The end of Little Havana?

MIAMI – It’s easy to miss the tide of “development” that could soon transform Little Havana into something quite different from what it has been for a long time: a community where people with very limited means could at least get a roof over their heads, albeit hardly luxurious and usually just barely affordable.

For the most part, the big cranes haven’t arrived yet, so right now there is no furor on the street over looming gentrification. But activists and preservationists are worried because there are signs that the cranes might be just around the corner.

Such a transformation would benefit some folks – especially landowners and developers but also new middle class residents with jobs downtown who won’t miss the long commutes from areas like Kendall and Cutler Ridge. But a big number of locals could end up in a world of pain in the form of rising rents and outright displacement, among other things.

For many people, especially new arrivals, Little Havana has served as an essential stepping stone where people with good educations but no U.S. degrees and/or amazing craft or entrepreneurial skills plus a superb work ethic could manage to survive before moving on to greener pastures in places like Westchester and Hialeah. For many others, however, especially older people and those lacking a marketable trade or command of English, Little Havana is not a way station but the last stop on the line.

Still, here at least they can communicate in their own language and navigate within the familiar confines of their own culture. Most don’t own a car, but there are plenty of places within walking distance to shop for food and catch the breakfast or lunch specials along with a good dose of Cuban coffee. There is even decent bus service – by Miami standards at least. And more people use bikes for transportation (not recreation) here than in other parts of the city with a much younger population.

Today, there are two main sources of concern about gentrification. The general reason is the upscale-oriented development boom now under way in Greater Miami generally and specifically in the Brickell area adjacent to East Little Havana. That’s the neighborhoods’ most dilapidated and troubled area, thus the most vulnerable to gentrification. Land and buildings are cheaper here. And, after all, slum clearance seems like a good thing. Who wants to live in a slum? But where one person sees neighborhood improvement another sees the tearing down of the social fabric and the architectural fabric of a community.

The specific sources of anxiety are “up-zoning” proposals being floated by the City of Miami for some parts of Little Havana. “Up-zoning” is bureaucratic jargon for allowing developers to build taller buildings, cram more people into the same acreage, and include commercial uses where only residential construction had been allowed.

To be sure, Little Havana has never been static nor should we want it to be so in the future. Jewish residents still abounded when the first Cubans came. As the Cubans became the majority, the term Little Havana was coined. But it was somewhat of a misnomer, even then, because all the Cubans that moved there were not from Havana, although most were.

The Mariel boatlift in 1980 created divisions between new and old arrivals and produced a crime wave that by now has largely disappeared. Later, the settlement of waves of Central and South Americans in the area once more changed its cultural flavor.

More recently, tourism, art galleries, upscale restaurants, ice cream parlors, more attractive cigar stores and a movie theater that shows highbrow movies have revitalized the core of Little Havana. These new ventures have largely complemented, not replaced, the old standards. You can still eat a medianoche at El Exquisito but you can also take a short walk and eat sushi or ceviche.

Through all the changes, the moniker Little Havana has stuck. The attempt to rename the place “Latin Quarter” failed and Little Havana lived on. But can it survive the force that has been the source of both the city’s growth and of the erasing of so much history and community, the ferocity of the real estate market?

If the force that created condo canyons made up of soulless buildings able to deprive all but the lucky few of the sight of the city’s main geographic referents, the ocean and the bay, does Little Havana have a prayer?

Critics of no-holds barred global capitalism coined the phrase “another world is possible.” Perhaps, even in Miami, another form of development different from that of high-rise canyons for the rich is possible, and Little Havana is where it will happen. I am not hopeful.

I would want it differently because I have lived here for more than half my life, felt the spontaneous warmth of ordinary people and the burning rage of ideologues, savored the sweet flavor of a mamey ice cream and the bitter taste that daily diatribes about Obama and his Cuba policy leave in my mouth. In Little Havana, I have experienced the contradictions inherent in real life in a real place as far from a Disney-type world as the galaxy Andromeda.

The artist Arturo Cuenca was right when he titled a painting of some space in Little Havana “This is not Havana.” It’s not. It’s a very different place. Yet it is real.

But I am not hopeful. I think of what happened to Don Quixote when he took on the windmill, and cranes are much bigger and tougher than windmills.