By: Jaime Izurieta

The city of Miami has been taken over by Latin fare and nowhere is the culture more alive than around the little windows that open to the street to sell coffee and pastries. Cortadito is a delicious, excruciatingly sweet, dark, small, frothy coffee with just enough evaporated milk to lighten it. Pastelito is a luscious puff of a million layers filled to the brim and ready to explode with guava paste dripping down the sides of each bite, baked with just a little extra sugar on top. Here in Miami, azúcar is everywhere.

Miami and the world

Many places have seen an entire culture moving in and bringing up to the nooks and crannies to the new country. Chinatown in San Francisco, Little Italy in New York, Greek enclaves in Chicago and Levantines in Detroit. They all claim to be little-something and in that claim they transform their surroundings to meet Old country expectations. And to remind us a bit of the lechón asado that Mummy made.

Thus appears the Miami Ventanita. High end, Low end, bodegas, latin marts, supermarkets. South Beach, South Miami, Hialeah, El Portal, Little Havana.

Ventanitas, those ubiquitous openings close to the espresso machine, whisking ten, twelve, maybe more teaspoons of sugar with the first drops of the colada.

Frothing the sugar and the coffee and the clinging sixty year old memories of Old Havana which they might not even have seen in their lives.

Or in this life at least.

Then comes the shot. The sugar rush through the scorching South Florida summer. The same two pesos of a cafecito in the old country. The same pause, the same repose, in a different world.

Miami is not quite America but not quite home either. The scale and the pace outran us decades ago but we adapted. Or we conquered, some might say, pervasive as we are, making things just a bit messy, just a bit spicy, and a lot more savory.

So sweet, so good

The scale of the Ventanita reminds us of our own scale. All might be lost but the familiar smell of the cafecito offers a glimpse of simpler, more human times.

City blocks get crushed under cranes and economies of scale and newcomers out of Seattle or San José.

But the Ventanita thrives, the two-peso cafecito is still alive, a fresh pastelito makes it all good. Queso y guayaba, please. Ya tu sabes.

The experience of Miami is the experience of the small scale Cuban culture, translated to this new world by Peter Pan, airlift, boatlift, wet feet, dry feet, old money remade, old friends refound, boleros, latin jazz, tabaco, pan con puerco y mojito. Translated to this brave new world where it has grown, where it has made a possible future from the one that was torn, choked, taken away back home. Translated to where that possible future burns bright. To where home became.

And nothing burns brighter than a Miami morning after a cortadito.