Versailles and the Cuban Exile Coffee Window

The window is narrow. It opens onto Southwest Eighth Street and is framed by the same yellow-and-white tile that covers the interior of Versailles, the restaurant that has occupied this corner since nineteen seventy-one. You order a cortadito, which arrives in a small plastic cup. You stand on the sidewalk. People around you are talking politics at a volume that suggests the conversation has been going on for decades and will continue after you leave. You are in the informal senate of the Cuban exile community in Miami, and the session is always in order.

Versailles opened a decade after the first wave of Cuban exiles arrived in Miami, by which point the exile community had already built a parallel city within the city: Spanish-language radio stations, a Spanish-language press, civic organizations, veterans' associations of the Bay of Pigs, and the mutual conviction that the exile was temporary and the return to Cuba imminent. Versailles became the place where all of it was processed out loud. The Mariel Boatlift in nineteen eighty, the Elian Gonzalez affair in nineteen ninety-nine and two thousand, every shift in United States-Cuba policy, every death of a Castro-era figure: these events were debated at the window and on the stools inside in the hours after they happened.

The community that built Versailles and that gives it its political significance was overwhelmingly white Cuban. Cuba in nineteen fifty-nine had a population that was roughly one-third Afro-Cuban or mixed-race, but the professional class that fled the revolution was disproportionately white, disproportionately Catholic, and disproportionately concentrated in Havana. The Black Cuban exiles who came in subsequent waves, particularly through Mariel, encountered both American racial hierarchies and the existing power structures of an exile community that had consolidated without them. The window at Versailles is real. The community it represents is part of the story.