Pocket of Miami, dubbed Little Manila, caters to thousands of Filipino cruise ship workers
Julius Caesar Ang set down his tray filled with dried fish, adobo pork, black beans and white rice at Manila Kantina in downtown Miami. It was his favorite time of the week, the two-hour window, when he can “feel normal, like a human being.”
At about 9:30 a.m. on a recent day, Ang was allowed to disembark at PortMiami from the Royal Caribbean cruise ship, where he works as an assistant waiter, while the ship was preparing to turn around and head back to the Caribbean with a new group of passengers.
“It’s my happy moment to be here. I get to have a taste of the authentic food that I’m always craving. It’s comforting, a taste of home,” he said of Manila Katina, one of a dozen Filipino and Southeast Asian businesses scattered around one square block in downtown Miami, between Flagler Street and NE 1st Street.
It’s a little-known microneighborhood — a Little Manila — catering to the thousands of Filipino workers who make Miami’s world-famous cruise business run.
While Miami doesn’t have a significant Asian population, workers from the Philippines, Indonesia, India and across the globe flock to the city for contract jobs on the cruise ships. But like Ang, who is working an 11-hour graveyard shift for seven months in Royal Caribbean’s restaurants, most crew members usually only have a few hours between cruises to set foot on the Miami soil.
During those precious hours, many crew members head to Flagler Street, where they can have authentic Filipino cooking, buy their favorite Filipino snacks to bring onboard, use the WiFi to call home, pick up packages of American goods for their families in the Philippines — and most importantly send remittances home to support their families.
Judith Blasco owns Manila Kantina, featuring a $12 all-you-can-eat Filipino buffet. Blasco, a Filipina immigrant who opened the place in 2012, used to work at a sushi restaurant downtown before she saw a unique opportunity to use her Filipino cooking skills to serve the constant stream of Filipino seafarers who pass through Miami.
“We try to be a one-stop shop for the crew members,” she said.
Amazon and Walmart packages waiting to be picked up by crew members are stacked high behind her cash register and in the back of her store. She’s got toiletries like shampoo, toothbrushes and deodorant behind a glass case and a wall with an array of instant ramens and snacks like ube (purple yams) cakes and cookies, and Filipino chicharrón, fried pork rinds with origins in Spain that made their way into the local cuisine of many former Spanish colonies.
A couple hundred feet away from Manila Kantina is Aklan Filipino Buffet, another Filipino family-owned restaurant inside the open shopping center between Flagler and NE 1st Street. Matt Cardano is starting to take over the business his mother started in 2012, and his sister owns the Filipino grocery store across the hall. Besides the cruise ships’ crews, he hopes to attract more Miami locals to his buffet.
“We’re not going to be successful, if it’s just Filipinos who come here,” Cardano said. “Our problem is that we need to inform the local public about our cuisine, but it’s really hard to introduce here.
“The goal is to rebrand. I’m trying to market it as ‘island cuisine,’” he said, explaining Aklan is the province where his mother is from, on one of the Philippines 7,000-plus islands. Cardano thinks he can appeal to Miami’s Latin American-centric tastebuds.
“We were colonized by the Spanish, so we have Latin influence. We were also colonized by the Americans, so we love things with cheese. It’s a lot of flavor and a lot of sweet and spicy,” he said.
Think: tangy, sweet and sour, vinegary. Similar to other Southeast Asian countries, seafood and fish sauce are staples. But the Spanish influence is undeniable. In addition to Latino staples like chicharrón, Filipinos have their own version of lechón (roasted suckling pig) and serve up a pig’s blood stew called dinuguan, reminiscent of morcilla. Aklan makes a Filipino chorizo similar to the Spanish kind but with a strong sweet kick.
“Miami is the home of the modern cruise industry, and sometimes people only think of the glamour of these huge, amazing ships, but the reality is that it takes so much to make this industry run,” said Rolando Aedo, the chief operating officer of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau.
“Businesses like these showcase the entrepreneurial spirit of immigrants in Miami: They saw an opportunity, they have an ethnic connection to their customers, and they’re supporting this critical Miami industry.”
Why so many Filipino cruise crew?
With Miami being the cruise capital of the world, somewhere as far away as the Philippines is not an obvious place for recruiting for cruise ship crew members. William Terry, a Clemson University professor of history who specializes in labor migration and tourism, said overseas workers are a cornerstone of the Philippine economy. He explained that under the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marco from 1965 to 1986, the high concentration of English-speaking, educated workers in the Philippines became an export.
“The Marcos regime turned to a system of emigration in order to utilize their human resources and created an entire apparatus of the Philippine emigration system, promoting their workforce and facilitating their moves abroad,” Terry said. “They created one-stop shops for contracting, where the paperwork and the worker were sent out the door and straight overseas.”
Today, remittances play a huge role in the Philippine economy. In 2019 prior to the pandemic, $35 billion in remittances were sent to the Philippines, which accounted for 9.3% of the country’s Gross Domestic Product that year, according to the World Bank. Many of those payments are coming from seafarers’ salaries — working on cruise and cargo ships — and also from land-based jobs in hospitality and nursing.
“In terms of recruiting for crew, the cruise lines look for a sweet spot where there is a high concentration of English-speakers and low wages,” Terry said.
A former U.S. colony, the Philippines has two official languages, Tagalog and English. Former British colonies in the Caribbean and India also play a significant role in the cruise industry workforce, along with Eastern Europeans and other southeast Asian nationalities like Indonesians and Malaysians.
While many cruise ship workers earn more than they would at home, the wages tend to fall far below minimum wage in the United States. For example, the median annual pay in 2019 for workers on cruise ships owned by Carnival Corporation, the world’s biggest cruise company, was only $15,429 according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of 275 companies in the S&P 500 index.
Seven-month contracts
Many crew members of Royal Caribbean and Disney Cruise Line interviewed for this story confirmed they make much more working on cruise ships than they would at home in the Philippines. Their remittances put food on the table for their families, pay bills and school tuition. But some workers, like Romeo, who asked not to use his full name for fear of retaliation from his cruise line employer, say they’re desperate for better working conditions.
“I wish there were some U.S. senator or someone advocating for us. We work six-, seven-month contracts without a single day off,” he said. “Why do others working in the U.S. get a day off and not us? We’re workers just like them. Our bodies need a break. No one protects us with any kind of labor law.
“But coming to Miami and eating Judith’s [Judith Blasco] food is like a birthday for us,” he said of Manila Kantina. I look forward to it every time we come in. It’s our taste of home, on a scale of 10, her food is an 11.”
Venezuelan cooks in Filipino kitchen
While Filipino crew members swear the food at Manila Kantina is as authentic as it gets, they may be surprised to learn the cooks are Venezuelan. Carlos Dominguez, from Valencia, Venezuela, recently came to the United States with his cousin. They went door to door in downtown Miami looking for work. Blasco hired them and taught them the ins and outs of Filipino cooking, speaking broken Spanglish and using Google translation.
Similar to the cruise ship crew members they serve, they work long hours in the kitchen in order to send remittances to Venezuela. With the cost of living in Miami, they’re only able to send about $40 a week to their families.
“I never, ever thought I’d be cooking Filipino food,” Dominguez said with a laugh, admitting he’s still getting used to some of the flavors. “But it’s a start to a life here.”
This story was originally published October 16, 2022 at 5:30 AM.
