Outside HistoryMiami, you face the city's primary repository of its own complicated past, housed in the Miami-Dade Cultural Center complex designed by architect Philip Johnson and opened in 1983. The museum's collection spans from the Tequesta people, who inhabited this region for thousands of years before European contact, through the Spanish colonial period, the Seminole Wars, Henry Flagler's railroad development, and the twentieth century's successive waves of immigration. What makes HistoryMiami unusual is its willingness to tell the difficult parts of that story: the forced removal of Indigenous peoples, the imposition of racial segregation, the destruction of Overtown by highway construction, the cocaine trafficking that flooded the city in the 1980s.
The museum's galleries on Cuban exile culture are particularly strong — oral histories, artifacts, and documents that capture the experience of a community that came here with nothing and built one of the most politically influential ethnic communities in American life. Check the exhibition calendar: the temporary shows are often the most revealing windows into Miami's present as much as its past.