Object Lesson: “All the Help I Needed, I Got Here”: Miami’s Freedom Tower and the Freedom Tower’s Miami

In the summer of 2005, South Florida’s Terra Group was embroiled in a controversy over its plan to purchase and develop the iconic Miami property known as the Freedom Tower (Figure 1). The real estate development company, headed by Pedro Martin, had placed the winning bid with the family of the late Cuban American National Foundation chairman Jorge Mas Canosa for the eighty-year-old building. Mas Canosa and his family paid $4.1 million for the Freedom Tower in 1997 and, in conjunction with the foundation and other members of the Cuban American community, had invested $16 million into restoring and remodeling the structure. The foundation had been leading the effort to convert the former site of the federal Cuban Refugee Center (CRC) into a museum dedicated to the Cuban diaspora. Several bidders had sought to purchase the building from Mas Canosa’s family, but the Terra Group offered a compromise by which the Freedom Tower would be preserved as a museum but a new condominium tower would be built behind it. The Terra Group had plans to construct a $500 million, sixty-two-story high-rise just thirty feet from the historic building, requiring the demolition of the back of the Freedom Tower complex.

The Terra Group’s plan drew criticism from preservation activists and organizations including Florida’s Bureau of Historic Preservation after news surfaced that in preparation for the sale the Mas family had withdrawn its nomination of the tower as a National Historic Landmark. Foundation chairman Jorge Mas Santos defended the decision by stating that the submission had been withdrawn to facilitate the sale and that it could be submitted again at any time. Pedro Martin, for his part, stated that the Terra Group might choose to enter a new application in the future. Others, however, stressed the importance of designating the tower as a National Historic Landmark. Barbara Mattick, of the Bureau of Historic Preservation, explained that such a designation meant the site had significance for the entire country; it was, after all, the “Cuban Ellis Island.”¹

There was a sense of irony to the efforts both to preserve the entirety of the Freedom Tower and to incorporate it into the creation of a new condominium complex. The creation of a new condominium tower almost four times as tall as the original building would continue a trend of intense new construction in Miami in the decades preceding the preservation controversy. The effort to preserve the tower was related to its time as the CRC, the Miami headquarters of the Cuban Refugee Program (CRP), a federal entity created in 1961 to aid the flow of exiles fleeing Fidel Castro’s revolution. The CRP disbursed nearly $2 billion in aid to some seven hundred thousand exiles arriving in the United States.² In over a decade of operation, the CRC saw thousands of Cuban exiles seek governmental assistance and was the local source for the distribution of hundreds of millions of dollars. The presence of the Cuban refugees and the access to an unprecedented level of federal benefits fundamentally altered the political, social, and economic landscape in Miami.

The effect of these processes on the built environment around the Freedom Tower was significant. Where the tower was once a prominent part of the Miami skyline, it came to be dwarfed by urban development driven by both federal expenditures and investment from Latin America spurred on by the Cuban presence in the city. The very processes that made the Freedom Tower notable as the Cuban Ellis Island helped bring about the real estate explosion in South Florida that threatened its continued existence as a historical landmark. The history of the Freedom Tower and the different roles it played in Miami serve to illustrate the changes to the city in the wake of the Cuban Revolution. The Freedom Tower represented the point from which the physical, economic, social, and political changes to the city of Miami radiated. As a physical location, the Freedom Tower embodied a particular government policy...