By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
I used to think of traditional or ethnic urban neighborhoods as old-timey places. I’d envision the post-potato-famine Irish tenements of nineteenth century New York City, Mario Puzo’s Little Italy from The Godfather Part II, or San Francisco’s Chinatown after prospectors discovered gold at Sutter’s Mill in 1849.
During a recent visit to South Florida, however, I learned that such neighborhoods formed during my own generation too. One of them is Little Havana in Miami.
One Monday afternoon in mid-March 2023, some of my Parsons Behle & Latimer law firm colleagues and I took a break from our nearby continuing legal education employment law conference to visit Calle Ocho (Southwest 8th Street), the beating heart of Cuban-American life and culture in Little Havana.
The National Trust for Historic Preservation calls the neighborhood a “national treasure.” The official Miami travel website says the “vibrant and iconic enclave” is known for “authentic Cuban restaurants, popular ventanitas (takeout windows), warm and toasty Cuban bakeries, and street festivals that are too colorful for words.”
We got a small taste of it all from an excellent tour guide named Michael Tome. The son of Cuban immigrants and a Miami native, Michael lives right on the Calle Ocho.
Michael explained how Little Havana formed in the early 1960s—just before I was born—after charismatic communist revolutionary leader Fidel Castro overthrew the American-supported regime of President Fulgencio Batista. A baptized Catholic, Castro attended Jesuit schools before adopting a Marxist ideology and leading the guerrilla war that brought him to power in Cuba.
Critics of Castro’s polarizing and often-brutal regime fled the country to South Florida, only 90 miles away. These exiles settled in Little Havana, hoping one day to return to a liberated Cuba. During their long disapora, which continues today, they and their descendants converted what was an Irish/Jewish enclave into a home away from their North Caribbean island home.
It was not an easy time. Michael vividly remembers his grandmother admonishing him to respect the man they once saw cleaning a department store floor. “Back home in Cuba,” she said, “he was a heart surgeon.”
Notwithstanding the many hardships, signs of resilience are everywhere in Little Havana, including roosters. Live roosters strut up and down the street. Large colorful rooster statues are everywhere too, but they are not mere decorations. Roosters symbolize strength and power in Cuban folklore.
Our tour started and ended with the Cuban culinary arts. We bought and ate fresh peanuts from Francisco Cazanas, known locally as “El Manisero” (the Peanut Vendor). Cazanas walks up and down Calle Ocho, selling (for one dollar) hand-rolled paper cones stuffed with the unsalted nutty snack.
At the neighborhood visitors center, our guide Michael served up thimble-sized cups of delicious but potent Cuban coffee (café cubano or cafecito). Later, we drank mojitos, and ate guava-filled pastries called pastelitos de guayaba.
The tour ended at Azucar, where we later enjoyed gourmet ice cream inspired by the owner’s abuela (grandmother). My unscientific survey during our short visit showed the most popular flavor was chocolate ice cream with a kick of cayenne pepper. The flavor, called “Burn in Hell, Fidel,” debuted in November 2016, right after Castro died.
In between stops for food and drink, Johnny “Big Papa” Cardona, owner of the “D Asis Guayaberas” shop, told us the history of the guayabera shirts he sells. The Cuban shirt includes four pockets to hold everything from cigars to farm tools to guava fruit. It even has slits on each side for more fluid hip motion while dancing, which Big Papa demonstrated several times.
A bit down the street, at “Casa Del Tabaco,” we watched an artisan named Maria hand-roll Cuban-style cigars. With two decades of experience—including in Havana—Maria deftly used tobacco leaves grown from Cuban seeds but not on Cuban farms. Not even Little Havana’s love of fine Cuban cigars is strong enough to overcome its aversion to giving any economic support to Fidel’s regime.
One of the most striking features of Little Havana is its many colorful wall murals. They depict luminaries like Gloria and Emilio Estefan, singer Celia Cruz (who shouted “azucar (sugar)!” at her concerts), and the world leaders who attended the 1994 Summit of the Americas held in Miami.
The murals also reminded me that Bacardi rum once was based in Cuba, that McDonalds can adapt its restaurants to any culture at any place any time, and that the rapper Pitbull (Armando Christian Pérez) remains very popular in his native South Florida.
The sentimental heart of the neighborhood is the black marble memorial for the failed April 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. The effort to liberate Cuba was planned by the Eisenhower administration and approved by President John F. Kennedy. Several hundred Cubans then living in Miami volunteered to fight.
JFK pulled the plug on critical U.S. air support for the invasion after the operation did not go as planned, and Fidel eventually prevailed. The local monument, topped by an eternal flame, fondly remembers many locals who died, with no love lost for JFK or any of the other Kennedys who followed.
After the tour, our group enjoyed a delicious meal at Sala’o Cuban Bar & Pescaderia. (I highly recommend the tomato-marinated flank steak with sweet potato fries!) The restaurant pays loving tribute to Ernest Hemingway and his 1952 novella The Old Man and the Sea.
A mural in the bar quotes the great writer, “I drink to make other people more interesting…” Between drinks in Cuba, Hemingway wrote his Pulitzer prize-winning book about an aging and salty (“salao” in colloquial Cuban) fisherman named Santiago and his struggle to capture a giant marlin in the Gulf of Mexico.
Santiago deals with setback after setback while trying to return home with his giant fish in tow. Refusing to give up, he eventually exclaims, “[M]an is not made for defeat. A man can be destroyed but not defeated.”
Hemingway published his book in 1952, well before the historic events that gave birth to Little Havana, yet his salty old fisherman still managed to define the spirit of the unique place I saw over seventy years later.
*Mike O’Brien (author website here) is a writer and attorney living in Salt Lake City, Utah. Paraclete Press published his book Monastery Mornings, about growing up with the monks at the old Trappist monastery in Huntsville, Utah, in August 2021. The League of Utah Writers chose it as the best non-fiction book of 2022.
