Calle Ocho, SW 8th Street, runs under your feet: the main commercial artery of Little Havana and one of the most culturally layered streets in America. The name itself is a small act of cultural self-assertion: in a city where streets have numbers, this community insisted on a name. Walk the blocks between 12th and 17th Avenues and you'll find cigar rollers working in shop windows, the smell of café cubano drifting from ventanitas — walk-up windows serving thimbles of rocket-fuel espresso — fruit vendors selling mamey sapote and guanábana, and botanicas selling religious candles and herbs for Santería practice.
Every March, Calle Ocho hosts the Calle Ocho Festival, one of the largest outdoor parties in the world: a street fair that closes twenty-three blocks and draws hundreds of thousands of people to dance to salsa, cumbia, and reggaeton. In an election year, every presidential candidate makes a stop here, because the Cuban American community that lives along these blocks has wielded disproportionate political influence for half a century. This street is not nostalgic.
It is alive and arguing with itself.