Beacon of Hope: Miami's Newly Landmarked Treasure Faces a Bright Future

Ellis Island might be the most famous entryway to America, but Miami boasts a more recent chapter in the immigration story, whose ramifications are still rippling today. From 1962 to 1974, thousands of exiled Cubans passed through its refugee center, the Freedom Tower, on their way to a life free of communism. Designated a national historic landmark in October, the tower was recently gifted to Miami Dade College by the city’s Cuban-American Martin family. The institution plans to turn at least part of what college president Eduardo Padrón calls a “public treasure” into a museum to commemorate the city’s Cuban heritage. “They are the perfect custodian,” says Becky Roper Matkov, CEO of Dade Heritage Trust, a local preservation group.

Matkov says her group is happy the cupola-topped structure finally has an owner with a real use. Although intermittently a banquet hall after a 1988 renovation, the place had a hard time attracting business, often left vacant and vandalized. It’s in good shape again, thanks to a restoration in 2000, even weathering the threat of being dwarfed by a proposed 62-story condo next door.

The tower earned its reputation as the “Ellis Island of the South” after Fidel Castro’s 1959 rise to power. Thousands of desperate Cubans sought asylum in the United States. At the peak of immigration in 1962, over 1,800 arrived weekly, until the Cuban Missile Crisis put a halt to it. The exodus resumed when Castro opened the doors to anyone with relatives outside of Cuba. Between 1965 and 1973, flights into Miami brought over a quarter million Cubans.

The Freedom Tower helped with medical care, surplus food, resettlement assistance, and monthly stipends. “A material and emotional refuge” is how Robert Chisholm, a Miami architect who migrated with his family as a boy, recalls it. As the Freedom Tower’s national historic landmark nomination points out, it was the height of the Cold War, and America considered assistance critical in the name of democracy. “As a result,” says the nomination, “the Cuban exodus was viewed unlike any previous wave of immigration.” It is a migration that continues today, with 20,000 Cubans allowed into the country legally per year, and no shortage of applicants.

Schultze and Weaver, a prominent New York architecture firm, designed the edifice–built in 1925 for the Miami News, the city’s first newspaper, published for 92 years starting in 1896. Modeled after Seville’s Giralda Tower, it features a copper weather vane, a mural of an Old World navigational map, and a bas-relief depiction of Queen Isabella of Spain. It’s a classic beauty amidst the modern glasssheathed skyscrapers downtown.

Padrón says the college wants to honor not only its architecture, but its history. Only the lower floors are currently open to the public but eventually Miamians will get a chance to go all the way to the top.

“It points to the sky and says that here, in this country, you are free to pursue your dreams,” Padrón says. “That’s why we call it the Freedom Tower. And why we can’t just let it disappear.”

For more information, contact the Dade Heritage Trust at (305) 358-9572, visit the Miami Dade College website at www.mdc.edu, or call (305) 237-8888. Read the NHL nomination online at www. nps.gov/history/nhl/designations/ samples/fl/FreedomTower.pdf.