Lets go smoke a Cuban Cigar!

Beating on cooking pots and honking car horns, hundreds of Cuban exiles streamed into the streets of Miami's Little Havana to celebrate news that Cuban President Fidel Castro had handed over power.

Calle Ocho, the main street of the Spanish-speaking neighborhood in Miami that is the heart of Castro's exiled opposition, was awash in Cuban flags and dancing people who had waited years, and in some cases decades, for this moment. Fireworks exploded over parts of Miami.

Castro announcement that he was handing over power provisionally to his younger brother and designated successor Raul Castro while he underwent surgery was greeted by Cuban exiles in Miami as a signal of his imminent demise.

"I am elated but I am sad at the same time, because there are so many of us who could not be here to see this," said Ana Maria Lamar, referring to exiles who spent their lives fighting Castro and the thousands of Cuban rafters believed to have perished trying to flee the communist-ruled Caribbean island.

An estimated 650,000 people of Cuban descent make their homes in Miami, the Florida city remade by Cubans who left the island in waves following Castro's 1959 revolution.