Two Florida cities claim the Cuban sandwich. What’s the real story?

By Terry Ward, CNN

(CNN) — Miami and Tampa both have enviable weather, a vibrant Cuban diaspora and beautiful beaches at their doorsteps. Both Florida cities also lay claim to the Cuban sandwich.

So when you dig into which community is the cradle of this layered love affair, expect an earful.

“As far back as I can remember eating, I’ve been eating Cuban sandwiches in Tampa. They were always there at birthday parties, anniversary parties, funerals,” said Andrew Tambuzzo, who was born and raised in the Florida city and has Sicilian and Cuban roots.

On the menu at Tambuzzo’s Tampa craft butcher and café, The Boozy Pig, his version of a Cuban sandwich, dubbed a mixto, references the sandwich’s original Cuban name.

“I think Tampa is where it all started because of the migration here for the cigar industry. Also, Tampa has the original Cuban bread,” said Tambuzzo, who comes from a long line of Tampa food purveyors.

Roughly 280 miles to the southeast in Miami, Michelle Bernstein — the owner of Café La Trova, a Cuban-inspired restaurant along Calle Ocho in Little Havana, among several other Miami restaurants — has her own fond memories of the Cuban sandwich in the city that similarly claims ownership of it.

While not Cuban herself, Bernstein said she was born and raised in Miami on Cuban sandwiches and grew up across the street from a Cuban market and butcher. Her mother would sit her at the counter when she was a child, order her a Cuban sandwich and banana milkshake and do the shopping. Bernstein called it one of her fondest childhood memories, adding that it was formative to her relationship with food.

“Miami doesn’t just eat the Cuban sandwich, we claim it as ours. It’s an identity. You grow up here and the Cuban sandwich is in your blood the same way café con leche is,” said the James Beard Award-winning chef in an email to CNN Travel.

So which city actually invented the Cuban sandwich — and where does the Caribbean island of Cuba come into the picture? And how did the notable differences in the fillings and bread texture — salami in Tampa and the fragile eggshell-like exterior on the bread in Miami — come to be?

The answers involve a winding journey that links back to a bygone Cuba.

The Cuban sandwich’s evolution

In their book, “The Cuban Sandwich: A History in Layers,” the description by co-authors Andrew T. Huse, Bárbara C. Cruz and Jeff Houck of the Cuban sandwich might make your mouth water.

“When prepared well, the Cuban sandwich enthralls with the first bite,” they write. “The audible crunch as your teeth shatter the toasted Cuban bread and plunge into the warm fillings inside. Sweet ham, pungent Cuban roast pork, the subtle charm of Swiss cheese, briny pickles, mustard, and sometimes more — are sliced and layered to become one dynamic flavor on the palate.”

While Miami, Tampa and even Key West have all laid claim to being the Cuban sandwich’s true hometown, write the authors in their book, the story of the Cuban sandwich has a predictable origin point, if not a terribly well-documented origin story.

“The Cuban sandwich absolutely has its origins in Cuba,” said author Bárbara Cruz, who is Cuban-American and a professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa.

In its early days on the island, the sandwich was similar to the traditional Spanish sandwich known as a bocadillo — made with bread, cheese and whatever protein was available to put on it, said author Jeff Houck.

The sandwich eventually evolved, by roughly the late 1800s, into what came to be called a mixto, Spanish for “mixed,” with the option for more than one meat.

“From our research, we found that this idea of the mixto really was revolutionary. Up until that time, people would have a ham sandwich, or a pork sandwich, a pan con bistec (steak sandwich),” said Cruz, whose research unearthed ads in old Cuban newspapers where Havana bakeries advertised mixto sandwiches.

And while fans spar over the Cuban sandwich’s bread and key ingredients today in places like Miami and Tampa, there were hardly such first-world discussions on the island.

“On the island, it literally was a mixture of whatever they had. There weren’t such strict rules or perceptions of what the sandwich should or shouldn’t have,” said Houck, adding that the sandwiches were often enjoyed by people as they rode around on carriages at night.

It’s impossible to pinpoint when the mixto, or sandwich resembling a Cuban, was first enjoyed in the United States. But when migration started from Cuba in the early 19th century to cities like New York (and later Key West, Tampa and South Florida), the mixto came along with it. And, predictably, it evolved.

“Everywhere everybody migrated, there’s some evidence that we found where they called it a ‘Cuban sandwich,’” said Houck, about the creation.

“But really, it didn’t take the form that everybody fell in love with until it got to Tampa,” in the late 1880s and 1890s, he said.

‘Half of it now, half of it later’

Before that, Key West saw the first major influx of Cubans into Florida around 1868, said Rodney Kite-Powell, a historian who has worked at the Tampa Bay History Center for three decades. That original influx marked the start of the Ten Years War and Cuba’s first war of independence from Spain.

The following decade pushed much of Cuba’s cigar manufacturing from Havana to Key West, Kite-Powell said. By 1885, however, due in part to labor problems and a lack of reliable fresh water, Spanish cigar manufacturer Vicente Martinez Ybor moved his operations to Tampa. And with that came the makings of Tampa’s Cuban sandwich.

In Tampa, the Cuban sandwich was similar to what we consider street food today, said Kite-Powell. “Restaurants would serve it out of a small service window or at a bar,” he said.

As Tampa’s cigar industry boomed, the sandwich was the perfect fit.

“It was easy, it was dependable, and it was something that could kind of be carried with you. It’s wrapped up in paper. You can have half of it now, half of it later,” he said.

Since cigar workers were paid by the cigar instead of a daily wage, the sandwich was something they could eat at their work benches while they pumped out their product.

By contrast, Miami didn’t see a major wave of Cuban migration until 1959, when Fidel Castro came into power.

“It was the switch to Communism and then things like the Mariel boatlift (in 1980) and other factors that really began pushing the Cuban population into South Florida, particularly Miami, in the 1960s. Then going all the way through into the 80s, when it just continues to grow more and more, there are more people fleeing Cuba and generally ending up in the Miami area,” Kite-Powell said.

The differences found in Tampa’s and Miami’s Cuban bread can likely be explained by those different waves and time periods of migration.

“That is definitely a cultural difference that likely is because of that later arrival,” he said, adding that Miami bread likely represents a more direct lineage to the bread from the island, since it arrived in the US more recently.

The makings of a Cuban sandwich

Die-hard Cuban sandwich fans vary when it comes to how they prefer their sandwiches — and that most notably applies to the Tampa-Miami divide and diaspora, says Houck, who is vice president of marketing for the 1905 Family of Restaurants.

A cursory search on Reddit and other online forums might lead you to believe that it’s the inclusion of salami in the Tampa Cuban sandwich that separates it from Miami’s version. Indeed, Genoa salami is a common ingredient in many bonafide Tampa Cuban sandwiches.

Often sliced at an angle to make a triangular wedge that shows off the fillings and makes the sandwich easier to handle, it’s the bread itself that’s the real point of differentiation, Houck said.

“The bread is vastly different. It’s super crusty yet tender inside in Tampa. In Miami, it has much more of a fragile sort of eggshell kind of crust,” he said, which often lends the Miami version to being pressed to achieve crispiness (such is the case at the legendary Versailles restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, where Cuban sandwiches have been on the menu since it opened in 1971).

For its part, Tampa appears to be most fiercely loyal to a single purveyor of Cuban bread: La Segunda Bakery, which has three locations across the city, including in Ybor City, Tampa’s original Latin quarter.

Since 1915, La Segunda Bakery has been run by four generations of the Moré family and bakes more than 20,000 loaves of bread each day that get sold onsite and distributed in Tampa and well beyond.

The bakery is known for the century-old custom of placing a palmetto leaf atop each loaf to retain moisture. And every restaurant in Tampa tied, at least in part, to tradition — from the historic Columbia Restaurant in Ybor City (Florida’s oldest restaurant) to Tambuzzo’s Boozy Pig — uses the La Segunda bread in their Cuban sandwiches.

Houck said the tradition extends well outside Tampa, too.

“A lot of people, they won’t admit it, but they import their bread from Tampa to Miami. I don’t know anybody who does the reverse,” he said.

Re-invention lives alongside tradition

Today, Cuban sandwiches have made their way onto menus at restaurants not only across the United States but around the world, from Toronto and Helsinki to Guam and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

At the International Cuban Sandwich Festival, held every year in Tampa, a Cuban sandwich restaurant from Seoul, South Korea, placed first in the popular vote for two years running with the addition of kimchi to their version.

Bernstein said she had a Cuban sandwich on the menu for years at Café La Trova that was made with pork belly and Serrano ham, but she never thought it was as “craveable” as a traditional Cuban. So she replaced it with a Cuban sandwich empanada made with all the original ingredients plus mustard aioli in a homemade empanada dough (the restaurant sells roughly 400 a day, she said).

Diaspora descendants like Tambuzzo at The Boozy Pig put their own spin on the sandwich’s ingredients — he house-smokes and cures the mixto’s ham from pigs he raises in the countryside north of Tampa, slow roasts the mojo pork using a recipe inspired by both his Cuban and Sicilian ancestors, and makes his own garlic dill pickles, too.

In Miami, Sanguich, owned by locals Daniel Figueredo and Rosa Romero, nabbed a Michelin Guide Bib Gourmand award for its gourmet Cuban sandwiches, with ingredients like garlic-confit shredded pork and preservative-free Cuban bread.

Sadly though, due to resource shortages on the island, there is nothing resembling the American-born Cuban sandwich that exists in Cuba today, said Cruz.

But as the Cuban sandwich continues to evolve Stateside and beyond, loyalties — and strong feelings about the proper way to make it — still run deep.

“I have a sister who lives in Miami. She’s actually going to come up for Labor Day weekend,” Cruz said before the holiday earlier this month. “That child is going to bring her own Cuban bread with her.”

​​Florida-based travel writer Terry Ward lives in Tampa and never met a Cuban sandwich she wouldn’t scarf.

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