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South Beach, by Alexander Chen.
Cubans in Miami
At the forefront of a culinary revolution
by Maricel Presilla
They came by sea and by air in battered chartered planes and makeshift rafts and transformed Miami into a vibrant city with deep Latin roots. For Cubans are like the sturdy tubers at the core of their cuisine; they stay firmly in the ground and don't easily dissolve into their surroundings.
The first major wave of Cuban immigrants settled in the declining downtown area between Flagler and Eighth Streets, now known as Little Havana, in the early 1960s. Gradually they moved north to Hialeah, west and south of Coral Gables, Key Biscayne, and other affluent areas, and, most recently, east of revitalized Miami Beach.
South Florida's links to Cuba, however, go back as far as 1868, when immigrants and exiles transformed sleepy Key West into a prosperous Cuban enclave complete with cigar factories, social clubs, newspapers, restaurants, coffee shops, and schools. Key West also became a lively point of commercial exchange between Cuba and the United States. By the 1920s, entrepreneur Charles Brooks was shipping Cuban citrus fruits and avocados by boat to Key West and by train to points north. When a fierce hurricane destroyed the railway in 1935, Brooks planted citrus and avocados farther north, in Homestead, where his grandson, J. R., later founded Brooks Tropicals, Florida's largest shipper of tropical produce.
El Palacio de los Jugos (Palace of the Juice) is where Cuban Miami comes to shop for food.
A quarter of a century later, Cuban immigrants planted fields of tropical root vegetables—starchy yuca, sweet boniato, and shaggy malanga—as well as plantains and tropical fruits, alongside the old groves in Homestead. The magnificent mamey sapote groves were protected by barbed wire and watch-dogs, as if the leathery brown skin and sweet, salmon-colored flesh of the fruit enclosed gold nuggets instead of shiny black seeds.
Homero Capote, a farmer from central Cuba, is emblematic of the resilient wave of immigrants whose knowledge and toil fueled a culinary revolution that sustains Latin American cuisines in this country and provides the raw materials for some of our best Florida chefs. Capote began as a field worker but soon rented land of his own and experimented with the corn seeds and malanga corms his father sent. Over the years, Capote built up a thriving business of tropical tubers nurtured by hard work and commitment to his adopted land.
During the 1960s, Miami's once lonely and quiet downtown, its manicured sameness, also changed. The streets became crowded with small bodegas (grocery stores) and storefront Cuban restaurants serving fragrant black beans, hearty roast pork, and tender yuca doused in
mojo, a tart, garlicky sauce of citrus juice and oil. Juice stands sold batidos (shakes made with dozens of exotic tropical fruits), and Cuban bakeries turned out guava pastries and elaborately decorated cakes for the lavish fiestas de quince, with which Cuban families celebrate their daughters' fifteenth birthdays.
On weekends, Cuban families flocked to Key Biscayne with makeshift kitchens in tow. They filled the peaceful, tree-lined beach at Cape Florida with Latin radio music and fast-paced Spanish dialog. While the children swam, parents and grandparents cooked meals under the pine trees, and the tempting aroma of Cuban barbecue and rice and beans warmed the ancient stones of the lighthouse.
At the time, two kinds of restaurants catered to the burgeoning Cuban population: large, ornate Spanish establishments that appealed to their strong Spanish roots and the Mediterranean elements of their cuisine, and small cafeterias. The cafeterias were oases where people went late at night to eat Cuban sandwiches with cafe con leche (coffee with lots of milk) or during the day to meet and talk over sips of strong coffee from tiny paper cups.
Miami Cubans are like the coffee they drink: bittersweet, intense, and passionate, embracing their new home with the same ferocity with which they cherish their native Cuba. It is this paradoxical longing for what was lost and attachment to what is new that has transformed Miami into a hybrid Cuban city where even the old men playing dominoes on Eighth Street (Calle Ocho), nostalgic for Cuba, are among the most devoted of Miamians.
Each new wave of immigrants has refreshed the "Cubanness" lost by the previous, more assimilated groups. A virtual tidal wave of immigrants washed over South Florida in 1980, when Castro released 125,000 Cubans. In the years that followed, open-air markets that resembled chunks of Cuba—with pigs roasting close to the sidewalk, outdoor fruit stands, and people sitting down on wooden stools to drink coconut juice—sprouted in Miami. Once the most popular of these markets, El Palacio de los Jugos, is now a must-see for any food writer and tourist visiting the area.
There are several interesting cafes in and around Espanola Way serving a variety of Cuban staples.
Though Cuban coffee may look like espresso, don't he fooled by appearances. It is even thicker and stronger.
Drawn by the success of the Cubans, many other Latin Americans began settling in the region. Miami became the emotional and economic capital of the Latin American world, attracting many of its movie and television stars and pop singers. Today, 1.1 million, or nearly 60 percent, of metropolitan Miami's 2 million residents are Latin-American, about half of them Cuban. The Cuban population continues to grow as Cubans living elsewhere in the United States fulfill what seems to be their destiny: to end their days in Miami.
For Cubans and other Latin Americans, the road to Miami was built of shattered dreams and the mortar of new hope. At the road's end sits a great pot in which the flavors of all of Latin America simmer and beckon. You can sample Salvadoran pupusas (stuffed tortillas), Argentinian churrasco (grilled meat), and Nicaraguan tres leches ("three milks" cake). The town of Sweetwater has become the heart of the Nicaraguan community, where you can enjoy desserts in informal cafeterias and small bakeries and flavorful meats at elegant steak houses. Adding to the traditional bastions of Cuban fare, such as Versailles and La Carreta on Eighth Street, are newer, upscale restaurants, including Yuca and Victor's Cafe, offering an inventive, hybrid cuisine.
Part of the ongoing cultural replenishment of Miami is the merging of food and music. People go to restaurants where they can also enjoy shows by performers newly arrived from Cuba. This is the kind of lively night life for which Havana was once famous.
Every year before Lent, Miami explodes into the "Calle Ocho Festival," a huge carnival sponsored by the Kiwanis Club of Little Havana to celebrate a community that has come of age. Its core is on Calle Ocho, where the first Cuban immigrants settled and where every block is crowded with kiosks, the smell of Cuban tamales, roast pork and black beans and rice mingling with that of Colombian arepas (corn patties) and Peruvian anticuchos (skewered beef heart). And then there is the music. Rhythmic and infectious, it captures the essence of those who move easily between two worlds and dance to one celebratory Miami beat.
Dining Out in Miami
Order a big dish of ropa vieja-and be sure to wear your best threads
by Kendall Hamersly
South Florida is a fusion of cultures, and South Florida dining is a fusion of cuisines—dishes from around the globe coming together in the same neighborhood, in the same restaurant, on the same plate. If you want
