Calle Ocho and the Exile Capital

Southwest Eighth Street is where you go to understand what Miami is for, if you are Cuban and came here because you had no choice. The coffee window at Versailles, open since nineteen seventy-one, has served as the unofficial senate of the exile community for more than fifty years. You order at the window, you stand at the counter, you talk about what is happening in Cuba, and then you go back to building the second capital.

The Cuban exile community that settled in Miami after nineteen fifty-nine transformed a mid-sized southern resort city into something that had no precedent in American immigration history: a community defined not by assimilation but by the expectation of return. The exile community did not come to Miami to become American. They came to wait out a revolution that, in the early nineteen sixties, most of them expected to last a few years at most. They built their institutions, their press, their radio stations, their civic organizations, with the explicit understanding that these were temporary structures for a temporary exile. The revolution lasted sixty-plus years. The exile became permanent. The infrastructure they built became the city.

The community that built Little Havana and that processes its politics at the Versailles window was, and largely remains, white Cuban. Cuba's population at the time of the revolution was roughly one-third Afro-Cuban or mixed-race, but the wave that fled was disproportionately professional, white, and Catholic. The Black Cuban exiles who arrived alongside them, and in subsequent waves including the Mariel Boatlift, encountered the racial hierarchies of American society and a secondary exclusion from the power structures of the exile community itself. The Versailles window is real. The community it represents is not all of it.

The dominoes game in Domino Park at the corner of Southwest Fifteenth Avenue has been running continuously since nineteen seventy-six, rain permitting.