PATRICK MAY Herald Staff Writer

Most of us are here tonight for the same reason: As relative newcomers to Miami, we are simultaneously charmed and confounded by the Cuban culture that has dropped down on this town like a curtain. The feeling we share is undeniable: We are, in many ways, on the outside looking in.

We want to know why and how things work here and we accept the premise that to really know Miami, one must try to understand the Cubans who have changed it forever.

It seems from introductions before the class that most of my 12 fellow students would share another premise with me: Miamians live not on the southern edge of the Northern Hemisphere, but on the northern edge of the other.

For the next five weeks, Lisandro Perez , chairman of the sociology and anthropology department at FIU, will guide us through the Cuban -- and specifically the Miami Cuban -- psyche. The trip begins tonight with a crash course in Cuban history, and running through it one crucial theme:

"In many ways," Perez says, "Miami's Cubans are just not foreigners here. There have been extensive contacts and familiarity with the United States. By the '40s and '50s, Cubans looked more to the United States than to the rest of Latin America."

For two hours, Perez gives us a concise and thoughtful lecture, occasionally tying in a bit of Cuban history to a real- life situation we are likely to encounter in the streets of Miami 1986.

"You'll find in history a lot of explanations of why Miami Cubans do the things they do," he says, citing as an example the fact that most Cuban restaurants will usually serve ajiaco, a heavy bouillabaisse-type soup, only on Mondays.

The reason: "In the 1930s, the Cuban president at the time declared that every Monday would be Cuban Day and that Cubans should only eat domestic foods, nothing that had been imported."

Ajiaco fit that bill. So today, three decades and many miles away, the tradition lives on.

"The Cuban community has grown tremendously and become a vital element in the development of this city," Perez says. "It has had impact on a lot of non-Cubans, both personally and professionally. Some of it has been very negative.

"But knowledge can make a difference," he tells us. "If more people understand another group better, that just might make for better inter-ethnic relations."

Already I have begun to make some sense out of a culture that, while it totally surrounds us, has remained inaccessible and alien to me, save for my random and reckless stab at Spanish before some unlucky waitress in a Calle Ocho diner.

This new course is offered by Florida International University. Herald Staff Writer Patrick May is taking the weekly class and will file a report each Friday until its conclusion Nov. 20.