miami ❤️

This was really a great read. An analysis of the Cuban American diaspora and the crime and terrorism that it inspired. The secret origin of Dan Quayle as a Iran Contra player after his tenure in congress leading to his shoe in for vice president.

This book is a must-read for anyone who has ever lived or wants to live in Miami, and I recommend it to anyone wanting to learn more about my hometown during the 60’s, 70’s & 80’s! Didion writes this nonfiction essay collection about Miami in such a perceptive and nuanced way, which is super impressive for her as an outsider to Miami culture but it also allows her to see it in a clear way. She writes truthfully and curiously about what is now a historical Miami (but of course the echoes are still very palpable today). She spends a lot of time describing the relationship between Cuba and Miami (logically) and the resulting cultural & linguistic emergence as well as events like the Bay of Pigs invasion and Mariel Boatlift. She talks about Miami in the context of the Cold War, in the context of race relations, and generally you can get a sense of the special place Miami has had in American and world history. I loved getting to know my hometown better, and better recognizing just how unique it is – especially as I read this in my first weeks back after my time in Paris. I appreciate Didion’s tone and sincerity as she describes the good, the bad and the ugly.

Joan Didion's, "Miami," is an intriguing story that chronicles the time between the 'Bay of Pigs,' and straight into the Reagan administration. In many way it is a sociological study of the different Cuban exile groups in Miami and the different approaches they took in the hope of overthrowing Castro. Of special interest, was how some exile groups did not really believe that the United States was their ally in this fight. They believed that the Kennedy administration had made a deal with the Russians that literally tied the American hands.

The latter part of this book deals with the unrest in Central America during the Reagan administration, and the different stories circulating out of Washington and Miami about the approaches being used to liberate the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador.

I must admit I found the last twenty pages of this book very difficult to follow. It was like reading James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, but the rest of the book was truly stimulating and made incisive statements about Miami during this time that I had no idea about.

EXTREMELY detailed and observant. perfectly described the weirdness and conflicting nature of miami

WILL THE LAST AMERICAN TO LEAVE MIAMI PLEASE BRING THE FLAG

Super interesting subject but either it’s too dense or I am

I wish I could have given this book 5 stars as the first half was equally heartfelt as it was relatable — having grown up in the city. Not being Cuban, I was always an outsider, and immediately understood Didion’s perspective as she positions herself as a “voyeur” of sorts. It losses a star as the second half is repetitive in explaining the Cuban rhetoric and thought of the time.

It does not take her years of reporting in Miami to identify that the city’s “democratic institutions seemed rooted if it all, only shallowly,” that “nothing about Miami was fixed or hard,” that there were too many public works projects that were faulty at best, that being Hispanic here only “meant mostly Cuban,” “Cubans in the clubs did not admit Jews or blacks,” that there was money to “spend and a notable willingness to spend it in public,” “yet another gala,” “all high visibility,” that “Miami Anglos and Miami Cubans were failing to connect,” and that Spanish was spoken everywhere by default. It’s a city with an overwhelming amount of paradoxes; most notably being diverse but only in the most Hispanic sense, being a free land but to some a place of betrayal, openness of displaying passion but disallowing protests when not done in the right way, and pushing away newcomers despite their own circumstances of flee. All in all, Didion did her duty in describing Miami’s society at odds with what it was battling from the Bay of Pigs to the Watergate break-in. A look into a place of passion and hypocrisy.

This one just didn’t hit for me I’m sorry Joan

Joan Didion is a great writer. I don't think "Miami" is a great book, though.

"Miami," does a marvelous job of showing how intrigue, double-crosses, and empty promises are the coin of the realm when it comes to both the Washington intelligence establishment and the expat community in Miami who dreamed of a Cuban reconquista by the exiled propertied classes. The problem, for this reader and reviewer, though, was that this note was struck so constantly and redundantly that it became the journalistic equivalent of a long atonal music experiment by a minimalist composer. Didion's voice-mostly deadpan and sometimes droll, usually laced with cynicism and soaked in irony-is probably perfect for a column-length piece. Over the course of a book, though, it became a bit excruciating, sort of like the "New School" journalism perfected by Michael Herr or ramped up to ten by Hunter Thompson, only if the Good Doctor had spent more time with Thorazine than LSD and Herr spent less time in Huey gunships and more time in the Broward County Library scouring through reams of microfiche.

The book is effective in places, and Didion is capable of laser-like insight and breathtaking prose. But the short glossing allotted the other cultures simmering in the melting pot of Miami (from the Haitians to the American blacks) felt like either an oversight or a snub, as Didion concentrated not just on Anglo-Cuban relations, but almost solely on the only sometimes-substantiated rumors of the intriguers in these two communities, to the exclusion of everything else.

No, I wasn't expecting the pastel neo-noir of Miami Vice, but Didion is too good a writer and Miami too sensuous a locale for her to forego physical and sensory description (for the most part) and to focus on the staid corridors of power in D.C., ignoring the flesh-and-blood world she was no doubt steeped in when writing this book.

Mileage may vary, though, and digested in the right portions, as a string of essays rather than a coherent work, you might get more out of it than I did. The notes at the end provide a nice trove of primary and secondary sources worth raiding.

Informative and interesting depiction of the political morass of, primarily, the Cuban 'exile' community in Miami and its relations with US government bodies, agencies, policy and action; also with same in other Latin American countries. (Published 1987 and, it seems, researched mainly over the two preceding years.)

It provides an overall impression via accounts of multiply intertwined factions, individuals, movements, etc. The impression is, crudely, that (1) the US has consistently tried to manipulate and hoodwink Cubans in the US, not just expressing support for their aspirations but providing money, training, organisation - but in ways that were never what they purported to be and which never eventuated in any decisive action against Castro's government; while (2) the Cuban exile community itself was, as the saying goes, riven by faction, with differences of political analysis and nuance overriding the shared goal of 'doing something' about Castro, and these differences often expressed in the form of lethal violence against each other.
At that level of generalisation, the situation seems to have been fairly constant since the early '60s, if not longer.

It's a depressing and discouraging tale in several ways, but also a salutary reminder of the cynicism of the Reagan administration (in which of course Reagan himself played an almost negligible part).

Didion often gets praised for her prose: here she often seems to go out of her way to be convoluted. Try this:
"Orlando Bosch himself, according to staff interviews conducted by and to CIA and FBI memos released to the 1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations, had been under contract to the CIA during the early 1960s, running, with Evelio Duque of the Ejercito Cubano Anticomunista, a camp in Homestead, the last Florida town before the Keys."
Perhaps the idea is to convey the tangledness of the tale, with all the parenthetical introductions of other characters, organisations, etc.; as well as all the slog of research she had to do to extract some sort of followable narrative from all the confusion. Still, it makes it a slog for the reader at times too, which is why I could only describe an overall impression rather than give a neat summary of specifics.

Anyway, a worthwhile and kind of absorbing read. The morals seem to be: stay out of Cuban politics in Miami if at all possible, and never trust a US government official offering support for your cause.

READING VLOG

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