He has been very tough. He can say bull---- without actually saying it. He can look at you so you know he thinks you're full of it."

In 34-square-mile Miami, which, unlike many cities of its
size, has assigned the management of what would otherwise be its public hospital, its port and its sewage, mass transit and school systems to a second-tier metro government, the city is a prosaic organism, handling the urban ABCs.

"If the streets are clean, you as a citizen don't even think about the fact that the city is working," Odio tells the Coconut Grove Chamber of Commerce. "If the garbage gets picked up, you don't think about it. If you don't get mugged or if the parks are clean, you don't think about it."

Odio has no such option.

"The phone starts ringing at 6 in the morning," says Odio's wife, Marian Prio, a psychotherapist who is also the elder daughter of the late Cuban president Carlos Prio Socarras. Life in the fishbowl is by no means a new phenomenon for Prio, whose father so delighted in having his children share his presidency that one famous, emotional speech he delivered was interrupted by tiny Marian's amplified, protesting treble, "Daddy, don't spit on me!"

Still, "they call us in the middle of the night," Prio says. "They called us about a propane gas explosion. Every time something happens, they call him. He can't count on weekends."

Foes and admirers alike sometimes compare Odio to the late former manager Mel Reese, a feisty, hands-on, tough-talking administrator who hung onto his job for years by mastering the bureaucratic art of knowing a lot while keeping his mouth shut. Reese's slogan was "When I decide to do something, I do it." So does Odio.

Quick decisions

"I do make decisions very quickly," he says. "I don't know how my people, my staff, feel about that. I will make mistakes. You make more mistakes by doing that. On the other hand, you get more things done, and I think we need to get more things done here."

"He's energetic," says Jack Eads, a former Odio assistant who is now Coral Gables city manager. "And his heart's in the right place."

"He's like this (rapid snapping of fingers)," says Prio, an irrepressibly ebullient woman who sometimes presents a sharp contrast to her more introverted husband. "He just solves things. Not as well as I would solve them. I don't know how to explain it. When we moved into our house, he just went to the store and picked out some furniture and just furnished the house. Like that. I had to return half of it, but, in fact, we had a place to sit. If it had been left up to me, we'd have been sitting on the floor for two months. He solved the problem right away, and we didn't have to exchange all of it. If what he does do isn't perfect the first time, he manages to have people to fix it up. And it's good enough. It's always good enough."

And, indeed, the 52-year-old Odio does seem to operate within a whirr of constant, scattergun motion. His day may start with an 8:30 a.m. review of the next week's commission agenda and not end until after budget hearings when night has fallen. Whether the issue is the color scheme for new waste containers, a controversial trash pickup fee, the promotional needs of the Miami Design District or the economically spurred retirement ("I'd rather lay off cars than people") of a tenth of the city's motor fleet, the manager is a symphony of nervous energy. His sunny, unimposing City Hall office is crammed with relics of activity: baseballs autographed by Hank Aaron and Dwight Gooden; action shots of Vinny Testaverde and the pope; a plaque from the Little Haiti Soccer League; a clock from the Latin Builders Association; a photograph of Miss Universe inscribed, warmly, "In my eyes, you're the best."

On the job, Odio's concentration is not concentrated. It diffuses into the poking of the buttons on the phone by his desk ("Tell her Cesar Odio returned her call. O-d-i-o"), into scribbled memoes, into the vigorous bowing of an air fiddle when a citizen's complaining telephone call goes on too long. Routinely his sentences are punctuated with sharp knuckle raps inflicted upon the table or desk before him. "Nobody (rap) ever said where (rap) are your revenues (rap) going to come (rap)
from. Nobody (rap) asked that question. No(rap)body." He is blessed with a remarkably mobile face, and in moments of intense concentration, agitation or amusement, his lips purse, or his eyebrows soar. When he walks, his shoulders hunch slightly forward as if he were headed into an eternal strong wind.

One-on-one he is capable of enormous warmth, and at
commission meetings he sometimes greets male acquaintances by leaning over the barrier beside his chair and gripping the visitor's shoulders firmly with both hands while he whispers in an eagerly upturned ear. He can also be chillingly curt.

"If the question is money, the answer is no."

"If anyone here overruns his budget, goodbye."

"If it costs overtime, I don't want it."

"I cannot make things happen to make everybody happy. I cannot function that way."

Says long-time friend Jose Arellano, "He has an opinion on everything, and he'll tell you straight to your face," and an assistant manager who does not show up on time may well expect to be greeted with the stony lecture: "This meeting was at 8:30."

"His energy, his enthusiasm and his temper are what set him apart from a lot of people," says his eldest son, Cesar Odio Jr., now a college basketball coach.

"I have several kinds of anger," says Odio. "Sometimes I react and say what I think at that moment," a phenomenon his wife calls "in the brain, out the mouth."

"I have another type of anger that I keep within myself. It's when I think there's something wrong, something's not kosher, somebody tries something with this office that's not right, not strictly right. I don't get angry in public. I don't react. I would just keep it to myself, but I would cut off my friendship. I have done it once. I will never be close to that person again."

Exile and separation

Cesar Humberto Odio is the eldest of 10 children. His father, Amador, a political ally of Marian Prio's father, owned what by 1950 had become Cuba's most successful trucking company. The family lived in Havana's fashionable Alturas de Miramar district and had a sprawling country home, Finca Hurrah, not far outside the city. "Life on the island was full of leisure," says Silvia Odio, the eldest of the manager's five sisters. "We were spoiled to death."

Young Cesar -- "A very good boy, good son, but he didn't like to study just for the sake of studying," his mother says -- was sent to private military academies in the United States. "They felt I needed the best schooling and the best discipline," Odio says, "and you do learn things, little things like being on time, all the time, appearance. I didn't want to be there, but I was there, and I guess a lot of it sticks." Even today, his penny loafers gleam.

The family fortunes changed abruptly when first Batista and then Castro seized power. For almost 20 years, until 1970, the Odios' history is plagued by exile, loss of property, separation and imprisonment.

Sarah Odio, who in 1959 was named mother of the year by the Havana newspaper Informacion, also was working by then in the underground alongside her husband, and two years later, like him, she was arrested and sent to jail. Her youngest child was 2.

"He never figured that my mother would be arrested," says Cesar Odio, who eventually sailed twice back to Cuba to infiltrate his own country in vain attempts to buy his parents' freedom. "I don't think they ever calculated the risks." The elder Odio was sentenced to 30 years and ended up on the Isle of Pines. His wife served part of her six-year term in a women's prison established in what had once been her own country house. With terrible irony, Finca Hurrah was rechristened America Libre. Where once there had been a bowling alley, there were prisoners. Where the chickens and the pigs had lived, there were prisoners. Being kept there, a literal prisoner in her own house, Sarah Odio now says quietly, "was terrible."

By the time of their parents' arrest, most of the Odio children had been parceled out among relatives, friends and schools in a loose chain that ran from Miami to Texas. Cesar Odio, saddled with the care of some of his younger siblings and starting a family of his own with his first wife, washed dishes, pumped gas and sold truck parts to buy food and meet the mortgage payments on his new house in Westchester.

None of the Odios talks comfortably about that period now. "If you ask me to live that episode again," says Silvia Odio, "I would tell you that I would rather go into the ocean with a big stone around my neck." Sarah and Amador Odio, married more than half a century and both now in their 70s, were freed in 1967 and 1970. Their South Dade house is not so grand as the homes they left behind, but it is spacious and comfortable, and they now happily preoccupy themselves keeping track of their more than three dozen grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Sarah Meier, their second-eldest daughter, who now lives in London, says, "Some of the women who were in jail get together, and they talk about what they went through, but (my mother) never goes. She doesn't try to go back to the past, because otherwise she couldn't enjoy what's now."

Before he joined the city, Cesar Odio spent about two decades working for private trucking and cement companies, including Maule Industries, the failed family business of former Miami Mayor Maurice Ferre. He had begun university studies in Cuba and eventually acquired a degree in public administration
from Florida Memorial College.

Now a grandfather himself, he has three grown children by his first wife and two more -- Carlos, 6, and Sarah, 2 1/2 -- by Prio, with whom he became reacquainted during the 1980 Mariel boatlift. "I first met her when she was 4 years old," says Odio, who was the assistant city manager assigned to handle arrangements for the refugees at the Orange Bowl, when Prio, who had grown up and become executive director of Miami Mental Health Center, arrived on the scene to offer psychological counseling.

"I remember when I met him," she says, "he said something like, 'Oh, that's exactly what I need, a bunch of psychologists.' He's trying to feed and shelter these people, and here we come in ready to do psychotherapy. He didn't appreciate my presence at all." The couple will have been married seven years in September, and the family lives in Coconut Grove with Vice Mayor Rosario Kennedy and Commissioner J.L. Plummer for neighbors.

"Our life is really very peaceful," says Prio, now 42. "We don't go out much, except he loves to go to the movies. I hate to go to the movies. I say to him, 'Cesar, I hardly see you. We're going to be sitting in front a screen looking at something else for two hours.' I want to go to a nice, romantic dinner, go dancing. Nah.. . . I was never the ideal girl. I'm sure when he thought of the ideal woman he wanted to marry, he would never have thought of me. In Cuba, they would have said I caught the last train. That's what they say when (the marriage) is late. I caught the last train, but I'm very happy with the train."

'I work for you'

When Cesar Odio took over as city manager after Sergio Pereira moved to Metro, he reorganized the city's Topsy municipal structure, laying off or eliminating some high-level administrators and erasing whole departments. The move earned him a cut-throat reputation around City Hall but saved money and paid off in a lot of good press. Except for a flap over inaccuracies on the resume he had submitted when he applied for the assistant manager's job -- he omitted his role as president of one financially troubled company and misidentified his position at another firm -- his own tenure at City Hall generally has been free of the scandals that have plagued some other South Florida public officials. He buys his suits at Saks Fifth Avenue or J. Bolado on Miracle Mile, "and I don't have so many suits."

Until recent weeks when tempers have flared on both sides, Odio's public association with the city commission has been determinedly modest and deferential. "I work for you," he will say over and over again. He has been known to describe his bosses as "like the fingers of your hand. You look at them, they're all different, and they all have their own agendas."

The highs of the job -- watching Bayside and the new Miami Arena go up or nailing down a Miss Universe pageant or the Miami Heat franchise -- are offset by the blows. The deaths of Miami Police officers David Herring, poisoned by carbon monoxide by his own faulty police car, and Victor Estefan, shot on duty this spring, were particularly devastating.

"I can't get used to dealing with people's lives," Odio says. "These are people you see every day, you work with, and all of a sudden they're gone. It's very, very tough."

For months, Odio has been talking about the possibility of retiring when he is 55. "I don't think I'm indispensable here. I think people come and go," and during a recent commission meeting when J.L. Plummer asks, "How long have you been city manager?" Odio grins and shoots back, "Too long."

"There is no best part of this job," he will say when he is very tired. "This is not fun."

Cesar Odio sometimes compares Miami's government structure to a snowman, haphazardly constructed and irregularly shaped. "That's how this city was built and run for years, in bits and pieces," he tells a May gathering of department heads. "That old thinking doesn't work anymore. We still have a lot of improving to do, folks. We still have a lot of improving to do."

And then he turns to the man sitting on his right and says, "If you were city manager, what would you do?"

"I think," says then-Police Chief Clarence Dickson, "I would do the best I can."