What’s with the Queen of Salsa? Celia Cruz was born in Havana in 1925 with a voice that could fill a carnival, and when she left Cuba on tour in 1960, after the revolution, she never went home again. Miami became her second island. On Calle Ocho in Little Havana — among the cafecito windows and the domino tables — she was simply Celia: the Queen of Salsa, the Afro-Cuban dance music she carried around the world for four decades, her trademark shout of ¡Azúcar! ringing from every stage. In March 1988 she led the Calle Ocho festival’s conga line into the record books — some 119,000 dancers behind her, the largest ever — and in 1994 the nation awarded her the National Medal of Arts. In 2024 the nation honored her again — the United States Mint issued the Celia Cruz quarter in the American Women Quarters Program, its reverse showing her mid-song in a rumba dress with ¡AZÚCAR! inscribed beside her, the first Afro-Latina ever to appear on United States currency.
The Freedom Tower, opened in 1925 and modeled on Seville’s Giralda, served as the Cuban Refugee Center from 1962 to 1974 — "the Ellis Island of the South."
Why People Visit Miami Florida
Miami offers a founding story with an orange blossom at its center, a refugee tower that welcomed the community that remade the city, cafecito through walk-up windows, boom-era Mediterranean fantasies, and tropical light on Biscayne Bay. Visitors come for Little Havana, the Deco-era heritage, the bay, the Everglades at the back door, and the winter that made the city famous. Magic City since 1896.