Tacos and tequilas – taste the new Miami nice

Hemingway’s house, or stopping en route to Disney or a cruise. Even Trump prefers Mar-a-Lago, outside the melting pot of the city, to think about his border wall and Big Bad Latinos. Were they all missing something? I started out in Calle Ocho, or SW 8th street, in Little Havana. In some ways it’s your average US main drag: parking lots, strip malls, Taco Bell, Wells Fargo, wave after wave of big trucks and souped-up cars – it’s the southern end of Route 41. But on foot you soon pick up an un-American vibe. For one thing, you’re not the only person walking on the sidewalk (I even saw chickens and cockerels hanging out on corners, pueblo-style). There were benches in the shade, where old-timers watched the world go by or debated politics in variously accented Spanish. There were Salvadorean and Cuban eateries, a taco joint paying homage to famous Mexican wrestler El Santo and a “sanguich” bar. Outside a café a couple scoffed arepas – the maize stodgebomb that’s a staple in Colombia and Venezuela – and eggs; it seems Latinos love their huevos. Pensioners played dominoes on their little corner plot and I passed Cuban cigar stores and guayabera shirt shops, smart barberías offering a shave and some heavy gelling. The flags of Central and South America and the Caribbean waved in the tropical breeze. There were lots of places where you could send money to somewhere else.

An eternal flame burns above a monument to Brigade 2506 – the Cuban exiles involved in the Bay of Pigs debacle – and a martyr named Nestor “Tony” Izquierdo who fell fighting the Nicaraguan Sandinistas is memorialised, automatic rifle at hip-height, in bronze. You’ll never “get” Cuba unless you get antiCommunism: the fact so many people are the descendants of exiles, and they bear an enormous grudge not only against Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and the USSR, but also against America for not helping in the retaking of “their” homeland. A key text to make sense of this is Joan Didion’s 1987 monograph Miami – tense, precise, damning, it is non-partisan and powerful. “Havana vanities come to dust in Miami,” she wrote. Then again, all vanities go that way in the end.

Dr Paul George, resident historian at the excellent HistoryMiami

Museum (a Smithsonian outpost) Downtown, does guided walks and boat rides to peel back the layers of history. Founded in 1896, Miami is a young city and has grown from 300 people to almost half a million – the metro area is home to more than six million. Few cities have this extreme, exponential micro-history and Dr George connected up the short chapters deftly as he led me through the exhibits of ancient bones, dugout canoes, Spanish ingots from sunken ships, sea sponges once a massive industry here – and the 20th century boomtown, of flappers, prohibition violations and the watershed that was the Cuban revolution.

“This is a place for starting over. People come escaping the cold weather, dictatorship and economic problems. Miami is a never-never land, kind of nebulous.” He has a hard time getting Floridians to take an interest in their past – even today some 63 per cent of Miami residents are foreignborn: “History is not really their main concern.” Tourism, aviation, real estate: these are the forces that built Miami. “People from other cities think we have a swagger, that we’re flamboyant, and party-oriented,” said Dr George. “It’s true, we’re flashy.” A proud resident of Little Havana, he sees immigration as a positive. “We’ve come back to our Spanish heritage since the Sixties, gone full circle.”

Latino Miami has several futures. Cuisine is a major one. Over a week I tried thrillingly tasty Mexican food, enjoyed an excellent Uruguayan steak lunch, sampled “nuevo” Peruvian food as good as any in Lima and had my first ever Puerto Rican meal, featuring mofongo (crackling and plantain stew) and tembleque (coconut pudding) – two dishes that must play a key role in that stereotypical Latino body shape.

A swanky dinner can be had at Estefan Kitchen, owned by music super-duo Gloria and Emilio Estefan – creators of the Miami Sound Machine – in the heart of the Design District. The names of Gucci, Givenchy and Tom Ford glittered as I made my way to the litter-free piazza and the restaurant. Blue lighting, white surfaces, mosaic tiling inspired, apparently, by the interior décor of Havana’s Hotel Nacional “before the revolution” – the Estefans are wellknown Castro-dissers. The food is luxe