Last September a new museum opened in Miami’s oldest skyscraper, a Mediterranean Revival building from 1925 modeled after the majestic Giralda cathedral tower in Seville, Spain. During its first decades the seventeen-story building housed The Miami News. In 1962, three years after Fidel Castro’s forces overthrew the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista and established a revolutionary state, the skyscraper became the home of the Cuban Refugee Center, a haven for the half-million Cubans who arrived in Miami between 1962 and 1974, fleeing the increasingly radical government in Havana. It was on the basis of this history—which the museum documents in its centerpiece permanent installation—that the building became known as the Freedom Tower. Like the building itself, the city of Miami has to some extent become synonymous with the Cuban exile community. Nearly 70 percent of Miamians speak Spanish at home, and more than half the population is foreign born. Almost every Cuban American with family that arrived between 1962 and 1974 has some kind of personal connection to the Freedom Tower; in many households, stories about …