Calle Ocho and Little Havana

Turn onto Southwest Eighth Street, the road Cubans renamed Calle Ocho, and you enter the heart of exile Miami. At Domino Park, officially Maximo Gomez Park, older men have clacked tiles across folding tables for decades, arguing politics between plays. A few miles east stands the Freedom Tower, the ornate nineteen twenties building where the federal Cuban Refugee Program processed hundreds of thousands of new arrivals, handing out powdered milk, cheese, and resettlement papers.

Many call it the Ellis Island of the South. During the Freedom Flights, from nineteen sixty five to nineteen seventy three, two planes a day carried roughly three hundred thousand Cubans here, the largest airborne refugee bridge in American history. Along Cuban Memorial Boulevard, monuments honor the Bay of Pigs brigade and the lost homeland.

At Versailles Restaurant, exile leaders have held court over cortaditos and croquetas for half a century. Every March, the Calle Ocho Festival fills the street with more than a million people. This is where a displaced nation rebuilt its capital in exile, block by block, cafe by cafe.