Freedom Tower

The Cuban Refugee Emergency Center opened in the Freedom Tower in 1962 as a federal operation, and the scale of what it did is easy to understate.

Arrivals were registered and their details recorded. They received medical screening and vaccinations. They were given financial assistance, surplus food, clothing and help finding work and housing — frequently outside Florida, since federal policy at the time deliberately resettled Cuban arrivals across the country rather than concentrating them in Miami. Families were reunited. Children arriving alone under Operation Pedro Pan, the programme that brought more than fourteen thousand unaccompanied Cuban minors to the United States in the early 1960s, were processed through the same system.

The volume increased sharply from December 1965, when the Freedom Flights began: twice-daily chartered flights from Varadero to Miami, running until April 1973, which brought more than a quarter of a million people.

The centre closed in 1974. Little Havana, a mile and a half west, had by then become the neighbourhood those arrivals largely built.

What the restored building does with this is the heart of the current visit. The interpretation is documentary — records, photographs, objects and testimony — and it is presented in a building where the events actually took place, which is rarer in Miami than it should be.

Schultze & Weaver were New York architects who built a great deal of 1920s Florida, and they had a habit.

The Freedom Tower's crowning element is a direct quotation of the Giralda, the twelfth-century minaret turned cathedral bell tower in Seville. A year after finishing here, the same firm used the same reference for the tower of the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables. Stand where you can see both and the family resemblance is obvious; they are the two most recognisable towers of Miami's boom era and they are effectively the same idea executed twice.

The choice was not arbitrary. Mediterranean Revival was the boom's official style, sold as an argument that South Florida was the American answer to the Mediterranean, and Spanish sources carried the additional implication of the region's own colonial history. George Merrick made it law in Coral Gables. The Miami News made it architecture on Biscayne Boulevard.

The building is seventeen storeys, in a form that reads as a base, a shaft and a heavily ornamented crown, with cast-stone detailing that the 2023–25 restoration worked over comprehensively. For decades it stood alone on this stretch of the boulevard; now it is surrounded by towers many times its height, which has, oddly, made it more conspicuous rather than less.