The Cubans in Coral Gables, Florida did not arrive in tenements or storefront churches. They arrived in the City Beautiful, a 1920s dream of Mediterranean arches and banyan-shaded boulevards, and they made it their own with law firms, surgeries, banks and quiet money. If Little Havana is where the Cuban story began in Miami, Coral Gables is where its professional class came to stay.
The Place
Coral Gables sits just southwest of downtown Miami, a city of roughly 50,000 people wrapped inside the larger metropolis. Its borders run along Coral Way and the leafy streets between Le Jeune Road and Red Road, with the University of Miami campus anchoring its southern edge.
The look is unmistakable. Coral rock and stucco, terracotta roofs, fountains at the intersections, street signs cut into low limestone blocks. This was not an accident of growth. It was drawn on paper before a single house went up.
Today it is one of the most affluent municipalities in South Florida. The 2023 median household income sat above 130,000 dollars, and the streets carry the names of Spanish provinces. Roughly 56 per cent of residents are Hispanic, and the single largest group, by a wide margin, is Cuban.
How It Became Cuban
A planned city, 1921 to 1926
George Merrick began selling lots in his planned community in 1921 and incorporated Coral Gables as a city on 29 April 1925. He named it for the coral-rock family home where he had grown up, and he built it around a single obsession: Mediterranean Revival architecture, applied without compromise.
Merrick assembled architects, artists and planners to deliver wide tree-lined avenues, plazas and ornate fountains. The Venetian Pool opened in 1924, carved from a coral quarry. The Biltmore Hotel rose in 1926. That same period gave the city its university, chartered in 1925 with land and money from Merrick himself.
The 1926 hurricane and then the Great Depression broke the boom, but the bones of the city survived. The arches, the canopy, the strict architectural code: all of it was waiting when a different kind of newcomer arrived three decades later.
The golden exiles, 1959 to 1962
When Fidel Castro took power on 1 January 1959, the first Cubans to leave were the wealthiest and the most established. Historians call this first wave the golden exile, and it was unusually professional in character: company executives, doctors, lawyers, engineers and landowners whose property the new government was nationalising.
More than 200,000 of these exiles had reached the United States by 1962, when commercial flights between the two countries stopped. They were mostly white, mostly urban, and disproportionately drawn from Havana’s middle and upper classes.
Many of these families settled first in the working-class blocks west of downtown that would become Little Havana. But the doctors and lawyers among them carried credentials and ambition that pointed elsewhere, towards a city built for exactly the life they had lost.
Moving up and moving in, 1970s onward
By the 1970s the pattern was clear. As the early exiles found their footing, recertified their professions and rebuilt their incomes, many moved out of Little Havana and pushed the boundaries of the Cuban enclave into the middle-class blocks of Westchester, the residential streets of Kendall, and the tree-lined opulence of Coral Gables.
This was not the Mariel generation. When the Mariel boatlift brought 125,000 Cubans in 1980, the established families were already comfortable enough to help the new arrivals settle, often elsewhere, in Hialeah and the western suburbs. The class sorting that began in Havana hardened into geography in Miami.
Coral Gables became the address of arrival, the proof that the exile had not just survived but prospered. A surgery on a Gables side street, a name on a downtown letterhead, a daughter at the University of Miami: these were the markers of a journey completed.
The Landmarks
The Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Avenue. Built in 1926 and now a National Historic Landmark, the Biltmore is the city’s grand gesture, its tower modelled on the Giralda of Seville. For generations of Cuban Coral Gables it has been the place for the wedding, the quinceanera, the Sunday brunch that signals you have made it. Few buildings say old Spanish money quite like it.
Miracle Mile, Coral Way between Le Jeune and Douglas Road. The four-block commercial heart of the city, developed in the 1940s, is where Cuban-owned bridal shops, jewellers, cafes and law offices line the pavement. Spanish is the working language of the street. The annual planting of the canopy and the slow pace of the storefronts make it feel less like a mall and more like a plaza.
The Venetian Pool, 2701 De Soto Boulevard. Opened in 1924 and fed by spring water from a coral quarry, it is one of the few public pools listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Cuban families have cooled off here for sixty years, the children of exiles swimming where 1920s Miami once paddled.
Books & Books, 265 Aragon Avenue. Founded by Mitchell Kaplan in 1982 inside a 1927 Mediterranean building, this independent bookshop became the literary living room of bilingual Miami. Its reading series has hosted Cuban and Cuban-American writers for four decades, the courtyard a meeting place for a literate exile culture that refused to forget its language.
The University of Miami, Coral Gables campus. Chartered in 1925, the university is home to the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, housed in Casa Bacardi. Its scholars and panels have hosted thinkers including Carlos Eire and Carlos Alberto Montaner, and it holds one of the deepest archives of Cuban exile material anywhere. The Gables campus is where the community came to study itself.
Havana Harry’s, 4612 Le Jeune Road. A family Cuban restaurant that has fed the Gables for decades, the kind of place where palomilla steak and maduros come without fuss and the dining room fills with three generations at once. It is proof that the high-end city still eats its home food, unembarrassed and in Spanish.
De Soto Fountain, junction of De Soto and Sevilla. One of Merrick’s original 1920s plaza fountains, it sits at the heart of the residential district that drew the professional exiles. The roundabout, the coral rock, the canopy overhead: this is the postcard image of the life the golden exiles came to claim.
Where They Came From
The Cubans of Coral Gables came, overwhelmingly, from Havana. The capital’s professional and commercial classes were the heart of the first exile wave, and it was their habits and expectations that shaped where they landed in Miami.
These were not rural migrants. They were the families who had sent children to private schools, who held degrees from Cuban universities, who ran the law offices, hospitals and import businesses of pre-revolution Havana. When Castro nationalised those businesses, the families left, and the ones with the most to lose left first.
That origin matters. The reason Coral Gables, rather than some humbler suburb, became the Cuban professional address is that the people choosing it had already lived a version of this life in Havana. The Mediterranean villas and shaded boulevards were not aspirational fantasy. They were a recognisable echo of home.
Coral Gables Today
The numbers tell the plain story. Coral Gables is about 56 per cent Hispanic, and of that Hispanic population the largest single group is Cuban, around 13,000 residents. Spanish is spoken in offices and shops without comment, a true second working language of the city.
The city has also become a Latin American business capital. It hosts multinational headquarters and one of the highest concentrations of Latin American consulates and corporate offices in the country, and South Florida ranks second nationally for international banking. Much of that trade flows through Cuban-American bankers, lawyers and executives whose families arrived with nothing but their training.
The Cuban presence here is less visible than in Little Havana and all the more telling for it. There are no roosters on Calle Ocho, no domino park. Instead there are name partners, surgeons, university trustees and quiet generational wealth, the long settlement of a community that arrived as refugees and stayed as professionals.
It is worth saying plainly what this city is not. It is not the cradle of the Cuban exile story, and it never pretended to be. The cradle is Little Havana, three miles east, where the working-class families landed and the storefront cafes still open at dawn. Coral Gables is the chapter that comes after, the one about what a refugee class can build when it carries its credentials across the water.
The grandchildren of the golden exiles now run for office, sit on boards and send their own children to the University of Miami. The journey that began at Havana’s airport in 1960 ends, for many Gables families, in a city that was built to look like the one they lost. For more on the wider story, see our pieces on the Cubans in Little Havana and the Cubans in Hialeah.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Cubans settle in Coral Gables?
The first Cuban exiles to reach Miami after 1959 were disproportionately professional: doctors, lawyers, executives and landowners from Havana. As they rebuilt their incomes through the 1960s and 1970s, many moved up from Little Havana into affluent, Mediterranean-style Coral Gables, a city that echoed the urban professional life they had left behind in Cuba.
Is Coral Gables still Cuban?
Yes. Around 56 per cent of Coral Gables residents are Hispanic, and Cubans are the single largest group, roughly 13,000 people. The presence is quieter than in Little Havana, expressed through law firms, banks, the University of Miami and Spanish as an everyday working language rather than street festivals.
What are the best Cuban places in Coral Gables?
Havana Harry’s on Le Jeune Road is a long-standing family Cuban restaurant. Books & Books on Aragon Avenue has hosted Cuban and Cuban-American writers since 1982. The Biltmore Hotel and the Venetian Pool are the landmark settings for generations of Cuban-American weddings, quinceaneras and family Sundays.
How is Coral Gables different from Little Havana?
Little Havana was the working-class point of arrival for Cuban exiles and remains the cultural heart of the community. Coral Gables drew the wealthier, professional exiles and later generations: doctors, lawyers, bankers and executives. One is the story’s beginning, the other the proof of its upward mobility.
Where did the Cubans in Coral Gables come from?
Overwhelmingly from Havana. The first exile wave, the so-called golden exiles of 1959 to 1962, was drawn from the capital’s professional and commercial classes, the families who ran pre-revolution Havana’s law offices, hospitals and businesses and left first when those were nationalised.
When did Cubans first arrive in Coral Gables?
The professional exodus began in 1959 after Castro took power, with more than 200,000 exiles reaching the United States by 1962. Significant movement into Coral Gables itself came in the 1970s, as the early exiles prospered and extended the Cuban enclave into the city’s affluent residential districts.
If your family’s story passed through Coral Gables, or any of the places Cubans have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From Havana to a surgery on a Coral Gables side street, to wherever you are now.
You can also read about other communities who reshaped South Florida, including the Venezuelans in Doral and the Nicaraguans in Sweetwater. For the wider history, the golden exile and the founding of the University of Miami are both well documented.