“I felt terrible,” Mariel recounted of her recent visit to a Miami emergency room. Her family brought her to the hospital after the sensation of an immense weight on her chest became more intense. By the time she was ushered into one of the examination rooms, her breath had been reduced to a shallow rapid wheezing. The attending physician took her pulse, ran a few quick tests, and gave her an Ativan, concluding, “I can’t give you a diagnosis.” After her breathing grew less labored, he sent her back into the waiting room. As she bent down to collect her things from under one of the coffee tables, she stood frozen for an instant and then plummeted face-first to the floor, unconscious.

One of the things that first struck me upon entering the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection is the many ways “Cubanness” is written onto the space of the archive itself. The glass doors that separate the lobby from the reading room are emblazoned with the Cuban coat of arms. Protective glass cases house bejeweled statues of Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre, the patron saint of Cuba. The scent of café cubano regularly seeps from the kitchen. The Cubaness of the space is further heightened by the university’s architectural features and geographic location. Oversized windows fill the reading room’s southern wall with views of the sprawling U Miami campus. One plant in particular dominates the landscape: the royal palm (Roystonea regia). One of the most enduring symbols of Cuba, perhaps this was the variety of palm Cuban poet and founding father José Martí envisioned as he composed the famous lines that have been forcibly recited by countless generations of Cuban schoolchildren: Yo soy un hombre sincero/de donde crece la palma/y antes de morirme quiero/echar mis versos del alma. As the national tree of Cuba, the royal palm decorates the same Cuban coat of arms that is reproduced on the doors of the CHC.