The Caribbean · Volume 12, The Sofrito, the Libreta and the Ninety Miles to Miami

The Cuban sandwich

Name: The Cuban sandwich
Total time: 5 min
Cuisine: Cuba
Ingredients: 1 loaf, split Cuban bread, lard-enriched and steam-baked; 4 slices roast pork; 2 slices ham; 2 slices Swiss cheese; to taste pickles; to taste mustard

Havana, Tampa and Miami

The Cuban sandwich, pressed pork, ham, cheese and pickle: a pressed sandwich cut diagonally in half and stacked, faint crosshatched grill marks on the golden toasted bread, visible layers of pale roast pork.

Illustration

Time: 5 minutes

Researched: Researched from 66 sources in the brief

by Havana, Tampa and Miami

Ybor City, founded in 1885 by the cigar manufacturer Vicente Martínez Ybor, drew Cuban, Spanish, Italian, German, Romanian-Jewish and Chinese immigrants into its cigar factories; at its 1920s peak roughly 10,000 cigar rollers across 200 factories hand-rolled up to half a billion cigars a year. Tampa, not Miami, held the largest Cuban enclave in the United States from roughly 1890 to 1950, a working-class cigar-industry population heavily intermarried with Sicilian and Spanish immigrants in the same factories, and genuinely distinct from the professional-class exodus that followed the revolution seventy years later. This is the population that built and stabilised the Cuban sandwich as it is now known, covered in full below, and this chapter treats Tampa's Cuban food history as its own distinct strand rather than folding it into "Miami" out of habit.

Read the history

As tradition built it

The Cuban sandwich

Havana, Tampa and Miami; disputed origin; pressed 3 to 5 minutes on the plancha.

Ingredients

1 loaf, split Cuban bread, lard-enriched and steam-baked
4 slices roast pork
2 slices ham
2 slices Swiss cheese
to taste pickles
to taste mustard

Method

Fill the Cuban bread with roast pork, ham, Swiss cheese, pickles and mustard.
Press hot on a plancha until crisp through.

Notes

The Havana claim traces the sandwich to the mixto, roast pork, ham, cheese, pickles and mustard on Cuban bread, predating any US version, a position both academic USF historians and Tampa's own La Segunda Bakery, in business since 1915, accept as the true point of origin.

The Tampa claim credits Sicilian immigrants working alongside Cubans in Ybor City's cigar factories, with Genoa salami added, stabilised in workers' cafés from around 1900; Tampa's city council named it the Historic Tampa Cuban Sandwich in a 2012 resolution.

The Miami claim omits the salami, sometimes adds tomato and mayonnaise, and is pressed thin and crisp; Miami's own mayor has publicly dismissed the salami version.

No serious source, academic or in-tradition, can name an exact date or individual credited with inventing the sandwich, and any source offering a precise answer should be treated with suspicion.

What a modern chef changes

House-baked bread, sous vide pork, Big Green Egg press

Rung 02, 06

Method

Bake the bread itself, properly lard-enriched and shaped, rather than substituting a plain baguette, the single decision this chapter treats as the most consequential in the whole dish.
Mojo-marinate and cook the pork shoulder sous vide to an even, moist doneness before it ever meets the press, so pressing crisps the exterior without drying the meat inside.
Press on the Big Green Egg fitted with a flat griddle plate run properly hot, closer to Miami's iron-press heat than a domestic panini press typically reaches.
Fresh-grind any whole mustard seed for a sharper, more textured mustard layer than a jarred paste alone gives.

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