Family, festival hub of the Hispanic community
By Víctor Manuel Ramos
Sentinel Staff Writer
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Rafael Rigoberto Medina arrived in Orlando with his family on a cold January day after driving cross-country from California, convinced it would be a temporary stop before their return to a free Cuba.
He asked his wife, Luisa, not to unpack.
“We looked around, and there was nothing here,” Medina said. “This was country.”
That was 38 years ago.
Not only did the Medinas unpack and stay, the couple bought a house, raised three daughters, started a business, launched a festival and, along the way, helped make Orlando more welcoming for Hispanics.
Medina’s Grocery and Restaurant at East Washington Street and Bumby Avenue is the oldest Hispanic grocery in Orlando. It anchors other shops that cater to Latinos.
The Medinas were also instrumental in starting the city’s oldest Latin festival, Fiesta Medina, which attracts tens of thousands to downtown Orlando every spring. This year’s festival is Sunday.
Over the years, the Medinas have seen Metro Orlando’s Hispanic population grow exponentially. The U.S. Census Bureau counted about 26,000 Hispanics in 1980. In 2006, there were an estimated 438,000 Hispanics.
Through those changes, the Medinas remain a fixture in east Orlando.
“The story of the Medinas is indirectly the story of the community,” said Ernesto González Chávez, a Cuban architect who designed their plaza in the 1980s. “This street where they started became the center of the Hispanic community at some point.”
While Hispanics have spread, Medina’s remains the small, old-fashioned mom-and-pop bodega it was in 1970.
Power lunches
The fragrance of freshly made café con leche wafts through the store’s narrow aisles as nostalgic Cuban songs such as Guantanamera play in the background.
There’s crusty Cuban bread, still warm from the oven. By the meat section, deep-red chunks of beef are sliced into fine fillets for customers. In the back of the store, sugar cane is crushed to squeeze out the sweet juice known as guarapo.
Rafael Medina still walks around the store, adjusting items on the shelves and joking with customers while Luisa, a former nurse in Cuba, works the register. She greets people as they come and go, calling them by their first names, asking them about family.
“I try to give my customers the affection, the love and the trust so they can feel good,” Rafael, 75, said in Spanish. The business has become a traditional stop for politicians campaigning for office or seeking a connection with older Hispanic voters.
The walls of the restaurant are decorated with pictures of the Medinas posing with Orlando power players past and present.
Sen. Mel Martínez, whose late father used to frequent Medina’s, remains a loyal customer.
He went there for lunch the same day he endorsed Sen. John McCain for president. In the dining room, where customers can enjoy a typical meal of white rice and black beans with ropa vieja a shredded-beef dish, he ran into Jack Kemp, a former U.S. housing secretary.
That’s not unusual for Medina’s.
“The thing that is so significant about them is that it isn’t just a place to buy groceries or, you know, whatever. But it is part of the fabric of the Orlando Hispanic community, where it began,” Martínez said. “It is a focal point.”
Family feeling
Like many in Orlando’s first wave of Latin American immigrants, the Medinas came to the U.S. seeking refuge from the Cuban Revolution.
Rafael Medina had studied to become a schoolteacher, but instead siphoned weapons to rebels hiding in the mountains in the 1960s. They had risen against Fidel Castro’s reforms, which would take away land from local farmers.
The military squashed them. Medina’s cousin, one of the rebels, was arrested and executed. Medina was locked up with hundreds of others in a chicken farm transformed into a prison camp. After his release, Medina bought his escape ticket to Spain. He left his wife and two daughters behind because their visas were pending.
He left Spain for New Orleans, then moved to Los Angeles, where he opened a gas station and repair shop. His wife and daughters joined him with the help of a Catholic relief agency.
But California seemed too distant to his homeland, so Medina closed his shop, and the family headed for Florida.
Medina poured the $400 he had in savings into a grocery shop.
“I just wanted to survive at that point,” he said.
Word of their cortadito espresso got around. Other Hispanic shops soon opened nearby, creating a cluster that helped fuel growth.
Theirs is the only small Hispanic shop that remains amid growing competition from supermarket chains that cater to Latinos. They also have seen the block party that they helped start in 1987 balloon into a large spring festival.
Many of their early customers continue to shop at Medina’s.
“I could go other places to get these things, but here it’s like visiting family,” said Judith Andújar, an east Orlando resident who visited Medina’s on her lunch break to buy Cuban bread; malta, a sweet malt drink from Puerto Rico; and pastelitos stuffed with meat.
Luisa Medina, 71, said she treasures the closeness they have with customers.
“People come to talk to us,” she said.
Thanks to their customers, she and her husband were able to send their three daughters to school. Minerva, the eldest, is a doctor’s assistant; Mirna is a nurse; Marisel, the youngest, is a surgeon.
“All that came from the store,” Luisa said.
