Little Havana

At first, the area called Little Havana was known as the Shenandoah and Riverside neighborhoods and offered inexpensive housing and a bit of a blank slate for exiles and refugees to start new lives, but as more and more Cubans began immigrating to Miami [1], the area began to take on a more definitive identity.

Some observers have gone as far as to say that walking along Little Havana’s Calle Ocho [2] is a reasonable facsimile for a stroll through the Cuban capital, but nobody’s going to mistake the low-slung mid-20th-century buildings here for the crumbling majesty of Habana Vieja [3] any time soon.

Still, what Little Havana lacks in architectural beauty it more than makes up for in its vibrant sense of community.