Cuban and Caribbean Florida, A Century of Arrivals

Florida has been a Caribbean place for as long as it has been a North American one. The currents of the Florida Straits, ninety miles wide at their narrowest, have moved people in both directions for centuries, Spanish colonists to Havana, Cuban cigar workers to Key West and Tampa, Bahamian sponge fishermen to Tarpon Springs, Haitian refugees to the waters off Miami, and, in the largest wave, the Cuban exiles who transformed South Florida after nineteen fifty-nine. Key West was once a Cuban city in everything but name.

By the eighteen sixties, Cuban cigar manufacturers had begun moving their operations to Key West, drawn by proximity to Havana's tobacco supply and by distance from Spanish colonial taxation. At its peak in the eighteen eighties, Key West was the wealthiest city per capita in the United States, and its economy ran almost entirely on cigars. José Martí, the Cuban poet and independence leader, visited Key West and Tampa repeatedly in the early eighteen nineties, raising funds and writing the political program for Cuban independence from the cigar workers' mutual aid halls.

In January eighteen ninety-two he gathered Tampa's cigar workers and drafted preparatory resolutions that laid the groundwork for the Cuban Revolutionary Party, which was formally founded in April of that year. The largest transformation came after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba on January first, nineteen fifty-nine. In the first years of exile, the Cuban population in Miami was concentrated in a neighborhood that became Little Havana, but the community grew far beyond any single neighborhood.

By the nineteen eighties, Cuban Americans had become a dominant force in Miami-Dade County politics, business, and culture. The Mariel boatlift of nineteen eighty brought one hundred twenty-five thousand additional Cubans to Florida in a matter of months. Later waves came from Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Colombia, and across the Caribbean and Central and South America, making South Florida one of the most demographically complex regions in the United States.

Florida's Caribbean identity is not a recent or southern-only phenomenon. It runs through the state's entire length, from the Bahamian fishing families of the Keys to the Haitian communities of Palm Beach County and the Venezuelan and Colombian arrivals reshaping Doral and Weston in the twenty-first century.