Little Cuba

What Rockstar has said

Rockstar's Vice City page mentions "the bustling panaderías of Little Cuba" between Ocean Beach and the Tisha-Wocka flea market. Panaderías are bakeries. It is a small detail to lead with, and a telling one: Rockstar sells Little Cuba through everyday neighbourhood life rather than a landmark.

Who lives thereUnconfirmed

Dazed's August 2026 cover story, written with access to Rockstar, said the game's background characters are "more tailored to their local environments, from Vice City's Little Cuba to the wilderness of Mount Kalaga national park". Rockstar's senior art director for characters, Jamie-Lee Lloyd, told the magazine the studio built new tools and pipelines for "the most detailed and varied character population we've ever created". Expect Little Cuba's streets to look and sound different from the beach strip a few miles away.

Real-world model: Little HavanaUnconfirmed

Little Havana lies immediately west of Downtown Miami, stretching about two and a half miles west from the Miami River. It was a lower-middle-class and largely Jewish area in the 1930s, and became Little Havana in the 1960s as Cubans fleeing the Castro government settled there; by 1970 the neighbourhood was more than 85 percent Cuban. Since the late 1990s more Central Americans, especially Nicaraguans and Hondurans, have moved in, though most businesses are still Cuban-owned.

Its best-known landmarks are on Calle Ocho (SW 8th Street): Máximo Gómez Park, better known as Domino Park, where older men play dominoes over coffee and cigars; the Tower Theater; the Calle Ocho Walk of Fame for Latin stars such as Celia Cruz and Gloria Estefan; and Versailles restaurant at SW 8th Street and 36th Avenue. The Calle Ocho festival, part of Carnaval Miami, draws more than a million visitors. The National Trust for Historic Preservation listed Little Havana among America's 11 most endangered places in 2015 and named it a national treasure in 2017.

Little Havana in 2002Unconfirmed

Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002) used the real name Little Havana for one of its districts, and its plot drew on Miami's Cuban and Haitian communities. Game Rant notes that the original map's South Bridge led from Little Havana to Ocean Beach. GTA VI renames the district Little Cuba, in line with Rockstar's habit of tweaking real names.

What is still unknownUnconfirmed

Rockstar has not published Little Cuba's boundaries, which businesses can be entered, or which characters are based there. Rockstar has not captioned any image as Little Cuba, so the cover should be read as a general Vice City view.

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• Vice Citypart of[1]