March 1, 2025 | Michael Fechter
“I don’t think we can tell the story of the Freedom Tower without telling the story of Miami,” says Maryam Laguna Borrego, Miami Dade College’s senior vice president and chief operating officer, who is shepherding a renovation project coinciding with the 17-story tower’s centennial.
When it opened in 1925 as the Miami Daily News Tower, it was one of the city’s tallest buildings with little else around it. But after the newspaper relocated, the tower earned its reputation as the “Ellis Island of the South” during the 1960s and early 1970s as the absorption site for tens of thousands of Cuban exiles fleeing from Fidel Castro’s Communist regime. The federal government leased the property in 1962 to house the Cuban Assistance Center, providing everything from medical care to food staples and identification cards to new immigrants.
“A lot of wonderful things happened in that building for a community that came and just lost so much,” Borrego says. “I think it is a very uniquely positioned building of hope, freedom and opportunity … in the heart of downtown Miami.”
Over the years, it has been a symbol of protest and rallies. It also has served as a place of mourning. Though she died in New Jersey in 2003, Cuban salsa singer Celia Cruz lay in state at the tower, attracting an estimated 200,000 mourners.
The tower was donated to Miami Dade College in 2005. MDC President Madeline Pumariega’s parents are among those who were served at the Cuban Assistance Center in Freedom Tower. Now her school is renovating it and increasing its contributions to the city’s history and culture.
The state provided $25 million for the structural renovation, and fundraising continues for work on the interior and exhibition space. The tower is expected to reopen by fall.
It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1979 and designated a National Historic Landmark in 2008.
New exhibits chronicling its history will be part of the reopening, including permanent exhibitions honoring the Cuban exile experience. That includes 250 recorded testimonials from Cuban Americans describing their experiences coming to the United States and being processed in Freedom Tower.
Freedom Tower, Borrego says, “is going to be a world-class interactive museum experience.”