Calle Ocho

Calle Ocho means two things in Miami. First, as the literal translation suggests, it refers to SW 8th Street, or more precisely, the long stretch of the street that's regarded as the centre of Little Havana. It's where the Cuban expatriates congregated when they first arrived here, and is still the place that news organisations go when something happens in Cuba and they want some commie-bashing quotes from old men playing dominoes and drinking cafecito.

Second, Calle Ocho refers to the annual festival held on the street around the start of March (a completely arbitrary date, so far as I can tell). The event was first held in 1978, and is intended to celebrate Miami's Latino culture. It's sometimes referred to as a carnival, but the pedant in me points to the lack of parades and masquerades and sticks with 'festival'. I imagine that it was overwhelmingly Cuban originally, but these days, though Cuban flags and colours still predominate there's strong representation from every Spanish speaking country and island in the Americas (and the Portuguese speaking one, too. This pedant in me can be tiresome sometimes).

For Calle Ocho the festival, a two mile stretch of Calle Ocho the street is bookended by stages, and lined with stalls. At most intersections, another stage is placed, blocking the intersecting avenue (streets run East-West, avenues North-South). The stalls are a mixture of food places, people selling stuff, and corporations giving out freebies. The biggest queues were for the freebie stalls. People were patiently lining up and waiting probably half an hour to get some free toothpaste, or a cheaply made bag, or some other pinchbeck, branded tat. Every other person seemed to have got something or other from one of these places. I couldn't understand this eagerness to grab corporate goodie bags in the full knowledge that their contents were crap, but never mind.

The smell as you walk along the road is exclusively of meat cooking over coals or being fried; Cuban cuisine, and it seems most Latin American cuisine, is based around huge hunks of flesh, often pork, cooked simply and eaten without ceremony. The most famous Cuban dish - the high point, the zenith of their culinary culture - is the Cuban sandwich. This consists in roast pork, ham, 'Swiss' cheese, thinly sliced dill pickles, and yellow mustard, layered between two buttered slices of Cuban bread (soft, sweet, moist white stuff made with lard) and lightly toasted somewhat in the manner of a panino, but without the grooves in the grill. They're quite satisfying, in a suspicious sort of way, but hardly subtle. In truth, there are some good Cuban recipes for things to do with black beans, rice, and so on, but not many were on display at Calle Ocho, just the meat. I saw one despondent looking guy sat behind his stall, a large pile of fruit and two pristine, unused juicers on the table.

The combination of this diet and the music everywhere produced some truly horrifying spectacles. You think the freaky documentaries on C5 are bad? You've seen nothing till you've seen a 17 stone Cuban woman dropping down and shaking everything her mama gave her and all she's added since to some dutty piece of reggaeton. Seriously, seriously disturbing. The music was, of course, mostly Latin-influenced, but this ran the gamut from the aforementioned reggaeton, to flamenco, latin jazz, Spanglish hip hop, some pretty terrible latino house hybrid stuff... and several more styles that I can't distinguish descriptively. Sorry. Peculiar exception: there was no Diplo-style funk carioca or the like. Maybe it just doesn't sound right at an event running from 11am to 7pm.

The curious thing about Calle Ocho, I found, was that though it's ostensibly vibrant, it seems rather polite, lacking in edge, somehow. It's a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon, but seems too well-behaved to be really fun. I also realised, as I left, that I'd seen nothing overtly political, apart from the wizened chap in the white suit and red bow tie who is always hanging round the area with his sign saying "Muerte es Fidel'. I even saw someone wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt, apparently unconcerned that he might get lynched. I do wonder, for all the talk of exile, how many American-Cubans would return to the island if it were to be democratised tomorrow. It seems that the political attitudes are more a kind of article of faith these days, rather than a fervently held opinion, certainly amongst the younger generations who've never even seen Cuba. As Calle Ocho demonstrates, with its massive turnout and close attention from the corporate big boys, the Latino presence in South Florida is firmly established, and these days, intrinsically American.