So did the 35,000 balseros -- rafters -- who left Cuba during the 1990s, and the scores of intellectuals who fled in more recent years with work contracts via Madrid, Mexico, Paris and Buenos Aires and eventually ended up here.

Out of the exiles' sense of loss, a tapestry of all things Cuban was draped over Greater Miami. Cuban culture is thickest in municipalities like Hialeah, where West 46th Place is Cuban Cultural Heritage Boulevard and West 47th Place proclaims ''Añorada Cuba Boulevard,'' Cuba of Our Yearning Boulevard.

It's shared over a cup of café cubano in places like the restaurant Versailles, where the Castro regime is scorned by the knots of Cubans who mill there well into the dawn hours. The restaurant is a hub of cubanía where you find shoulder-to-shoulder former batistianos -- who once supported dictator Fulgencia Batista -- disenchanted fidelistas and recently arrived dissidents.

''El exilio is a land that exists in Miami. The rest of us live as Cubans in the United States,'' says Silvia Pedraza, a Michigan sociologist who left Cuba as a child in 1961. She spends some summers in Miami, nurturing her intellectual interest in exile as well as getting ''my dose of culture,'' which remains fresh because every wave brings to Miami new art, new literature, new slang, an updated version of cubanía.

Through it all, there has been but one hope -- a free Cuba. Each New Year's Eve, while in Havana the government hailed another year of the Castros in power, in Miami's Cuban-exile homes a toast was made, a pledge renewed: ``El año que viene en Cuba.''

Next year in Cuba.

The next year often brought new upheaval on the island -- but not its democratization. More often than not, after an economic crisis threatened the end of the Castros' regime, the new year brought another exodus.

`OUR DAY IS COMING'

After the fall of communism in Europe in 1989, singer Willy Chirino summed up the exiles' euphoric hopes in a song that trumpeted ``nuestro día viene llegando'' -- our day is coming.

Some exiles packed their bags; some even put their houses up for sale. But the years passed and brought not the end of Castro's rule, but more refugees, another wave of people who left it all behind to start all over again -- in Miami, city of exiles, city of one dream, one longing.

Today, another Castro is in power. Still, Miami's Cubans never give up their stubborn hope. Chirino's song never goes out of style, and to this day, Miami sings: ``Ya viene llegando'' -- the day is coming.