Cuba in Miami

Upcoming projects include a Cuban-themed event space next to Ball & Chain, and the Museo of Little Havana, a project in partnership with HistoryMiami Museum. Another is the Paseo del Ron on 14th Avenue, where Miami Club Rum will have a small distillery and local market for visitors. And the debut of the 50-room Tower Hotel is on the horizon. “We’re close to announcing a relationship with a South and Central American hotel and hostel operator,” he says. The hotel, used recently for the Juggerknot Theatre Company’s production of Miami Motel Stories, will feature cultural experiences, like conga and salsa lessons.

First-generation Cubans may not share a happy nostalgia for the neighborhood, Fuller says. “When you talk about the 1960s, families thrown into apartments without means who lost everything, they were distressed. 1960s Little Havana was not a good time,” he says. “What has happened is my generation has come back and acknowledged that this is an important part of our culture.”

Nitza Villapol and the Essential Cocina Criolla

‘Do not underestimate this book, mi hija,’ my mom tells me as she hands over a book with a faded pink cover, an artifact that’s been in our house since the beginning of time.”

So writes Elly Dominicis in her blog, “Eat with Your Eyes Closed.” The book is Cocina Criolla by Nitza Villapol, a chef, cookbook writer and television host in Cuba. Between 1948 and 1994, her show on Cuban television taught homemakers how to cook. Cocina Criolla and Cocina al Minuto became guidebooks for Cuban recipes as well as the food situation on the island. Early editions featured American products. As those items disappeared from shelves, Villapol adapted her recipes accordingly. “Living in Cuba meant living in difficult circumstances and Villapol was that woman on TV helping people make do with what they had (¡hay que resolver!),” says Dominicis.
 
Meanwhile, families fleeing Cuba during the revolution brought their copies with them. Bootleg copies appeared in bookstores in Miami. Women learned to cook with her recipes, then handed down the cookbook, often with notes scribbled alongside the recipes, to their daughters when they got married.

Villapol’s cookbooks are the bridge to the past for many, such as Christina Gomez-Pina, 42, who decided to cook her way through Cocina al Minuto and share the results on her blog, “La Cocina de Christina.” “I was realizing that the old ladies in our families were dying and along with their passing, so were the recipes.  I didn’t want my kids and their friends to only know what picadillo was because they ordered it at a restaurant,” she says. Now halfway through 629 recipes, she says it’s a great feeling “knowing that in working my way through the cookbook, kids from my generation are now cooking like their grandmas in their own kitchens.”

But many of today’s second- and third-generation Cuban Americans who want to preserve their culinary heritage lack Spanish-language skills to successfully navigate the recipes. This was the dilemma of Miamian Amanda Finuccio, who was lamenting the lack of her own family recipes a few years ago. Answered her mother: “We’ve always had Nitza’s cookbooks.” Finuccio, a graduate student living in New York City, says she’s never been able to cook from them “without some serious help from Google Translate.” So she proposed the idea of an English translation to Jai-Alai Books, the Miami-based publisher under the umbrella of O, Miami, where she was a fellow in 2014.