Hundreds of people in Miami took to the iconic Calle Ocho, the heart of Little Havana, to celebrate former President and now President-elect Donald Trump’s victory on Tuesday night, waving American and Cuban flags and dancing in the streets.
The former president is the projected winner of the 2024 presidential race, and he defeated Vice President Kamala Harris with a significant victory in the state of Florida. Trump reportedly won nearly 55 percent of the vote in Florida, according to counts at press time.
Local media reported that Trump is the first Republican to win Miami-Dade County since 1988, leaning on heavy Hispanic-American support for the victory.
Little Havana has a tradition of convening at the iconic Cuban restaurant Versailles for major celebrations, such as when Fidel Castro died in 2016. On Tuesday night, so many residents assembled that the crowd spread far beyond Versailles to the front of neighboring Cuban restaurant La Carreta and both flanks of Calle Ocho.
CBS Miami reporter Marybel Rodriguez, reporting from outside of La Carreta, observed that if “the Heat win, the Panthers win, Trump wins,” Miami takes to the street to celebrate. Traditional celebrations feature loud salsa music and the banging of pots and pans to amplify the cheering.
Trump supporters gathered with pro-Trump signs, featuring slogans such as “Jesus is my savior, Trump is my president,” and anti-Biden signs. Some signs asked drivers to “honk if you hate Kamala.”
Drivers joined many of those celebrating on the streets, wearing the recognizable Trump red baseball caps and waving American and Trump campaign flags. Many wore or waved the flag of Cuba in recognition of Trump’s anti-communist policies during his first term as president.
Among the most popular tracks at the celebration was “Trump Song,” performed by the Cuban-American group Los 3 de la Habana, a staple of the 2020 campaign in the Hispanic Republican communities.
Los 3 de la Habana published a video on Tuesday night updating their song’s chorus from “I am going to vote for Donald Trump” to “Donald Trump won”:
Preident-elect Trump’s campaign focused heavily on courting the votes of several major ethnic demographics, Hispanic-Americans among them. The results were significant among Hispanics: according to NBC News, Trump received 25 percent more Hispanic votes in 2024 than in 2020.
“Trump won the support of 45% of Latino voters nationally compared with 53% for Harris, the NBC News Exit Poll found. That’s far better than the 33-point loss Trump suffered among Latinos in 2020,” NBC News explained, “when he won 32% to Joe Biden’s 65%. And it may end up being the strongest GOP performance among Latinos in a presidential race since George W. Bush carried 44% in 2004.”
In Florida, where the Cuban-American vote is a significant percentage of the overall Hispanic vote, many voters recalled Trump’s effective anti-communist policies during his first term in office. Trump prioritized ensuring that American money did not bankroll the violent, decades-old communist regime in Havana. The policies led to a documented decline in the number of arrests of political prisoners during the Trump administration and the emboldening of dissident movements on the island.
In Miami specifically, Trump dedicated time and attention to the trauma of the exile community. In 2017, announcing reforms to undo the pro-regime policies of predecessor Barack Obama, Trump featured the family of the victims of the 1996 Brothers to the Rescue murders. Brothers to the Rescue is a humanitarian group dedicated to helping balseros, Cubans who seek to land in the United States on rafts through the Florida Straits. The group operates legal flights over the straits to find and save wayward rafters. That year, dictator Fidel Castro shot their aircraft out of the sky over international waters, killing four Americans onboard: Carlos Costa, Armando Alejandre, Mario de la Peña, and Pablo Morales. The regime has yet to face any consequences for the killings.
In 2016, Trump also became the first candidate ever to receive an endorsement from the Bay of Pigs Veterans Association.