The annual festival celebrating Bahamian culture in Coconut Grove returns for three days in early June.
Organizers of this year’s Goombay Festival in Coconut Grove are hoping to attract bigger crowds, more vendors and additional funding to rebuild the three-day event into the festival they remember as the pulsing heart of Bahamian culture in Miami.
“As a young girl, growing up in Miami-Dade County, I looked forward to Goombay every year. I couldn’t wait to go to Goombay,” Congresswoman Frederica Wilson said last week at a media event announcing the dates of this year’s festival.
“I want to see this come back, so we are going to join hands today, and we’re going to raise money, and we are going to get people to come back to Goombay, and make it the festival that it was before.”
After a hiatus of several years, the Goombay Festival returned in 2022 as a smaller event. This year’s festival begins on Friday June 6 in Armbrister Park and then moves to Grand Avenue for the traditional street party on Saturday and Sunday June 7 and 8.
Wilson was joined at the event last week by Chala Cartwright, the Bahamian consul in Miami, Miami District 2 Commissioner Damian Pardo, and vonCarol Kinchens-Williams, the chair of the 2025 Goombay Festival.
“For our office, this is the most important event,” Pardo said. “We are thrilled to see it start coming back.”
The City of Miami has committed $150,000 in support of this year’s festival. Organizers are hoping to raise an additional $100,000, Kinchens-Williams said.
To date, about 60 vendors have signed up to participate. The Bahamian consul said she expected 10 to 12 vendors from the Bahamas to participate again this year.
At a time when the neighborhood Miami has designated as Little Bahamas is experiencing rapid gentrification, supporters say the festival is needed more than ever.
“As a community, we are losing our Bahamian roots. We are losing our Bahamian legacy, and we cannot let that happen,” said Wilson, whose maternal grandparents were Bahamian.
Bahamian settlers helped to establish the City of Miami in 1896, a fact that both Wilson and Pardo stressed last week. “They were here building the Flagler railroad before this was even a city. They built Vizcaya,” Wilson said.
“So today, I had a speech and it was going to be a nice little speech, but today I am giving you a sermon,” she added. “We have one event, and that’s Goombay. And we have got to make it our signal event.”
In addition to supporting Goombay, Wilson has pledged to build a Bahamian museum and cultural center in Coconut Grove to honor the neighborhood’s early pioneers.
In August 2022, she announced $6 million in federal funding to support the project. Since then, though, there’s been little progress and a fair degree of controversy.
Wilson spoke about the museum again at last week’s event.
“When we finish building the museum, it will be an anchor for Little Bahamas, where people will come from around the world to see this beautiful museum that pays tribute to the people whose lives and whose blood and backbone built the City of Miami.”
Asked about the status of the project, Wilson said a location has been selected, but she declined to identify the property.
In addition to the museum, Wilson said she wants to build a gateway arch to identify the Little Bahamas neighborhood and welcome visitors.
“You know that we have designated a section of Coconut Grove as Little Bahamas, and I’m going to be working with Commissioner Pardo to build an arch to show the entrance, that you are entering Little Bahamas,” she said.
A spokeswoman for the congresswoman identified the intersection of Grand Avenue and Douglas Road as the preferred location for the arch.
