Listen for the click and slap of tiles at Máximo Gómez Park, known universally as Domino Park, one of the most human-scaled and moving public spaces in Miami. The park was created in 1976 and is named for the Cuban independence hero, but its fame comes from what happens under its open-air shelters every day: Cuban men, and increasingly Cuban women and younger players, sit at concrete tables and play dominoes. The click and slap of the tiles, the argument and laughter in rapid Spanish, the cigar smoke curling in the afternoon light — this is a daily theater of community that has been running for nearly fifty years.
During the Elián González saga of 1999 and 2000, when a six-year-old Cuban boy became the center of an international custody dispute, Domino Park was a gathering place for the passions and protests that gripped the Cuban exile community. Sit on one of the benches outside the playing area and watch. You are observing a living tradition, a community maintaining its coherence through the repeated ritual of a game, in a park named for a revolution, in a country that was supposed to be temporary.