Sipping Cuban coffee at a ventanita? Here’s who you have to thank for it
Miami’s first ventanita, the window serving up cortadito, croquetas and pastelitos outside Cuban & Latin restaurants, was reportedly started by Versailles’ owner.
Felipe Valls Sr. says he was simply trying to fix a problem when he built Miami’s first ventanita.
As stories go, it’s the kind you would expect to hear at one of Miami’s ubiquitous walk-up windows. Ventanitas are where Miami meets to drink strong, sweet Cuban coffee and swap stories. Sometimes to talk politics, sometimes to tell tall tales — often they’re indistinguishable from each other.
Ventanitas are stopovers after late-night partying or stops on the campaign trail, Miami’s version of the Iowa State Fair. They’re busy at noon for a lunchtime pick-me-up or at 3 a.m. with revelers seeking to sober up.
They have evolved into a unique creation — something that had never existed in Cuba but has come to signify Miami’s roundthe-clock social culture.
But the story of how they came
to exist, at all — and how Valls could be the one who invented them — requires a colada of Cuban coffee to share, a pair of fresh-fried ham croquetas, and a flashback to a time when Miami was receiving its first wave of exiled Cuban families.
More than a decade before he founded arguably the world’s most famous Cuban restaurant, Versailles, Valls arrived in Miami in December 1960 at age 25, fleeing Fidel Castro’s revolution with a wife seven months pregnant and two children under 5.
He had owned several manufacturing businesses in Santiago, Cuba, and found work at a restaurant equipment company downtown, designing restaurant kitchens, installing refrigeration equipment and salvaging appliances from shuttered restaurants to fix and resell.
In 1963, he recalled, one of his regular clients, El Oso Blanco market, near the corner of Flagler Street and Southwest 12th Avenue in what would soon be called Little Havana, asked him to help remodel.
It was a market typical of its time, a shop with no facade, open to the not-sohospitable Miami weather — but it was primed to become the hub for Cubans in exile.
The owners wanted to close in the market to take advantage of a new advancement that was sweeping the South: air conditioning. And the Cuban owners also wanted Valls to find them something they’d been unable to source anywhere else in the country — a commercial espresso machine.
Valls was about to confront a new kind of design problem when two unexpected forces collided in Miami at exactly the same time in the 1960s: Cubans and air conditioning.
“La ventanita was born out of necessity,” recalled Valls, now 86.
In the first two years after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, more than 135,000 refugees arrived in Miami. Another 340,000 arrived through 1973 with help from Freedom Flights in a deal between Cuba and the United States.
These Cubans wanted coffee. And not watery mugs of American drip. They wanted the coffee they knew from their island, where cultural mixing had introduced them to Italian espressos made syrupy sweet when the first brewed drops are whipped with sugar for a frothy crema.
In Cuba, coffee culture was centered around carts, similar to New York hot dog stands. Others were little more than open-air kiosks or counters, serving coffee at 3 cents a cup, usually with bites like guava pastelitos, croquetas and a choice of cigar. Those stands were the community water coolers, where friends gossiped and talked politics.
Meanwhile, in 1960, Miami was tired of the heat.
As hard as it is to imagine during a Florida summer, air conditioning did not become common until the second half of the 20th century.
Floridian John Gorrie invented a patented “coldair machine” in 1851 to keep yellow fever patients cool, and any Floridian can agree he deserves that marble statue of him in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall. A/C was a creation that was uniquely American, the first society in the world to popularize its use, according to the definitive work on this subject, Floridian Ray Arsenault’s scholarly article “The End of the Long Hot Summer: The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture.”
But it wasn’t until the invention of the first window unit in 1952 that air conditioning snowballed.
When the first wave of Cubans seeking refuge arrived in Miami in 1960, only 18 percent of all households had air conditioning, Arsenault wrote. But by the end of the decade, more than 60 percent of all Florida homes were cooled by A/C.
Soon, everything from stadiums to restaurants in the South was being built or retrofitted for artificial cooling. A/C was no longer a curiosity. It was the standard of living.
“Air conditioning changed just about everything. It changed the culture in the South,” said Arsenault, the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida.
All of a sudden, in exiles’ homes and businesses, there was a new refrain aside from chants against Fidel: “Cierra la puerta que se va el aire!”
Close the door, you’re letting all the air out!
El Oso Blanco didn’t want to be left behind. It wanted a pair of whooshing espresso makers to draw crowds, and it also wanted those crowds to be cool and comfortable.
“By the end of the ’60s, you’d be hard pressed to have a successful business without central air,” Arsenault said. “It’s one of the signature changes of the 1960s.”
Valls worked on the first problem: the coffee.
He borrowed money from a loan shark to buy five Italcrem espresso machines at $300 apiece from a contact in Spain, an exorbitant amount for the time because they were sent by air, not popular enough in Miami to be shipped in bulk by boat. (Years later, he could buy them at $15 each.) Valls sold them all the first week. He paid to have the Miami plumbers’ association certify them, after adding a small pressure release valve to meet safety standards.
Next, the heat.
El Oso Blanco wanted to enclose its market but keep its coffee sales out front.
Valls’ solution? A modified guillotine-style window.
Valls had a background in innovation. A 1950 graduate of Riverside Military Academy in Gainesville, Georgia, Valls had bypassed Boston University and returned to Santiago, Cuba, where he started several manufacturing businesses that made glass rum bottles for Bacardi, cement bags for Titan American and industrial refrigerators.
So he talked with a Miami window fabricator to remove the bottom track of a single-hung window, reinforce the sides and lay it over a counter that stretched from just inside the restaurant to the sidewalk outside.
A blast of cool air kissed the customer when the cafecito waitress opened the window and served a thimbleful of sweet, black nectar of the Cuban gods.
“That’s why la ventanita exists,” Valls said. “They could have their coffee, eat a pastelito, buy and smoke a cigar and be on their way.”
Miami became the birthplace of the ventanita.
That northeast corner of Flagler and Southwest
12th, for a time, became the heart of Little Havana, the unofficial capital of exiled Cubans. The San Bernardo ice cream shop next door to El Oso Blanco was a hit with young families. And La Tijera, a fiveand-dime founded by three Cuban brothers where you could buy everything from color televisions to filters for your stove-top Italian espresso maker, was as essential as cafecito.
Before long, Valls started his own restaurant equipment company and installed the combo espresso maker and ventanitas all over Little Havana. Others caught on to the idea.
Soon, ventanitas sprang up overnight.
“They started putting up a wall here, a window there. And one day you looked up and it was enclosed. No inspectors. Nothing,” laughed Estrella Aragón, 81, whose late husband, Alberto Villalobos, opened the longtime Miami favorite takeaway Cuban restaurant, El Morro Castle, in 1964.
“Felipe knew what he was doing,” she said.
Aragón said when her husband built his second El Morro Castle, their first sit-down spot near the hospital in east Hialeah, he insisted on a ventanita. He dropped her off in the mornings and picked her up in the afternoons so she could manage the window herself.
“The very first espresso makers took a lot of muscle to operate,” Aragón recalled. “You got a good workout.”
Ventanitas became as essential as air-conditioning to a mom-and-pop restaurant’s success. The shop could reserve its inside tables for customers paying for larger, higherdollar meals, while the window waitress could keep the lines moving.
And she often became the face of the restaurant.
“My dad had me permanently stationed at the window for 28 years. It’s an excellent way to connect with people,” said Mercy Gonzalez, whose father, Victoriano “Benito” Gonzalez, founded El Rey de las Fritas Cuban hamburger chain. “You have to be quick. You give people their dose of hospitality and coffee for the day and let them be on their way.”
The ventanita allowed Cubans to preserve their coffee culture while adapting to their new air-conditioned world.
“Ventanitas provide that opportunity for vibrant pedestrian activity with patrons imbibing café or a con leche from the sidewalk,” said Paul George, HistoryMiami Museum’s historian in residence. “They are the antidote to the sterility and loneliness of life in car-driven suburbias.”
Valls learned the inner working of restaurants and soon thereafter bought Badia’s, a well-known sandwich shop at Southwest 16th Avenue and Eighth Street, when it was first starting to be called Calle Ocho. The first thing he did was remodel it to include a window. That site has for years been the home of El Pub, a restaurant popular with tourists and locals that has been closed for much of the pandemic.
El Oso Blanco and 10 other stores burned down in a spectacular fire on Valentine’s Day 1977 — and with it went Miami’s first ventanita. About 110 of Miami’s 150 firefighters battled the blaze overnight, the Miami Herald wrote the morning after. The fire was ruled arson, but no one was ever charged.
With his son, Felipe Jr., Valls would go on to open more than 40 restaurants over the years, including La Carreta, Casa Juancho, Casa Cuba, La Palma and his signature spot, Versailles.
He made sure all of them had a version of the innovation that changed Miami coffee culture forever.
“Ventanitas are iconic,” Gonzalez said. “I don’t think they’ll ever go out of style.”