A Florida restaurant is under fire for glorifying Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and communism.
Cafe Habana, with locations in New York City, Malibu and Tokyo, is causing controversy with their new location in Brickell, leaving a bad taste in the mouth of locals.
Café Habana, set to open in Miami in the Spring of 2022, opened its first location inside a converted New York diner in 1997.
The restaurant is a fusion of Cuban and Mexican cuisine, but the restaurant's backstory is what's upsetting locals.
According to critics, ahead of their move to Miami, the restaurant scrubbed its origin story by no longer boasting it was “inspired by a storied Mexico City hangout, where legend has it Che Guevara and Fidel Castro plotted the Cuban Revolution.”
According to the Miami Herald, until this week, the restaurant's website read "inspired by a storied Mexico City hangout, where legend has it Che Guevara and Fidel Castro plotted the Cuban Revolution, the flagship Café Habana location was created out of an old-school New York diner in 1997. Eighteen years later, Café Habana remains an institution.
Resident Ronnie Overman tells CBS Miami "Miami history 101 you would know not to promote anything pro-Castro or pro-Che Guevara – and they did that."
Miami influencer Josue, who runs the page "What Josue Has To Say", says the restaurant is "a slap in the face to Cubans, it’s tone deaf, it’s insulting, you’re just trying to capitalize off of it, it’s egregious. The fact they changed their description right before the Miami opening, it looks, you know what you’re doing, you’re just trying to capitalize off the movement there is now in Miami."