Miami's Little Havana: Calle Ocho, Domino Park & the Cuban Exile That Built a Neighborhood

Little Havana is the neighborhood west of downtown Miami where the Cuban exile community built a second Havana after Fidel Castro's revolution of 1959 drove hundreds of thousands of Cubans from their island. The neighborhood grew along Southwest Eighth Street, known in Spanish as Calle Ocho, and by the 1960s it was the social and commercial center of the Cuban diaspora in the United States, a place where the language, the coffee, the cigars, and the politics of the lost island were kept alive in the steam of a new city. According to [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Havana), Little Havana is located on the historic Calle Ocho (8th Street), where it is a place for Cuban immigrants to gather, drink coffee, smoke cigars, and play dominos, and the park has also been a gathering place for political demonstrations and a symbol of the exile community.

Calle Ocho and the Ventanitas

Calle Ocho is the main artery of Little Havana, a street of Cuban bakeries, cigar shops, and restaurants that serve cafecito, the sweet, strong Cuban espresso, from walk-up windows called ventanitas, where customers stand on the sidewalk and argue about baseball and politics in Spanish. The ventanita is the social institution of the neighborhood, a place where a three-dollar coffee buys twenty minutes of conversation and the sense that Havana is still alive, three hundred miles north of where it sank. The street is also home to the Walk of Fame, the Paseo de las Estrellas, which honors Latin musicians and celebrities, and to the Tower Theater, a 1926 Art Deco movie house that became the first in Miami to show Spanish-language films.

Domino Park and Máximo Gómez

At the corner of Calle Ocho and Southwest 15th Avenue sits Máximo Gómez Park, known to everyone as Domino Park, where elderly Cuban men play dominoes at outdoor tables from morning until night, the slapping of tiles audible a block away. The park is named after General Máximo Gómez, the Dominican-born military leader of Cuba's war of independence against Spain in the late 1800s, and it is the social heart of the exile community, a place where the game is played with the intensity of a religion. According to the [Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau](https://www.miamiandbeaches.com/l/outdoor-experiences/domino-park/5611), Domino Park, officially Máximo Gómez Park, is a social spot popular with locals, right on historic Calle Ocho (8th Street), named after General Máximo Gómez, a Cuban revolutionary.

Viernes Culturales and the Calle Ocho Festival

On the last Friday of every month, Little Havana hosts Viernes Culturales, Cultural Fridays, a street festival of art, music, and dance that closes Calle Ocho to traffic and fills it with vendors, musicians, and families. The annual Calle Ocho Festival, held every March, is the largest Hispanic street festival in the United States, drawing over a million people to a twenty-three-block party of salsa, Cuban food, and carnival rides. The festival was founded in 1978 as a way to bring the neighborhood together and has become the annual celebration of the entire Latin community of Miami, a single day when Calle Ocho belongs to every nation of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and Latin America.

A Mimosa for the Ventanita

A morning in Little Havana, with the smell of cafecito and Cuban pastries in the air, calls for a sparkling drink that can stand up to the strong coffee and the sweet guava pastelitos. A [classic Champagne mimosa](/recipes/classic-champagne-mimosa) is the natural match, the orange juice echoing the citrus of the cafecito and the bubbles lifting the rich Cuban pastries. A [passionfruit mimosa](/recipes/passionfruit-mimosa) is the most Cuban choice, its tropical passionfruit a nod to the guava and mango that flavor the neighborhood's bakeries.

**Reference Links:**

- Little Havana (Calle Ocho, Cuban exile community, dominos, cafecito): [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Havana)

- Domino Park / Máximo Gómez Park (Cuban revolutionary, Calle Ocho, social spot): [Greater Miami Convention & Visitors Bureau](https://www.miamiandbeaches.com/l/outdoor-experiences/domino-park/5611)