Miami thought this guayabera shop was another victim of the pandemic, but it’s back

Article by Sarah Moreno
With permission to reprint from The Miami Herald

Original guayabera shop in Miami opened by the King of Guayaberas, Ramon Puig

There are businesses that are such a part of Calle Ocho’s landscape that if something threatens them, Miamians feel like the ground is moving. In July of last year, La Casa de las Guayaberas — the store that Ramón Puig turned into an emporium of that very Cuban garment — announced it was closing due to the pandemic and many feared the loss of a business that serves as testament to the enterprising spirit of that first generation of Cubans to arrive in the 1960s.

But his son Louis Puig was not going to waste a lifetime of effort by the King of Guayaberas, who triumphed twice — first in Cuba and then in the United States.

“I am very aware of the hard work we faced in the United States to get where we are,” says Louis, who inherited the business when his father died in 2011 and closed it last year to protect his employees.

In July, Louis decided to reopen the store, without much fanfare, in a smaller location in the same shopping center on Calle Ocho and 58th Avenue where customers from all over the world come looking for the quality and finish of Puig’s guayaberas.

“I spent my childhood there. I swept the store after leaving school,” recalls Puig, noting that his father’s first store in Miami, which opened three years after the family’s arrival on the Freedom Flights in 1968, was next to the restaurant Versailles.

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