Nation: MIAMI

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The sharp smells of fresh pasteles (pastry) and café cubano waft from a hundred neighborhood coffee stands. Youngsters are everywhere, downing batidos (exotic fruit milkshakes) at open-air counters or putting away Grandes Macs at the McDonald's eatery on Flagler Street. This is Little Havana, a 5-sq.-mi. Cuban enclave in the middle of Miami.

Hispanics account for more than half of the city's population (207,000 out of 370,000), and the overwhelming majority of them are Cuban. They have given Miami, as Rum Maker Gerardo Abascal observes, "a spontaneity and boisterous flavor that it never had before."

Some 700,000 largely middle-class Cuban refugees have fled their Communist-dominated island home for the U.S. since Fidel Castro took power. Of these, 430,000 have settled in southern Florida's Dade County, where they were initially welcomed with sympathy and federal relocation grants. The Cubans have long since spread out from Little Havana. Neighboring Hialeah (pop. 133,000) is 65% Latin, and the Cubans have moved on to such well-tended suburbs as Coral Gables, Kendall and Westchester. They have prospered mightily, prompting Cuban Writer José Sanchez-Boudy to boast with only slight hyperbole: "We have been the most successful immigrants this country has received since it was founded."

Cuban enterprise has transformed Miami and Dade County into a dynamic commercial center. The area now boasts 230 latino restaurants, 30 furniture factories, 20 garment plants, a shoe factory that employs 3,000, and about 30 transplanted cigar factories. Hispanics are prominent in land development and make up 60% of the construction work force. They control 14 of the 67 local commercial banks. One, the Continental National, has seen its deposits swell from $2 million to $29 million in the past four years. Latinos generate an estimated $1.8 billion in annual income and have created 100,000 jobs. Says Jan Luytjes, a business professor at Florida International University: "We are seeing the rebirth of small entrepreneurship."

Every day scores of planes, from 747s to vintage C-46s, haul television sets, machinery and other U.S.-manufactured goods to the Caribbean and Latin America, returning with clothing, fresh flowers and food. In Coral Gables alone, 80 international firms have opened offices. Exxon, Du Pont and General Electric have their Latin American headquarters there. International trade now accounts for $4 billion in state income and has created 167,000 jobs, some of which have been filled by other Latin American nationals who have been drawn to the booming area.

For the Cuban middle class, hatching deals over lunch at Little Havana's American Club or lounging on weekends at the Big Five Club, life in the U.S. is a dream that grew out of a nightmare. Says Frank Soler, 35, who fled to the U.S. at age 17 and is now editor of El Miami Herald, a Spanish-language edition of the Miami Herald with a daily circulation of 50,000: "Suddenly we lost everything and were confronted with potential poverty and hunger. Fear spurred us to work our tails off to regain what we once had." Result: 40% of the county's Hispanics earned more than $12,000 last year. Nearly two-thirds own their own homes.