Want a Short Course in Cuban Culture?

It's all around you along a single street in Miami

19 April 2010

The food is fresh, Cuban-influenced and not as spicy as one might expect along Calle Ocho.

The city of Miami, Florida, is an oasis of swaying palm trees, white beaches, yachts and gigantic tour ships in the harbor, a handy monorail transit system that winds all through downtown, and boutiques and clubs in a trendy shopping plaza called Coconut Grove.

And several times a year, a generally quiet part of town with no big buildings or yachts comes alive with a flourish.

It's an old, crowded neighborhood of modest stucco homes and tiny shops that stretches for about 30 blocks along Eighth Street.

Carol M. HighsmithLittle Havana lies, literally, in the shadow of a much more modern Miami landmark: Metromover, the free monorail transit.

Only the people here call it Calle Ocho, and even the signs at the McDonald's fast-food restaurant are in Spanish.

This is Miami's Little Havana, where Cuban immigrants and their children have lived, worked, and shopped since the early 1960s. Communist leader Fidel Castro's overthrow of the Cuban government in 1959 triggered a huge exodus of Cubans to the west Miami neighborhood.

And Little Havana's population swelled again during six months in 1980, when more than 100,000 Cubans were permitted to leave Castro's island en masse in what came to be called the Mariel Boatlift.