Add to ORKGMiami, Florida, has long been considered a Western hemispheric hub; Pan-American Airways, for example, began advertising the city as the Gateway to the Americas in the early 1930s. By mid-20th century, some 600,000 people traveling to and from Latin America passed through Miami each year, encouraging the city\u27s Chamber of Commerce to organize a series of inter-American business meetings during the 1950s. The Chamber also waged a battle at that time to abolish a federal tax levied on travelers to the Caribbean and Central America. Thereafter, several decades of political turmoil in the region figuratively and literally latinized Miami, most visibly through entry of a half million Cubans. In the mid-1990s, thirty-four nations meeting in ...