"Florida, Flo-rree-da," says Heberto Padilla, pronouncing the familiar word with a flourish, as if it were a lover's name. "Ponce de Leon christened it, and in Coral Gables the streets have Spanish names. So we deserve the place. Whenever we had trouble in Havana, we went to Miami, and Miami is very, very important for us. We don't feel like immigrants." Padilla certainly does not. Cuba's best and most famous poet now talks as if he could be the proud father of all his 726,000 countrymen residing in South Florida. "The U.S. is the seventh-largest Spanish-speaking nation in terms of population,"...
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