Domino Park

The history of exile is not preserved only in monuments.

Sometimes it sits beneath a tiled roof on Calle Ocho, studying ten dominoes while pretending not to watch the other players.

At Máximo Gómez Park, better known as Domino Park, the tiles strike the tables with a sharp confidence. Games unfold beneath conversation, argument, laughter, traffic, and the attention of spectators trying to understand strategies the players have no intention of explaining. The park is small, but almost nothing happening inside it feels casual.

The official name honors Máximo Gómez, the Dominican-born general who became one of the great military leaders of Cuban independence. Yet the park is known by the activity that gives it life.

Dominoes.

The game appears simple enough. Numbered tiles are placed end to end according to matching values. In the Cuban form, the double-nine set is commonly used, creating a larger and more complicated field of play than the familiar double-six version. Four players usually compete in teams. Each player must remember what has been played, infer what remains hidden, protect a partner, mislead an opponent, and decide whether victory will come from emptying the hand or blocking the table.

The rules can be learned.

The game takes longer.

Dominoes demand memory, patience, calculation, and an ability to read people who are actively trying not to be read. A strong player does not merely consider the tile in hand. He considers the entire history of the table: what has appeared, what has not, what an opponent avoided playing, and what a partner may be signaling through restraint.

Every move contains information.

Every hesitation contains more.

The tile itself is only part of the play.

A slammed piece announces confidence. A lifted eyebrow disputes it. A long pause may suggest deep calculation or merely the desire to make everyone else nervous. Partners communicate partly through what they place on the table and partly through what they refuse to reveal.

Then comes the commentary.

A good move is acknowledged reluctantly.

A bad move is remembered generously.

Luck is blamed whenever skill becomes inconvenient.

The arguments are part of the game because the game is part of a larger social world. Politics, baseball, neighborhood news, family stories, gossip, jokes, and complaints circulate around the table. Players return not only to win, but to remain present in one another’s lives.

This is why Domino Park matters.

It is not simply a place where older men play a traditional game for the benefit of visitors. It is part of the civic infrastructure of Little Havana, as important in its own way as the restaurants, churches, newspapers, markets, monuments, and political organizations that helped Cuban exiles turn temporary displacement into a lasting community.

Many of the first Cuban arrivals believed exile would be brief.

They came to Miami expecting Fidel Castro’s government to fall and imagining that they would soon return to their homes, professions, businesses, and families. The Bay of Pigs deepened the separation. Years passed. Children entered American schools. Businesses opened. Families grew. Miami ceased being only a place to wait.

It became a place to live.

Communities require more than housing and employment. They require places where people can remain recognizable to one another. A person who has lost a country, profession, neighborhood, or social position may still retain a game, a language, a set of gestures, and the confidence that comes from knowing exactly what should happen next.

Dominoes provided that kind of continuity.

At the table, a player could recover a familiar measure of competence. Social status mattered less than memory, judgment, patience, and the ability to understand a partner. A man who had lost property, title, or standing through exile could still know when to play the double-nine.

That knowledge was not trivial.

Exile reorganizes identity. A doctor may become a clerk. A business owner may begin again as an employee. A respected family name may mean little in a new country. Familiar measures of adulthood, authority, and accomplishment can disappear almost overnight.

A game offers a smaller world in which the rules remain known.

The tiles still carry the same numbers.

A strong move is still a strong move.

An old rival is still capable of making an unforgivable mistake.

That stability matters when nearly everything else has changed.

Domino Park began informally as Cuban residents gathered to play in the neighborhood. The city eventually developed the space into a formal park, providing permanent tables and a sheltered place for games. Over time, the park became one of Little Havana’s most recognizable institutions.

Its permanence reflects a deeper transition.

What began as the gathering of exiles became a neighborhood tradition. What may once have felt temporary acquired tables, rules, routines, and a name on the city map.

Exile became diaspora.

The park does not commemorate that transformation with solemn inscriptions. It demonstrates it every afternoon.

Culture survives most effectively when no one has to announce that it is being preserved.

It survives in recipes made without written instructions, songs remembered from childhood, stories repeated until grandchildren know where to interrupt, and games taught by sitting down and being corrected.

Domino Park does not preserve Cuban identity beneath glass.

It allows people to continue using it.

That distinction separates living culture from display.

A museum protects objects by removing them from ordinary use. A monument fixes memory in stone or bronze. A park full of domino tables preserves habits, relationships, language, and the ordinary passage of time.

The game is not interpreted.

It is played.

Spanish remains the natural language of the park, but much of the communication requires no translation. The sound of a tile striking the table carries meaning. So does the theatrical sigh of a partner who has just witnessed a questionable decision.

Some conversations may concern Cuba.

Others may concern the Marlins, the weather, a family member, local politics, or the persistent incompetence of the person seated across the table.

Culture does not survive only through serious subjects.

It survives by allowing people to remain funny, competitive, impatient, affectionate, stubborn, and ordinary.

That ordinariness may be the park’s greatest value.

The nearby memorials preserve sacrifice, revolution, exile, and loss. Domino Park preserves the afternoon.

It gives people a place to spend time without needing to justify the time as productive. The game creates structure, but companionship gives the structure meaning.

Modern public space often treats sitting as suspicious unless it leads to consumption. Benches are removed, divided, or designed to discourage lingering. Parks become event spaces. Sidewalks move people toward businesses. Even leisure is expected to purchase something.

Domino Park permits another use of the city.

People gather.

They play.

They watch.

They argue.

They return.

Nothing needs to be bought for the time to matter.

That is one reason the park has become so attractive to visitors. It offers a visible form of community in a city often described through speed, nightlife, luxury, real estate, and reinvention. The domino tables suggest continuity.

This creates an unavoidable tension.

Domino Park is now one of Little Havana’s most familiar tourist stops. Visitors gather near the fence, take photographs, and observe the players as evidence that they have encountered something authentic.

The players are engaged in their own social ritual.

They are also being watched.

The park risks becoming an exhibit in which local people perform themselves for outsiders, even when they never agreed to perform. An ordinary afternoon becomes part of the neighborhood’s tourism economy.

Yet the games do not depend upon the tourists.

That is what preserves the park’s dignity.

The players do not arrange themselves for photographs. They do not slow the game to explain strategy. They do not require an audience to validate what they are doing. Visitors may watch, but the table remains governed by the people seated around it.

The game continues whether anyone understands it or not.

This is authenticity in its least theatrical form: life that would proceed without observation.

The park’s official name adds another layer to the story.

Máximo Gómez was born in the Dominican Republic but became one of the central military figures in Cuba’s struggle for independence from Spain. His life reminds visitors that national stories have always crossed borders. Cuban independence was not created only by people born on the island, just as Cuban identity in Miami would later be sustained far beyond it.

The park named for a general is occupied daily by strategists of another kind.

The stakes are smaller.

The disputes can feel just as serious.

There is something fitting about that.

Public monuments often elevate extraordinary individuals above ordinary life. Domino Park places the name of a revolutionary hero above tables where the daily work of community continues. History remains present, but it does not dominate the space.

The living are allowed to use it.

This is public space at its best.

It carries memory without becoming paralyzed by it.

It honors the past without insisting that every conversation remain solemn.

It gives a community somewhere to be visible to itself.

The game also reveals something important about diaspora.

A diaspora is not maintained only through political positions, ceremonies, anniversaries, and stories of departure. It survives through repeated practices. Culture becomes durable because people continue doing things that feel familiar.

They cook.

They pray.

They sing.

They argue.

They play.

These practices may seem small beside revolution, migration, imprisonment, and exile. Yet the survival of a community depends as much upon the ordinary ritual as upon the historic event.

The Bay of Pigs helped transform exile into permanence.

Domino Park made permanence livable.

It offered a place where loss did not have to be discussed constantly in order to remain understood. The players carried Cuba into the park without needing to announce that they were carrying it.

It was present in the language, the rules, the gestures, the rivalries, and the knowledge shared across the table.

A homeland can survive in something as small as a tile.

The game itself provides an appropriate metaphor for exile.

A player begins with what has been dealt.

Some pieces are useful immediately.

Others must be held.

The board develops through decisions made by several people, none of whom controls the entire outcome. Every move changes what remains possible. Success depends upon remembering the past while adjusting to what has appeared in the present.

A partner matters.

So does patience.

Sometimes the strongest move is not the most obvious one.

Sometimes the table closes before anyone has played what they intended.

The metaphor should not be pushed too far. Dominoes remain a game, and exile is not.

Still, communities often preserve difficult history through ordinary forms because ordinary forms are bearable.

A person can sit down, arrange the tiles, and begin again.

There is comfort in that repetition.

The monuments along Cuban Memorial Boulevard ask visitors to remember those who died, fought, fled, and remained separated from home. Domino Park asks something less dramatic.

It asks people to sit together.

That may be equally important.

Memory can become isolating when it exists only as grief. Community requires memory to be joined by humor, rivalry, routine, and the possibility of tomorrow.

At the table, the players cannot reverse exile.

They cannot repair relations between Cuba and the United States.

They cannot recover abandoned homes or restore the lives left behind.

They can study the board.

They can remember what has been played.

They can trust—or distrust—their partner.

They can make one more decision whose consequences are immediately understood.

Then a tile strikes the table.

Someone objects.

Someone laughs.

The game continues.

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The Sorcerer (1965)

When I look at Frank Frazetta’s The Sorcerer, I’m reminded not of medieval alchemy or forbidden incantations, but of the kitchen tables of my youth. I'm reminded of Magic: The Gathering games played with friends in middle and high school. The flickering firelight in Frazetta’s painting feels like the same energy that burned in those long afternoons when we, too, were sorcerers.

In Magic, we conjured creatures, cast spells, and countered each other’s enchantments in a battle of intellect and imagination. We carried our cards everywhere — to school, to church, to each other’s homes — bound in rubber bands and packed like relics in our backpacks. Laying them out on a friend’s table was its own small ceremony. We traded, debated, and experimented with endless combinations of color and power. My decks were usually blue: the color of illusion and intellect, of control through subtlety. I loved the enchantments, the enduring spells that reshaped the battlefield slowly and methodically. There was art in that restraint, and satisfaction in building something that lasted beyond a single turn.

Looking back, those games were more than pastime, they were community. They taught us to imagine, to negotiate, to lose and forgive. They were a world we built together through shared rules and unspoken trust. Frazetta’s Sorcerer, with his raised hands and open book, embodies that same impulse: to summon something greater than oneself through ritual and collaboration. The monster he faces could be fear, uncertainty, or simply the raw energy of creation. What mattered was that he dared to call it forth.

Frazetta’s influence runs deep through the world of fantasy art and gaming. Long before Magic or Dungeons & Dragons, he gave form to our collective dreams of adventure. He created a language of dark towers, enchanted blades, and the eternal struggle between light and shadow. His work created a shared aesthetic imagination, one that still echoes in every illustrated card and rulebook. Each game, in its own way, is a continuation of that same act of summoning: calling a world into being, if only for the span of an afternoon.

What strikes me now, as a teacher, is how rare those moments have become. In a time before phones, we gathered in person to play. We sat for hours, talking, laughing, teasing, arguing, and when tempers flared, making up again. Those sessions were formative in ways I could not have understood then. They taught patience, empathy, and resilience. They taught us lessons that live on far beyond the game table.

Today, in my classroom, I try to create those same spaces of play. We keep decks of cards, dominos, and chess sets on hand. Between assignments, I’ll see students challenge each other across the table — sometimes tentative, sometimes fierce — but always engaged. I join them when I can, not just to play, but to share in that ancient ritual of human connection. There’s a kind of quiet beauty in it: the sound of shuffling cards, the clack of dominoes, the murmured laughter that fills the room.

Play, I’ve come to believe, is not a distraction from learning but one of its purest forms. It is through play that we learn to imagine, to strategize, to empathize. Through play we learn to be human. Games remind us that creativity is communal, that meaning is made together.

In Frazetta’s Sorcerer, the act of summoning becomes a metaphor for that same process. Each of us, in our own way, stands before the fire, calling forth imagination and daring to shape it. Whether it’s in a fantasy painting, a deck of cards, or a classroom full of students, the magic is not in the spell itself. The magic is in the gathering, the shared belief that something wondrous can happen if we only sit down together and play. 

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Atari Video Game Mass Grave

There’s something oddly poetic about standing outside a chain-link fence in the New Mexico desert, squinting through metal and dust at a slab of concrete that marks one of the most famous failures in tech history. The site was closed by the time we got there, which felt fitting somehow. Atari’s burial ground—sealed, silent, and half-forgotten—didn’t need us to walk its dirt to tell its story. It was already legend.

We stood on the other side like mourners at a gravesite, not of a man, but of a moment. This was the place where the dreams of early digital pioneers were literally bulldozed and buried—where unsold cartridges of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Pac-Man, and a slew of other unwanted relics were dumped and entombed in 1983, victims of a crash that nearly ended video games before they began.

Most of what I know I learned from stories: how Atari, in a frenzy of hubris, rushed the development of E.T. in just five weeks; how millions of unsold games piled up in warehouses and came to symbolize the overreach of an industry chasing gold and striking dirt instead. So they hauled the shame to Alamogordo, crushed it, buried it, and tried to forget.

And for decades, people did forget—until the rumors wouldn’t stay buried. In 2014, a documentary crew led a dig to find out if the legend was true. It was. They unearthed the cartridges, warped and dusty, beneath layers of trash and time. The film (Atari: Game Over) captured the strange poetry of it all: a man who once coded the most mocked game in history watching it get pulled from the earth like an artifact.

Some of the games were reclaimed, preserved, and even sold—like relics from a digital Pompeii. What was once ridiculed became coveted. E.T. the Video Game found its place not just in landfills, but in museums. In collectors’ cases. In history books.

And that, I suppose, is how the story ends. The game that helped crash an industry was dug up, dusted off, and reimagined—not as a failure, but as a symbol. Not of what went wrong, but of how far we’ve come. E.T. the game became an icon, not because it was good, but because it mattered.

We took our photos through the fence and got back in the car. It wasn’t the most exciting stop on our trip, but maybe one of the most meaningful. Because buried failures have a way of coming back to life. Sometimes with a shovel. Sometimes with a story.

And sometimes, just by showing up at the fence—even when the place is closed.

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Mahjong

I first encountered Mahjong in the pages of Red Dragon. It wasn’t a game to me then — just a tile, a small but memorable detail in a chilling story. The dragon tile lingered in my mind, though I didn’t fully understand what it meant. I knew Mahjong existed, but only as a digital matching game — a quiet diversion where tiles disappeared in pairs, nothing like the intricate, strategic game I would later discover.

Last week, at a thrift store, I stumbled upon a real Mahjong set. The box was heavy, its contents rattling like a treasure chest. I had no idea if the set was complete, but when I opened it at home, there they were: rows of neatly arranged tiles, their symbols unfamiliar yet somehow familiar — bamboo, characters, dots, and yes, the dragon tiles. Seeing those red, green, and white dragons felt like rediscovering an old memory — the connection back to Red Dragon, only this time I wasn’t reading about them. I was holding them.

The tiles themselves were simple — cardboard rather than the thick, satisfying click of more traditional sets — but that didn’t matter yet. I didn’t know the rules — not really. But when I mentioned the set at work, several coworkers were just as intrigued as I was. We agreed to figure it out together. Between parent-teacher conferences, in those small breaks of quiet before the next meeting, we spread out the tiles, flipped through instructions, and started playing our first tentative games.

The rules were a puzzle — strange, detailed, and overwhelming at first. Drawing tiles, discarding them, building combinations — it felt like trying to read an unfamiliar language. Were we supposed to call out “Pong” or “Kong?” Was this a winning hand or just chaos?

And yet, “Pong” and “Chow” felt oddly familiar — like echoes from another game. They reminded me of Rummikub, a game I played with my mom as a kid. In Rummikub, I remember carefully arranging sets and runs — books and sequences — across the table, quietly counting tiles and planning my next move. There was something deeply satisfying about finally laying down a perfect sequence or stealing a wild tile to turn a losing hand into a win.

Mahjong carried that same rhythm — the strategy, the shifting patterns, the unexpected twists — and suddenly I was transported back to those quiet moments with my mom, huddled over the table in quiet concentration, matching tiles and chasing that same feeling of victory. Mahjong, like Rummikub, felt like a puzzle that kept revealing new layers — frustrating at times, yet endlessly rewarding.

Those moments of confusion while learning Mahjong became part of the fun. We’d break into laughter over mistakes, celebrate small victories, and puzzle over the tiles together. The game rewarded observation and patience, and just when I felt like I was getting the hang of it, a new rule would pop up, unraveling my fragile sense of understanding.

The dragon tiles became my favorite — symbols of power and fortune in Chinese culture, yet still tied in my mind to Harris’s dark novel. I kept thinking about that tension — the dragon as a symbol of strength in one context and terror in another. It reminded me that symbols, like games, take on new meaning depending on how you play them.

My Mahjong set is humble — just cardboard tiles — but playing with them has left me wanting more. I can imagine how satisfying a proper set must feel, with its weight, texture, and the distinct click of the tiles. Still, those cardboard tiles were enough to reveal something special: a game that’s part logic, part luck, and part social ritual. More importantly, those simple tiles brought my coworkers and me together, turning long conference nights into moments of connection.

And like Rummikub with my mom, I know I’ll keep coming back — not just for the game itself, but for the experience it creates. Mahjong isn’t just about winning hands — it’s about patience, discovery, and shared moments across the table. It’s a reminder that sometimes the best connections — whether with friends, family, or even a childhood memory — are built one tile at a time. 

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