Progressives tear them down and build idealizations to replace them, visions of new “communities” united by causes.
Conservatives argue for a return to clean, classical lines and columns reflecting the principles of society over government and the free person over the tyrant.
Establishmentarians take a deferential approach to architectural experts: a promise of artistry whose reality, like the reality of most bureaucratic promises, is impersonal, monumental, placeless.  What’s sought is a representation of authentic community. What’s developed is another front in the political war for control of America: idealized, abstract, top-down.

But outside of Washington, our city of memorials, there are other models for representing community. These models acknowledge breakages rather than eradicate them. They express concrete testaments, not symbolic ideals. They don’t assert an idea of community but live in it, take their bearings from it, become decipherable inside it. They remind people of the past not for a visit but in the everyday. And they trace what it takes for communities to survive.

You can find one of those models in an unexpected place, a unique section of an unusual city where a tourist hub, a neighborhood, and a memorial converge. The city is Miami—not the Miami of television or movies but a different Miami altogether. This Miami is west seven or eight miles from Miami Beach and two or three from downtown or Brickell by way of Calle Ocho. It’s past the investigative agencies and car dealerships, art galleries and outdoor fusion restaurants, fitness centers and grocery stores which occupy the first blocks of the street. And it’s right before the cigar shops and cocktail bars, jazz clubs  and restaurants, outdoor markets and coffee shops which come after—the part of Calle Ocho where tourists visit.  

A block or two east of  this area, close to an optometrist’s shop and a grocery, is a twelve-foot tall gray marble column supporting an urn holding an always-burning flame. In front of this column is a raised plaque, behind it some paces are two more monuments: one an abstract representation of a figure holding a rifle, the other a carefully rendered statue of a freedom fighter. Stretching south for more than a dozen blocks behind them is a boulevard park with houses on either side. In the first block of this park are giant gnarled trees with roots a foot overground; in their crevices, hens attend to their chicks and roosters strut and stand guard. A few paces past the trees stands a statue of the Virgin Mary, the center of its own curving space, enclosed by fencing for repairs. A few paces further down the same path stands a monument, longer than it is all, inscribed with a sixteen-foot long bronze raised map of Cuba and the words La Patria es agonia y deber; The Homeland is Agony and Duty.

Small lights affixed to the top of this monument to illuminate it at night. During the day the people who see it up close are women with strollers, couples, and office workers on a break who smoke a cigarette or eat on the benches nearby. Some days a truck from the city comes with men in neon orange and green to do work on the fenced section. Lizards flick back and forth across the path. Roosters call. Past these blocks of the boulevard are others, covering a mile in all, dotted with monuments and benches and rewards posters for lost dogs and occasional placards reminding visitors that they’re in a City of Miami park. But the immediate meaning of Cuban Memorial Boulevard Park inheres in those first two blocks, beginning with the granite monument and moving north to Calle Ocho and the ever-burning flame.

La Patria es agonia y deber; “The Homeland is agony and duty.” The line is from Jose Marti, who spent the years before his death in 1895 raising funds for a Cuban revolution against Spain and warily watching America. “Once the United States is in Cuba,” he wondered, as Northeastern academics and administrators eager for export markets hectored for war against Spain, “who will get her out?” Sixty years later, Spain had been expelled from Cuba and Marti’s warning was reality, as Washington elites looking for economic returns backed Fulgencio Batista’s strongman rule. By 1961, the consequences of this backing had come home. Batista was overthrown, Fidel Castro was nationalizing the country, 200,000 anti-Castro exiles were in Miami, and John F. Kennedy’s Administration was training 1,500 of them, Brigade 2506, to take the island back. These were the shifts that created the events memorialized by the Bay of Pigs Monument on Calle Ocho: the marble column with the ever-burning flame.[i]

The men whom this monument honors, the men of Brigade 2506, “came from all areas of [Cuban] society”: “university students, professionals, peasants,” "Black” “White,” “Chinese,” rising in opposition to the Castro state. But their failure or success was in the hands of a narrow clique of planners in the American state pursuing internally contradictory agendas and distanced from their effects. President Kennedy wanted the island back from Castro, but he also wanted plausible deniability for diplomatic purposes, and so he used the CIA. The CIA director, Allen Dulles, and his deputy Richard Bissell wanted a successful invasion, but they also wanted White House favor, and so they misrepresented that a small force with minimal air support could succeed. Political delays made Castro aware of the invasion’s imminence, and on April 17, when the invasion commenced, his forces and his air force were ready. At this eleventh hour, his eye on “diplomacy,” Kennedy denied further air support.

For the men of Brigade 2506, the ends of these insular decisions were inexorably concrete. Men were killed standing in the water—114 died, and their names are inscribed on the monument on Calle Ocho beneath the ever-burning flame. Men “started marching towards the beach and with incredible rage someone started singing the national anthem and everybody started singing,” as they fought in the reefs and the sand. The rebel commander’s radio dispatches ("Do you back us up or quit?...Please don't desert us...Will fight to the end if we have to….Please send help. We cannot hold") were heard and ignored. 1,189 men were captured and taken away to show trials—some suffocated to death in the trucks on the way there. They were held for twenty months before all but nine were released for private ransoms—during the Cuban Missile Crisis, four anti-aircraft nozzles were turned on them to be used if U.S. boots breached the island.

For the people who saw them up close, the events reverberated: one of the CIA officers, coordinating from a ship, said that "for the first time in my thirty-seven years, I was ashamed of my country." But this wasn’t the view of the people running the operation from Washington. A phalanx of Harvard-educated PhDs who styled themselves reformists—one called himself, without irony, the American Che Guevara—they saw the failure as a “disposal problem” to be mopped up, brushed aside. The American Che was Richard Goodwin, the Kennedy administration virtuoso who wrote and coordinated everything from presidential speeches to civil rights protests. Historian Arthur Schlesinger called him a “supreme generalist,” writing, “Dick Goodwin was handling Latin America and a dozen other problems.” The hubris of these operators led them to handle the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs by bringing the leaders of the Cuban exile community to the Oval Office the day the invasion failed, then having the President make an appearance in Miami the next year. “I had never seen the president more impressive,” Schlesinger wrote.

How do people keep going after two governments have taken actions to break them and then moved on, shucked them off, tried to forget? The plaque below the Bay of Pigs Monument speaks of this challenge in matter-of-fact terms: 

The Brigade’s Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, on April 17, 1961, resulted in defeat due mainly to lack of operational and logistical support…The invasion’s failure did not destroy the dream of returning to Cuba but it did cause most Cuban exiles to look to Miami as more than a temporary refuge…Most of them became professionals, joining the growing Cuban community that helped to enrich and develop Miami as a vibrant, exciting, and successful city.

The plaque doesn’t try to define what “enrich” and “develop” mean. Instead, standing in the Memorial Boulevard Park, you can measure these words against the city’s reality. The Miami skyline, the third largest in the country whose vista glimmers through the trees to the southeast, would not exist without Cuban-American architects. Miami’s financial district, the home to some of these glimmering buildings, would not be “the capital of Latin America” without Cuban-American bankers and businessmen. Lionel Messi would not be playing soccer for Miami without the efforts of the son of one of these men: a late leader of anti-Castro resistance whose name is adorned on boulevards and middle schools and youth centers across the city. Miami would not remain, for the moment, resistantly middle class in spite of steadily rising prices without the blocks and blocks of Little Havana stretching North, West, South, and East from the Memorial Boulevard Park. Small businesses would not thrive in the same radius as tech and finance companies without the aversion to regulations of the six Cuban-American mayors who have served for 35 of 38 years since 1985. Without these conditions, working and middle-class immigrants would not keep coming to Miami and creating a city where spoken languages downtown range from Creole and Ukrainian to Peruvian and Guatemalan to Italian and Arabic. Meanwhile, Cuban entrepreneurs send their children to MIT, Columbia, and Miami-Dade College or make them partners in their businesses. Some young Cuban-Americans who leave Miami stay in the North; after graduation, many others return.

All the while, the past isn’t forgotten here; as one Brigade 2506 veteran says, “He who loses the sap loses the root.” The Bay of Pigs Museum and Library, a long, one-story building with a red-tiled roof some blocks west from Cuban Memorial Boulevard Park where surviving veterans sometimes come and sit and talk to visitors, is undergoing a $2 million expansion. The American Museum of the Cuban Diaspora recently opened more than a dozen blocks Southeast of the Memorial Boulevard Park on Coral Way: a handsome columned structure grounding a busy street. The past lives on in less obvious ways here, too. In a new art gallery on Calle Ocho not far east of Memorial Boulevard Park where podcasters, performance artists and painters congregate is a painting of the head of Jose Marti: a black and white rendering that looks like a heroic bust put to paper. Close up, you can see thin, creased lines running up from the neck to the forehead, where black faces are imprinted on the shiny gray and a single red tear drips from the eye: remembering 24 Cuban martyrs imprisoned by Castro’s regime. Nine of these twenty-four men recently visited the gallery; they were relaxed, intimate, until the talk turned to Cuba, and then the fury came.

Meantime, in Cuba, the past has become the present. An unprecedented threat to the regime arrived in 2021 at the hands of ordinary Cubans who haven’t forgotten the dream, and its aftershocks still reverberate two years later. In Miami, Cuban American artists and writers talk about this new movement for freedom on American terms: pointing out the diversities the Cuban regime is suppressing; emphasizing that it discriminates against women and gays. Cuban-American podcasters and activists spread a message that is philosophical not partisan: society over government, the individual over the state, the person over the structures. Mostly, though, they talk about the specific agonies inflicted on their country by a totalizing state: supermarkets confiscated from grandparents who committed suicide; relatives fined for killing their cow for food because the cow was considered state property; Miami gallerists declared enemies of the state for exhibiting the art of an anti-Castro exile.

Miamians in general talk this way not just about Cuba but about Latin America. For people from this region who live in the city, the predations of regimes directly or indirectly enabled by Washington planners are their histories, and their guides. More than 200,000 people were killed or disappeared in Guatemala in the more than three decades after a CIA-backed coup in 1954 to make the country safe for “capitalism,” which meant United Fruit. 63,000 people died in El Salvador between 1979 and 1992 at the hands of American-supported governments to make the country safe for “entrepreneurship,” which meant state-sponsored beach resorts. The list of Washington idealisms and errors goes on, from country to country, transcending political divides. In this light, it’s not a coincidence that Miami—increasingly reflecting the efforts of Colombians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, Peruvians, Hondurans, Salvadorans, and Haitians—is mostly inhospitable to the central planning that’s become a feature of American cities. “We have our own system here,” is one way of saying this. “If you live here, you have to be OK with disorder,” is another. “We’ve seen what ‘order’ did to our countries,” is a third.

In Washington, the city of memorials, people take a different approach. One of the city’s airports is named after Allen Dulles’ brother John Foster Dulles, the Secretary of State whose grandfather helped bring Cuba into America’s orbit and who brought America into Vietnam. Its CIA headquarters at Langley was commissioned by Allen Dulles and designed by the same architect who designed the United Nations, another glassy monument to administrative idealism. Its founding CIA members, men of Dulles’ generation, colonized the farmland of Northern Virginia with the modernist houses or rustic farmhouses their more “diverse” successors inhabit today. The city’s organic community, mostly Black Americans, has been systematically displaced by a rotating non-community of politicians, defense contractors, think tank academics, non-profiteers, and administrators.

In Northwest Washington where these rotating players live in homogenous glass high rises that bulge against the interstates which cut through the neighborhoods, building construction is informed by a white paper “guiding principles for federal architecture” that was created by one of Kennedy’s Harvard academicians. From these buildings, the same people who propose idealistic designs for art push idealistic designs for living—an accreting colonization of society by government from Langley or other buildings nearby. People in Miami, whatever their specific politics, are used to keeping these colonial interventions at bay. People in the rest of the country, regardless of their specific politics, are just beginning to resist them.

All of this seems very distant from Cuban Memorial Boulevard Park in Little Havana, the spiritual center of a community which has suffered from Washington abstractions but survived, expanded, repaired, thrived, kept its sap and its root. From the Memorial Boulevard on a Friday night you can hear a low, occasional buzz as Fords and Volvos and Hondas turn off from the cheese shops and Montessori schools and Portuguese restaurants of Coral Way and zip up the Boulevard north, where charter schools live a few blocks from delicatessens. On Calle Ocho a few blocks west, Cuban-Americans who have been in America for a year sit in cafes and restaurants drinking rum or whiskey or beer near Cuban-Americans who have been here for thirty, and a few blocks west of that cigar shops with Cuban-American owners and Canadian employees host karaoke nights.

Further east down the street, on the other side of the Memorial Boulevard Park closer to Brickell, father-son restaurants which weathered COVID see people line up each weekend for drinks and food, live music and dancing. The high-end mattress shops and car dealerships nearby, closed for the night, are lit in neon. In the fusion restaurants, new arrivals work the bar and wait for their girlfriends or their wives and children to join them from Cuba. Walk down this stretch of Calle Ocho at any time, and you can see the burning flame.