FLORIDA PLACE TO EXPLORE
Little Havana
Miami-Dade County · South Florida & the Keys
A neighborhood running about two and a half miles west from downtown Miami along the river, with Calle Ocho through the middle of it.
ABOUT THIS PLACE
It was a modest southern and Jewish neighborhood in the 1930s. Cubans leaving after 1959 settled here in such numbers that by 1970 more than eighty-five in every hundred residents were Cuban, and this became the place exiles arrived at. The mix has changed since: by 1989 Cubans were fifty-eight in every hundred of the Hispanic population, down from eighty-four ten years earlier, as Nicaraguans, Hondurans and other Central Americans arrived. Southwest Eighth Street, Calle Ocho, carries the Walk of Fame with stones for Gloria Estefan and Celia Cruz among others, Domino Park where men have played at the tables for decades, and Cuban Memorial Boulevard with its monuments to the Bay of Pigs. Viernes Culturales fills the street on the last Friday of the month. The Calle Ocho Festival draws over a million people, and in 1988 it produced a conga line of 119,986. The National Trust for Historic Preservation named it a national treasure in 2017
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