The Miami sandwich is a club sandwich that moved to a Cuban bread loaf, and the swap changes everything about how it eats. Ham, turkey, bacon, Swiss, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise is a deli club's cold roster, and on plain white toast it would be exactly that. On Cuban bread it becomes a Miami deli sandwich: the soft, lard-enriched, thin-crusted loaf gives the build a different structure, a faintly sweet crumb and a crackly outer shell that hold the cold cuts without the dryness of toast or the chew of a sub roll. The defining decision is the bread choice itself, an Anglo club assembly carried on a Cuban loaf, which is the whole point of a Miami deli and the reason this sandwich reads as a place rather than a generic combination.
The craft is in the bread and the layering. Cuban bread has a tender interior and a thin crust that yields cleanly rather than fighting back, so a tall, mixed, slightly wet load of cold cuts and tomato sits comfortably without crushing or sliding. The meats are layered rather than piled, ham, turkey, and bacon shingled so each bite reaches all three, with Swiss between them as the binding note and bacon supplying the salt and crunch the soft loaf otherwise lacks. Lettuce and tomato bring the cold, acidic counter; the mayonnaise seals the crumb against the tomato's moisture so the bread holds for the length of the sandwich. Unlike the Cuban it shares a loaf with, it is built cold and unpressed, the bread doing the work without the plancha.
The variations move along the Florida Latin shelf. Pressing it on a plancha turns it toward Cuban territory; adding roast pork pushes it further still; swapping mustard for some of the mayonnaise sharpens it. Some builds drop the turkey for a leaner ham-and-bacon stack, others run it on a longer loaf for a sub-scale version. The pressed Cuban, the medianoche on its sweeter egg roll, the Elena Ruz, and the tripleta are all distinct builds on the same regional bread, and each of those deserves its own article rather than being crowded in here.