Calle Ocho Festival

The festival

What is Calle Ocho Festival

The Calle Ocho Festival is Little Havana’s big street party, the Cuban neighborhood in Miami. On a Sunday in March, SW 8th Street—Calle Ocho—closes to cars for about fifteen blocks and becomes a corridor of music stages, dance floors, food and craft stalls, and flags from Latin American and Caribbean countries. The festival marks the finale of Miami Carnival, a series of events that runs for several weeks between February and March.

The party began in March 1978, created by the Little Havana Kiwanis Club, a neighborhood association founded by Cuban exiles, as a kind of open house for the neighborhood to the rest of South Florida. Its first name was Open House 8, and outsiders later started calling it Calle Ocho. It grew large enough to be recognized by law in 2010 as the official festival of the state of Florida, and it continues to be organized by volunteers from the same club, with proceeds going to youth programs in the community.

The festival entered the record books on March 13, 1988, when 119,986 people formed the world’s largest conga line there.

Stages line the street playing salsa, merengue, reggaeton, traditional Cuban music and Latin pop, with folk dance groups between performances. The street is divided into sections with stages for different styles, food areas and a children’s space. Salsa groups and casino dancers—the Cuban ballroom style—perform and pull the crowd onto the street to dance, and it’s common to see multiple generations of the same family dancing together. Many people wear shirts or flags of their family’s country of origin, and the festival becomes a portrait of Miami’s Latin communities: Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Colombians, Venezuelans, Dominicans, Nicaraguans and others.

Miami Carnival, which culminates at Calle Ocho, includes in the preceding weeks a street party on Miracle Mile in Coral Gables, domino tournaments, golf and soccer events, the selection of the carnival queen and art exhibitions. Outside the festival day, Calle Ocho is Little Havana’s main artery, with Domino Park where residents play outdoors, walk-up cafés serving Cuban coffee, cigar factories and a Walk of Fame honoring Latin artists. For visitors to Miami in March, the festival is the liveliest way to get to know the neighborhood.