Miami, Florida, 1962. The sun beats down like a sweaty fist, baking the pastel facades of the Art Deco hotels along Ocean Drive. Neon signs, relics of a brighter past, flicker against the relentless glare, promising paradise but instead deliver something far more sinister. The air, thick with the scent of salt, exhaust fumes, and cheap perfume, hangs heavy over the city, a humid shroud concealing its rot.

The postcard images – palm trees swaying against turquoise or purple-yellow-orange tricolores skies, sun-kissed beaches teeming with tourists in Hawaiian shirts and bikinis – was a carefully crafted illusion. Beneath the veneer of glamour, Miami was a pressure cooker, simmering with corruption, narcotics, and the ever-present threat of violence.

For decades, the Italian mafia had owned this town since the bygone days of Prohibition. Their influence, woven into the fabric of the city’s underbelly, was as deeply entrenched as the roots of the banyan trees lining Biscayne Boulevard. Their reign was unchallenged, their power absolute. But the winds of change were suddenly blowing in from the south, and hard. Castro’s revolution in 1959 had sent a tidal wave of Cuban refugees crashing onto Miami’s shores. They huddled in what’s now Little Havana, clinging to the remnants of their former lives back home.

Then, things started to shift. The desperation of exile, the lures of easy money, power, and respect; the resentment towards marginalization, & the experience of the fight against the old dictator Batista began to coalesce. Small-time gambling dens and numbers rackets bloomed in Little Havana, controlled by men with hard eyes and harder hearts. The Cubans are learning the game, and they’re learning it fast. They are no longer content to stay within their own borders. They were expanding, pushing outward, encroaching on territory the Italians had long considered their own, risking a potential mob war in the future.

(Please describe your oc before beginning the story.)