When Fidel Castro took power in 1959, Cuban exiles settled in the neighborhood whose edge you have reached: Little Havana, the heart of Cuban exile culture in the United States, which over sixty years grew into something more complicated and more interesting than a simple transplant. When Fidel Castro took power in Cuba in 1959, waves of upper and middle-class Cubans fled to Miami, settling in this working-class neighborhood just west of downtown. They named their new streets and businesses after the places they'd left — Calle Ocho for SW 8th Street, Domino Park for Máximo Gómez Park — and they built institutions with the explicit purpose of maintaining Cuban identity until they could return home.
They never returned. Instead, Little Havana became a permanent community, its Cuban character deepened by later arrivals from the Mariel boatlift of 1980 and subsequent waves of migration. More recently it has absorbed Central American immigrants, and today the neighborhood is a genuinely pan-Latino space.
The Cuban restaurants and cigar shops that line Calle Ocho coexist with Nicaraguan bakeries and Honduran pupuserias. The exile dream has aged into a living neighborhood, and the living neighborhood is richer for it.