The line forms before the churros are cool. Outside the walk-up window at 4101 Bergenline Avenue, men in guayaberas hold cardboard trays of cafecito in thimble-sized cups, the espresso so sweet it leaves grit on the tongue. A block away, dominoes crack against a folding table in a vest-pocket park. The conversation is in Spanish, the cadence is Havana, and the view through the gap between buildings is the Manhattan skyline, close enough to touch and a world away.
This is Union City, New Jersey. For half a century the Cubans in Union City made this square mile of tenements their own, turning a former embroidery town above the Lincoln Tunnel into the second capital of Cuban America. They called it Havana on the Hudson, and they were not exaggerating by much.
Union City: The Place
Union City sits atop the ridge of the Hudson Palisades, the basalt cliff that walls off the river’s western bank, about 190 feet above the water and directly over the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel. At roughly 1.29 square miles, it is the second most densely packed city in New Jersey, with more than 53,000 people crammed into every square mile as of the 2020 census. The housing is wall-to-wall: brick row houses, three-family walk-ups, and storefronts whose upstairs apartments shake when the trucks roll past. Down the center runs Bergenline Avenue, the longest commercial avenue in the state, a ninety-block ribbon of shops that the Cubans simply call La Avenida.
How Union City Became Cuban
Before the Cubans
Before it was Cuban, Union City was Swiss, Austrian, and German, and it ran on thread. In the late nineteenth century, immigrants brought the Schiffli embroidery machine across the Atlantic and discovered that the hard Palisades bedrock under Union City could anchor the enormous, vibrating looms. The town became the embroidery capital of the United States, its mills turning out lace and trim for the whole country.
That industry is why the first Cubans came at all. They arrived from New York City in the late 1940s, drawn not by politics but by steady work in the embroidery and textile factories, where a pair of skilled hands could earn a living wage. By the early 1950s a small Cuban colony of perhaps 2,000 people had taken root, many of them from Fomento and the semi-rural province of Villa Clara in the island’s center.
It was already enough of a community that, in 1955, a young lawyer named Fidel Castro came to Union City to raise money for his fight against the dictator Fulgencio Batista. His speech at a hall called El Molino Rojo on 26th Street ended in a brawl and, by some accounts, his own arrest. Nobody could have guessed that within a decade his revolution would empty whole Cuban neighborhoods into this one.
The Cubans Arrive
When Castro took Havana on the first day of 1959, the small embroidery-town colony became a lifeline. Cuba’s professional and middle classes, the lawyers and shopkeepers and seamstresses who had the most to lose, began leaving in waves, and tens of thousands of them already had a cousin, an uncle, or a former neighbor with a spare room in Union City. Roughly 200,000 Cubans reached the United States before air travel was cut off in 1962.
The migration worked the way migrations always do, by blood and by word of mouth. A man who landed in Union City and found a job at an embroidery mill would write home, then sponsor his brother, who sponsored his wife’s family, until an entire extended clan from one Cuban town had reassembled on a single Hudson County block. The factory floors that had drawn the first arrivals now absorbed the new ones, and Cuban women who had never worked outside the home in Havana took up the needle alongside the German lacemakers.
When the so-called Freedom Flights resumed between 1965 and 1973, ferrying some 300,000 more Cubans out of Varadero, a steady share of them came straight to Union City because that was where their people already were. They brought the food, the music, and the politics of the island with them, intact. To be aplatanado is to have soaked up Cuban ways so completely that you belong; here the exiles did the reverse, keeping Cuba so alive on foreign soil that the soil itself turned Cuban.
Union City at Its Peak
By the early 1980s the transformation was total. Bergenline Avenue, an Italian-American shopping strip at the start of the century, was overwhelmingly Cuban by 1981, its windows full of pasteles, religious candles, and hand-lettered signs for medianoche sandwiches. The Mariel boatlift of 1980 sent another 10,000 Cubans into New Jersey between that April and October, and Union City’s Cuban population kept climbing toward 15,000 by 1994. For years it was the largest concentration of Cubans anywhere in the country outside Miami.
The community’s weight showed up in City Hall as well as on the avenue. Mayor William Musto, an Italian-American who ran Union City for the better part of three decades, courted the newcomers, pushed bilingual education, and brought Cubans onto his ticket. One of them was a poised twenty-year-old named Bob Menendez, the son of Cuban immigrants who had arrived in 1953 and raised him in a Hudson Avenue tenement. Menendez won a school board seat in 1974 with the machine’s backing, then famously testified against Musto in a 1982 corruption case, a turn that launched one of the most powerful political careers in New Jersey.
For an ordinary family, peak Union City was a life lived almost entirely in Spanish. You could be born, baptized, employed, married, and buried without ever needing English, buying your cafecito in the morning, your croquetas at lunch, and your week’s groceries from a Cuban-owned market, all within a few blocks of the Palisades.
The Change
The unraveling was quiet and began, like much else here, with money. As Cuban families found their footing through the 1980s, the more established among them did what immigrants do when they prosper: they followed the sun. Many sold up and moved to Florida, trading the cliff-top winters for the warmth and the larger, older Cuban world of Miami, while their children scattered to the suburbs.
As they left, others arrived. Dominicans became the fastest-growing group in town, followed by Ecuadorians, Colombians, and Central Americans, so that the Spanish on Bergenline Avenue slowly broadened from a single island accent into the whole hemisphere. By the 2010 census, Cubans were about 15 percent of Union City; the city as a whole was still more than four-fifths Hispanic, but it was no longer mostly Cuban.
The Landmarks of Cuban Union City
Celia Cruz Plaza, 31st Street and Bergenline Avenue. On June 4, 2004, less than a year after the Queen of Salsa died, Union City named this small plaza for Celia Cruz and laid a marble star in the sidewalk, with her widower and bandleader Pedro Knight on hand for the dedication. A mural by the local artist Edgardo Davila traces her career across the decades, and every spring the city adds another star to what has become its Latin Walk of Fame, among them Tito Puente and Johnny Pacheco.
José Martí Park. In a city of recent arrivals, the tiny park honoring José Martí ties Union City to the deeper Cuban past, naming itself for the poet and revolutionary who died fighting Spain in 1895. A bust of Martí has stood here since at least the late 1960s, the era when the post-revolution exiles were pouring in, and it remains the place where old men carry their dominoes on a warm afternoon. For the exile generation, Martí was the patron saint of the cause that had cost them their country.
El Artesano Restaurant, 4101 Bergenline Avenue. The Alfonso family opened El Artesano in 1974, right at the height of the migration, and it has fed Union City ever since. The dining room turns out ropa vieja and lechón asado, but the soul of the place is the walk-up window, where a morning crowd lines up for hot churros and cafecito the way their parents did on the island. It is one of the last of the founding-era Cuban kitchens still serving.
El Molino Rojo, 26th Street. This long-vanished hall is where the whole improbable story tips into legend, the room where Fidel Castro himself spoke in 1955 to raise money from Union City’s first Cubans for his war against Batista. The night reportedly ended in a brawl and his arrest, a small riot in a strange town years before the revolution that would send so many of his countrymen here as refugees. Nothing marks the spot, but old-timers still tell the tale.
Mi Bandera Market, Bergenline Avenue. Founded in 1992 with a supermarket downstairs and a Cuban restaurant up above, Mi Bandera was for a generation the place you bought your plátanos and your café and ran into half the neighborhood. Around 2014 it was sold to a larger grocery group and folded into the City Fresh Market chain, a quiet sign of the changing of the guard along the avenue. The name lingered in conversation long after the ownership changed.
Las Cubanitas Bake Shop, 3704 Bergenline Avenue. A few doors from Celia Cruz Plaza, this small bakery keeps the daily ritual alive with guava pastries, croquetas, and bread pulled warm from the oven. It is the kind of unglamorous, family-run counter that does the real work of holding a food culture together, one colada of shared coffee at a time. On a Saturday morning the line runs out the door.
Where the Union City Cubans Came From
The earliest Cubans in Union City were not from Havana at all. The pre-revolution colony came largely from the island’s center, from the town of Fomento and the wider province of Villa Clara around Santa Clara, drawn north by factory work rather than by exile. Theirs was an economic migration of skilled, semi-rural people, and they laid the foundations that the later refugees would build on.
After 1959 the map widened to the whole island, with a heavy weighting toward Havana and the educated, professional classes who had the most to fear from the new government. These were the people of the first exodus before 1962, the Freedom Flights of 1965 to 1973, and the Mariel wave of 1980, and they arrived not as job-seekers but as exiles, carrying a fierce anti-Castro politics that would define the community for decades. The Cubans in Union City came, in the end, from two different Cubas: the country town that needed work, and the capital that had lost a country.
Union City Today
Union City in 2026 is no longer a Cuban city, and it does not pretend to be one. The dominant Spanish on Bergenline Avenue now belongs to Dominicans, Central Americans, and South Americans, the children of the great Cuban migration have largely moved on, and a fair share of the founding families long ago decamped for Florida. To walk the avenue today is to hear a dozen national accents where there was once mostly one.
And yet the Cuban grain in the wood has not sanded away. Celia Cruz still has her plaza and her stars, José Martí still presides over his domino players, and El Artesano still sends churros and cafecito through its window every morning to whoever is hungry, Cuban or not. The Cuban Day Parade of New Jersey, marching down Bergenline since 2000, still draws a crowd each spring, and the political muscle the exiles built outlasted their majority.
What remains is less a Cuban enclave than a Cuban inheritance, absorbed into a broader Latin city the way an accent survives a generation. The exiles who reassembled their towns on this cliff did not lose Union City; they handed it on, and the next arrivals are writing the next chapter in the same Spanish, on the same crowded avenue, above the same shining river.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Cubans settle in Union City?
The first Cubans came to Union City in the late 1940s and early 1950s for jobs in its embroidery and textile factories, then the busiest in the country. After Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, exiles followed their relatives to the same town, and chain migration turned the Cubans in Union City into the largest Cuban community in America outside Miami.
Is Union City still Cuban today?
Union City is still strongly Latino but no longer majority Cuban. Many Cuban families moved to Florida or the suburbs from the 1980s onward, and Dominicans, Ecuadorians, and Central Americans have become the largest groups. The Cuban legacy survives in landmarks, restaurants, and the city’s politics rather than in raw numbers.
What are the most famous Cuban landmarks in Union City?
The best-known is Celia Cruz Plaza at 31st Street and Bergenline Avenue, dedicated to the Queen of Salsa in 2004 and home to a Latin Walk of Fame. Other landmarks include José Martí Park, with its bust of the Cuban national hero, and El Artesano, a Cuban restaurant on Bergenline Avenue serving since 1974.
Where in Cuba did the Union City Cubans come from?
The earliest arrivals came mainly from the town of Fomento and the central province of Villa Clara, around Santa Clara, drawn by factory work. After 1959 the migration widened to the whole island, with a heavy share from Havana and the professional classes who fled the revolution as political exiles.
When did Cubans first arrive in Union City?
Cubans first arrived in Union City from New York City in the late 1940s, seeking work in the local embroidery mills. The community was already established enough that Fidel Castro visited in 1955 to raise funds, and it grew enormously after his 1959 revolution and the Freedom Flights of 1965 to 1973.
If your family’s story passed through Union City, through an embroidery mill on the Palisades or a walk-up window on Bergenline Avenue, the people and places that shaped it are worth holding onto. You can trace the same thread in the Cubans of Little Havana in Miami, in the Dominicans of Washington Heights, and in the Portuguese of the Ironbound in Newark.