Jorge Malagón Márquez’s first sighting of Miami’s iconic Freedom Tower, the so-called Ellis Island of the south for its role in processing more than half a million Cubans fleeing Fidel Castro’s communist revolution, was through a flood of tears.
It was May 1967, and his family had just arrived from Havana on one of the first so-called Freedom flights ferrying refugees allowed to escape the dictator’s tightening grip on the island.
His parents, Eduardo and Irma, held in their hands two small suitcases and his seven-year-old brother Ed. The bewildered Jorge, aged five, clutched the shredded remains of what just two hours previously had been his beloved teddy bear.
“At the airport in Havana, the military people there would check you to make sure that you weren’t smuggling out jewelry, diamonds, whatever,” he said.
“They took my teddy bear, they took a razor blade. You see why I was traumatized? They cut all the stuffing out of it and handed it back to me, just without any stuffing or whatever, just limp.
“At the Freedom Tower, once we got there, we were separated from our parents. They took my brother and myself to one side, they took our parents to another place for a few hours. And of course we don’t speak the language. It’s crowded, there’s all these strange people. We don’t understand what they’re saying. All we know is that they massacred my teddy bear, and now they took my parents.”
Malagón Márquez’s emotional memories of his stressful arrival in Miami as a child are among hundreds captured for a new exhibition of history at the 100-year-old tower, known to the exiles as The shelter (the shelter). The building, a national historic landmark, reopens to the public in September after a multi-year refurbishment.
“The tower is linked culturally and artistically with everything that Miami has become,” he said. “When it was built it was a beacon out into the bay, the Freedom Tower that ships would use for guidance.
“In images from 1925 it’s the dominant feature of the skyline, the tallest building. Now it’s dwarfed by everything around it. But that’s part of the building’s story as well, because the people who came through started to create all of these networks and forge the Miami we have today.”
While room after room of static displays and interactive exhibits tell the entire story of the 289ft (88metre) tower, including its early years as the home of the Miami Daily News, and its status as an emblem of the nation’s fastest-growing city following the 1920s Miami land boom, its designation as the Cuban Refugee Center from 1962 to 1974 holds the most fascination.
The tower’s cavernous, pillared reception hall, the first glimpse the new arrivals had of its interior as they awaited medical checks and immigration processing in adjacent rooms, has been painstakingly restored in original Mediterranean revival style. The centrepiece is the attention-grabbing New World Mural 1813replicating Ponce de León’s landing that year in what was later to become known as Florida.
The hall contains a display of artefacts of Miami’s history. Beyond lie exhibition spaces collectively known as Freedom (freedom), a recreation of the journey Cuban refugees took both in the tower and beyond as they began their new lives in an unfamiliar country.
Upstairs, visitors learn of other famous milestone moments in Cuban emigration to Florida, such as the Operación Pedro Pan exodus of 14,000 unaccompanied minors between 1960 and 1962; and the 1980 Mariel boatlift when 125,000 refugees arrived in Miami by sea.
Malagón Márquez, now a professor in his 60s teaching history at Miami-Dade College (MDC), the tower’s owner since 2005, admits he cried when he saw the period restoration, recreated largely from photographs and the knowledge of historian Paul George, an expert in the development of downtown Miami.
Especially poignant, he said, was the black-and-white checkered floor of the reception and processing room.
“The moment we walked in I immediately became that five-year-old little boy again. I got choked up and the tears were just flowing because it was that strong a memory,” he said.
“We were checked out medically. I remember going to a dentist. They gave us food. The most significant memory I have is the government cheese, a big cheap block of it, I guess like Velveeta, in a plain cardboard box.
“Now I love good cheese and wine, but to this day there’s nothing like a grilled cheese sandwich with the cheapest possible American processed cheese that there is.”
On a wall is THE LUCK (lucky noticeboard), a pinboard where scores of newcomers would find advertisements for accommodation and jobs, while others learned of limited assistance available through the government’s Cuban Refugee Assistance Program – “a terrible, terrible acronym”, Malagón Márquez said.
His mother found work as a sewing machinist in a clothing factory, and his father, who had been a political prisoner in the early days of the Castro regime, worked two other lowly paid jobs, one washing dishes in a hotel kitchen. It was, he said, a time of opportunity, but blended with challenges that threatened to overwhelm them.
“I recall the difficulty my parents had finding us a place to live. In Miami in 1967 you’d open the newspaper to find an apartment and it would say, ‘no blacks, no Cubans, no dogs’,” he said.
It is those human tales of survival, fortitude and hope that those behind the tower’s anniversary reopening said they sought to pry out. Madeline Pumariega, MDC’s president, said that when the restoration project began in 2021, the year following her appointment, she directed its planners to incorporate personal stories such as Malagón Márquez’s, and those of her own parents, who also passed through The shelter decades earlier.
“There were these poster boards with pictures of what happened, but there wasn’t this real experience, and I thought, ‘how does my daughter hear this story as a 21-year-old? And how will her kids hear the story?’” she said.
“We wanted to leverage technology and the way that so many consume their experiences and information along with the first hand storytelling of those that came through here and experienced it.”
To that end, one gallery features a giant video wall where visitors can choose any of more than 350 personal stories recorded by those who lived them, or heard them from relatives. The collection is expected to grow.
“We wanted to create Libertad as an exhibit that leads multiple generations through feeling what it is to seek freedom, what it is to search for hope and opportunity, and how this great nation has given their families, their grandparentsthat opportunity,” Pumariega said.
The restoration project was funded with a $25m state grant and further awards from groups including the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Trust for Historic Preservation. Opening day will be early in national Hispanic Heritage month, beginning 15 September.
