Cities are like people. They have personalities. They grow in specific ways that belong only to them. No two cities are identical, just as no two people are — not even twins.
A city’s character is shaped first by its landscape: the geology of the terrain, the presence or absence of water, and the kind of water that surrounds it. A coastal city grows differently from one by a river or a lake. Climate, soil, and horizon matter.
Time matters just as much. Cities founded at the beginning of recorded history are fundamentally different from those that emerge in the middle of the twentieth century. Age is not a decoration; it is structure.
Lastly — not because it is least important, but to keep this reflection focused — cities are shaped by the people who build them. This is where the comparison between Havana and Miami becomes unavoidable.
Havana Before the Rupture
Havana, in the middle of the last century — the 1950s — was a city that could pride itself on its museums and intellectual institutions, its parks, promenades, and civic spaces, its theaters and opera houses, its cathedrals and major churches, and its cafés, libraries, and intellectual life.
This was not mythology. It was lived reality.
Many Cubans who grew up in Miami — and many descendants of Cuban exiles — never knew this Havana. What they know is often shaped by narratives of post-Castro Cuba. That Havana was not the Havana that existed before. Before the rupture, Havana was a city that rivaled many of the great cities of the American continent.
Havana was founded as San Cristóbal de La Habana on November 16, 1519. It is over five hundred years old.
Miami, by contrast, was incorporated on July 28, 1896. But as a modern, lived, recognizable city, it truly begins around 1950. In practical terms, Miami is about seventy-five years old.
This difference in age is not cosmetic. It is foundational.
A Brief Story of Miami
Miami was born where land and water argue.
Long before it had a name, the Tequesta people lived along the Miami River, navigating mangroves, tides, and storms with quiet precision. Spanish explorers arrived in the sixteenth century, claimed the land, and largely moved on. For centuries, Miami remained a humid edge of empire — isolated, mosquito-ridden, and half-forgotten.
Everything changed at the end of the nineteenth century. Julia Tuttle persuaded railroad magnate Henry Flagler to extend his tracks south. In 1896, Miami was incorporated — one of the few major U.S. cities founded with the decisive push of a woman.
The early city grew quickly and recklessly. The 1920s land boom turned swamps into dreams, then collapsed. A devastating hurricane in 1926 nearly erased the city. Miami survived by reinvention.
After World War II, it became a playground of sun, Art Deco hotels, and American optimism. Then history shifted again. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 transformed Miami into a city of exile, ambition, and layered identities. Latin America poured in — Cuba, the Caribbean, Central and South America — reshaping language, food, politics, and power.
By the late twentieth century, Miami was no longer only a beach city. It became a global crossroads of finance, migration, art, and contradiction. Glitter and fragility coexist here: luxury towers rising on limestone, hurricanes and heat pressing at the edges.
Miami is young, restless, multilingual, and unfinished — a city always becoming.
What Miami Does Not Have
Compared to Havana before 1959, Miami lacks several structural elements that define deep urban life.
1. Centuries-old civic architecture
Miami has no cathedrals or churches built slowly across centuries, no buildings that predate the nation itself, and no architectural layers that record multiple historical epochs in a single skyline.
2. A continuous theatrical tradition
Miami does not possess nineteenth-century theaters embedded in daily urban life, nor a locally evolving tradition of opera, ballet, and drama passed across generations, nor historic venues associated with canonical premieres.
3. Museums that grew organically with the city
Miami’s museums are recent. It lacks institutions founded in the nineteenth or early twentieth century as civic necessities, collections accumulated slowly by scholars and families, and museums rooted in national memory rather than curatorial fashion.
4. Large, free, safe, interconnected parks
Miami does not have a network of parks that allow one to cross the city on foot, green spaces designed for lingering rather than policing, or parks that function as cultural centers instead of monetized attractions.
5. A walkable civic center
Miami lacks a dense historic core where culture, politics, religion, and leisure intersect — a downtown meant for wandering without purpose, streets that reward walking simply for walking.
6. A non-commercial public culture
Miami has few cafés that function as intellectual centers, little public debate embedded in daily life, and limited social space not tied to spending.
7. Civic pride expressed in institutions
Miami does not express a shared civic narrative architecturally. Its buildings rarely say “this is who we are,” and few institutions are designed to outlast economic cycles.
8. Historical continuity
Miami lacks multi-generational memory embedded in place — buildings that survived regime change, revolution, or centuries of adaptation, streets that teach history simply by existing.
Miami is not lacking entertainment. Miami is not lacking beauty. Miami is not lacking wealth.
Miami is lacking depth, public culture, and historical gravity.
What Was Lost
Havana once had:
- Gran Teatro de La Habana
- Teatro Payret
- Teatro Martí — where opera, zarzuela, and ballet were part of public life
- Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes
- Museo Napoleónico
- City museums housed in colonial palaces
- Paseo del Prado, Parque Central, Bosque de La Habana
- The Malecón as a civic spine
- Parks as social life, not attractions
- Old Havana, Centro Habana, and Vedado as a continuous urban fabric
- Streets that expected pedestrians
- Tertulias, cafés, clubs, and salons
- Culture that lived between buildings, not only inside them
- The Capitolio
- The University of Havana (founded in 1728)
- National libraries and academies
A Final Word
Before its erasure, Havana was the Pearl of the Antilles — a developed, cultivated city comparable to New Orleans, to New York’s cultural density, and to pre-tech San Francisco. It was a port city with intellectual seriousness, walkable neighborhoods, integrated parks, and a public culture where art was necessary, not optional.
If you feel that something is missing in Miami, this may help explain why.
It is not nostalgia. It is memory recognizing absence.