As a South Florida native, this might be a long review for a book that is only 200 pages haha

I kind of went into this book hoping that a lot of what I grew up around not entirely understanding (the mariel, etc) would be made more clear to me, but this just made me realize how little I actually do know, as I found myself pretty confused through out the book regarding this specific topic.

The political climate when she wrote this in the late 80's is genuinely so close to the current climate today in South Florida, I was so surprised to read a lot of the common buzzwords on the conservative Cuban side of things that are still used to this day. I knew since I was a kid that down here, when you ask a Cuban why they are right-leaning, they usually just say because they're Cuban, which I never understood. I knew it had to do with the 'Bay of Pigs' and the betrayal of the JFK administration but while reading this, I realized the betrayal was so much deeper and longer than any of that. It went on for decades, multiple administrations, right and left, that continued to use and betray the Cuban people in Miami, act as if they were ever going to help their cause, and abandon them over and over again. Its definitely eye-opening and makes it more understandable as to why people are on that side of the political spectrum (in ways) although I do feel like neither party helped them at any point. Reading this just makes me feel like this group of people were doomed no matter what, as so many people mishandled so many things here.

The culture of South Florida cannot be talked about without speaking of Cuban culture, because its completely engrained and truly the base of what South Florida culture is. I have never worked a job where there wasn't a mid-day break to make cafecito, where people in the mornings brought not only donuts, but pastellitos. So many of my friends are atleast half Cuban and the thought of the Cuban people not migrating here is something I can't even truly fathom to what South Florida would look like. I'm glad I got to learn more about that experience especially in the very early years of it. I think the issues that come with speaking on the political aspect of Cuban-Miami culture is truly so complicated, complex and hard to grasp even after reading this.

Some random highlights:
- "They spoke of "diversity," and of Miami's "Hispanic flavor," an approach in which 56 percent of the population was seen as decorative, like the Coral Gables arches" - this stood out to me because I do feel like a lot of tourists come down to Miami and truly see the people as decorative and act as such as well. Its putting something I've thought into words in the best way possible.

-It was funny to see her refer to the people mover as a 'ghost train' considering its so widely used down here today. So much of what was true in 1986~ ring true and shows how much progress this city has undergone, especially in the realm of the violence down here. I truly had no idea it was that violent or had that much CIA involvement down here in the 80's at all.

This was also my first time reading a book by Joan Didion. It was a very interesting writing-style, I read that it was based off Hemingway's, which I have still yet to read as well, but it definitely had me re-reading sentences SO much, that mixed with a lot of the names I've never heard before, it wasn't exactly the easiest read ever. I would give 5 stars but I think also, I wish there maybe was more to say about Miami at that time. I wish it was a bit longer and delved more into other cultures history down here than it did.

”Here between the mangrove swamp and the barrier reef was an American city largely populated by people who believed that the United States had walked away before, had betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs and later, with consequences we have since seen. Here between the swamp and the reef was an American city populated by people who also believed that the United States would betray them again, in Honduras and in El Salvador and in Nicaragua, betray them at all the barricades of a phantom war they had once again taken not as the projection of another Washington abstraction but as their own struggle, la lucha, la causa, with consequences we have not yet seen.”--Joan Didion, Miami


Joan Didion's book on Miami explores the Cuban-American exile community from the 1960s through the mid-1980s (when the book was published). More a journalistic than a comprehensive study, it gives voice to the frictions and frustrations between Washington politicians and their CIA operatives (mostly from the Kennedy and Reagan Administrations) who tried to utilize the spirit of the exiles to carry out Cold War foreign policy (virulently opposed to Communist expansion in the Western hemisphere) with the actual desires of the Cuban expats themselves--who wanted nothing less than an American-backed invasion of Cuba.

This flag-waving abstraction vs. hard-core struggle is the center of the work, and Didion's prose and a great ear for the telling phrase and succinct quote make this one of the best examples I've read of her unique style as an interviewer and distiller of research. She inserts herself as an outsider into a complex environment and gets us what feels like a true understanding of the key points of an issue and what the key players are at odds about.

In other words the essense of great journalism.

I have read Joan Didion before, often with interest, but I have never enjoyed her work, particularly, until stumbling across this nonfictional work from 1987. This turns out to have been a really nice companion piece to Jennine Capo Crucet’s wonderful Say Hello to My Little Friend, which has been my favorite book so far this year. Both books are primarily about Cuban-Americans in Miami, one borne of lived experience and one from dedicated and meticulous research. I am embarrassed, as a native (and decidedly former) Floridian about how little I knew about this community.

Example: While I was a schoolboy, I was aware of something called the ‘Mariel Boatlift’, in which Fidel Castro invited anyone who wished to leave Cuba to do so, including those behind bars; I was unaware that about 134,000 Cubans ended up in South Florida as a result, and that it changed the reality of Miami forevermore. Didion showed up a few years later, asking questions. There had been a long-established Cuban power structure there – after all, three former Presidents of Cuba had rebuilt their lives in the upscale Coconut Grove / Coral Gables area – but by the time Didion arrived, 56% of Miami proper consisted of Cuban-Americans (a number that has since grown to about 69%).

Didion was dazzled by the ignorance of Anglo-Miamians to this culture taking root around them and does her best to rectify it.

In February of 1986, the Miami Herald asked four prominent amateurs of local history to name “the ten people and the ten events that had the most impact on the county’s history…[there follows a long list consisting mostly of early landowners and developers]..On none of these lists of “The Most Influential People in Dade’s History” did the name Fidel Castro appear, nor for that matter did the name of any Cuban, although the presence of Cubans did not go entirely unnoted by the panel. For the ‘Events’ question, all four of the panelists mentioned the arrival of the Cubans, but at slightly off angles, and as if this arrival had been just another of those isolated disasters or innovations which deflect the course of any growing community, for example the Freeze of 1896, the Hurricane of 1926 and the opening of the Dixie Highway.

This set of mind, in which the local Cuban community was seen as a civic challenge determinedly met, was not uncommon among Anglos to whom I talked in Miami, many of whom persisted in the related illusions that the city was small, manageable, prosperous in a predictable broad-based way, southern in a progressive Sunbelt way, American, and belonged to them.

Didion’s restrained acid tongue shows up again and again in this book, making it (for me) a very fun read:

On March 7, 1986, a group called the South Florida Peace Coalition applied for and received a Miami police permit authorizing a demonstration against American aid to the Nicaraguan Contras (an anticommunist insurrectionist volunteer army.) In due course, a second police permit was applied for and issued, this one to Andres Sargen, the executive director of Alpha 66, a group running current actions against the government of Cuba. That the permits would allow the South Florida Peace Coalition demonstration and the Alpha 66 counterdemonstration to take place at exactly the same time and within a few yards of each other was a point defended by Miami police. This was not an assessment which suggested a particularly close reading, over the past 25 years, of either Alpha 66 or Andres Sargen.

The later chapters, in which Didion tracks the involvement of violence-prone Cuban-Americans in the Iran Contra scandal that cast a shadow over the Reagan presidency, were less interesting to me, in that they were more about Washington, D.C. than about Miami.

Unless you live there, why should you care that the ninth most populous county in the United States has essentially become a foreign land? Because it is producing writers like Jennine Capo Crucet, who does not consider herself exotic at all, but simply the product of some accidents of history. That this culture has grown and prospered is an indicator, at some level, that the United States is doing something right.

Although, most of Joan Didion's reporting is focused on the politics of the city, it's still surreal reading this book (written in the late '80s) alongside recent news of the condo collapse. She sort of brushes over developers interest in Miami during the time and how scattershot it was.

I didn’t read Didion’s Miami to necessarily learn anything new. The work was published in 1987; yet Didion is so fluid and illuminating, reading anything of hers is going to provide indelible insight to the craft of writing.
 
“The buildings themselves seemed to swim free against the sky.”
 
Of a trial she writes, “there was flickering all through this presentation of the government’s evidence a certain stubborn irritability, a sense of crossed purposes, crossed wires, of cultures not exactly colliding but glancing off one another, at unpromising angles.”
 
Didion’s lens is always sure.
 
It is billed as a study of immigration and exile, passion, hypocrisy, and political violence, and further describes the “fateful relationship between the Cuban exiles of Miami and the larger body politic of the United States.” In a lesser writer’s hands, Miami could be viewed as textbook pedagogy. In fact, two other books about Miami were published that same year: one, an objective history; the other a shorter, personal odyssey.
 
However, Didion’s Miami, as described by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in his 1987 review, is “brief, impressionistic, a pointillist nightmare from which the author never even tries to awaken.”
 
Lehmann-Haupt further describes Didion’s Miami as “detached and elliptical, almost ritualistic in its repetition of syntactical constructions, it is a style that often seems to be fending off either laughter or tears.”
 
When we read Didion, it is how it’s always been: rather “the mood of her prose than its facts.”

Didion remains my favorite author, though that probably says more about me being relatively poorly-read than anything about her. Though her politics are presumably far different from mine, she has a discerning eye and examines her subjects with a cutting clarity with which I'm often struck. Having read two previous essay collections of hers, I was interested to see how she brought this skillset to "Miami," which is essentially a non-fiction, journalistic account of the city's Cuban "exilio" community in the 1980s.

She paints a compelling image of a population caught between the abstract policymaking of Washington and the material realities of Havana, an exile community whose entire lives are consumed by politics in a manner that Didion seems to find alien. Indeed, Didion spills considerable ink depicting Cubans as overly conspiratorial, and Miami as somewhat of a foreign land, a third-world locale that's part of the United States seemingly by accident. Her descriptions of Cuban culture include references to a "Spanish model" that is "absolutist" and "sacrificial," which is of course the type of language that leaves Didion vulnerable to critiques about implicit racism, Orientalism, and so forth. While I wouldn't fundamentally disagree with any such critiques, I think they're largely besides the point; to accuse Didion of being myopic, bourgeois, or problematic is akin to describing the sky as blue. The point is that she presents a discerning perspective from within an elite, WASP-y milieu, and sometimes these myopic viewpoints can be appreciated for what they are.

I was struck especially by her observations on the bifurcation of culture in 1980s Miami; though the Cuban exiles represented a plurality, if not an outright majority of the region's population, there seemed to be a nearly impermeable barrier between the Spanish-speaking Cuban world and everybody else. In Didion's telling, this isn't merely attributable to class dynamics-- Cubans generally did quite well for themselves, and were particularly well-represented in the city's real estate elite-- but is instead based on language and culture.

There's plenty more I can say, but overall, I'd strongly recommend it. It's an easy read, too. Got it done in just a couple of days.

Wow! So as the white Anglo Saxon perspective of a city that successfully blends two cultures it's no surprise to find racism disguised behind the mask of a liberal. What, there are people who don't speak English or agree with my politics, what is America coming to? Didion, who has never lived in South Florida, has written an embarrassing book that will look worse as time passes and America becomes multicultural. At first, this book was extremely addictive and the history aspect of it had me reading chapter after chapter in one sitting. By the end of the book, I was disgusted and wanted to throw it away.

Miami is not one of Didion’s best-known works, but it is a book of hers I felt compelled to read given my family ties to Cuba.

It’s not her easiest read, but I am glad I read it. Yes, there are a lot of characters. Yes, sometimes we end up down a rabbit hole of a sentence, paragraph, section. But I appreciate the amount of time she spent reporting this out, and I learned a lot, even as someone with more baseline Cuba knowledge than most.

one of the very best collection of didion's entries about miami, cuba and washington and the political maneuvering that has gone down in the name of democracy and revolution. she begins pre-castro, tracing a history of exiles coming into miami as safety zone, marks kennedy's bay of pigs event(s) as the new wave of exiles, and proceeds in twists and turns, charting the actions anti-castro exiles to reagan's america in the mid-1980's as the 40th president spins fantasies in order to aid the "freedom fighters" in nicaragua. along the way she links persona both virtuous and treacherous on both sides of the struggles in her inimitable fashion, forging a non-fiction narrative that reads like the best of suspense novels. this is a great place to start for readers new to didion, or those of us that have been following her for decades. just, wow.

Reading anything by Joan Didion is a lot like going through someone's medicine cabinet. One gets the most intimate details through the most mundane things. Didion's "Miami" is a series of political vignettes and observations describing the Cuban/American relations that shaped the landscapes of Miami switching between historical moments and luncheons that Didion attends. Listing off dress styles, lipsticks, sounds of taffeta and newspaper articles Didion gives her take on Miami - not quite a journalist, not quite a historical, not Cuban and not from Miami, Didion gives the reader nothing but style.



Didion writes herself into Miami as an outsider yet still makes the reader feel like they know and understand the climate of the city. I truly respect Didion's approach and intention of doing this. I feel that it is a skill and a look few can pull off - the outsider that can actually say something well about something that does not belong to them - a skill I grapple for and grapple with even the idea of doing it. At times I was frustrated with Didion telling stories that were not hers, an issue that hit close to home with my own struggles with my work, but I felt that in her writing I saw someone working to a solution of how to do so, even if it remained flawed by her telling of Miami as Didion's history.



This is definitely not Didion's best work, but, I still recommend this book to anyone! Didion writes beautiful, conversational prose, with a dry cynicism that masks deep compassion like the caked make-up she loves to point out.

"To spend time in Miami is to acquire a certain fluency in cognitive dissonance."

I suppose if you are not at all familiar with Miami and the Cuban exile community this very short book may give you a little insight into the very complicated history, unfortunately, the book is way too short and the last part of it is more about the Reagan policy on freedom fighters in Central America than anything else.

First book of the year had to fly over my head of course. Probably could have spent more time reading up on some of the background history, as this book assumes you have some knowledge in order to delve deeper into the lesser known parts of the action.

But for the parts I did understand, they stuck with me. They deepened the thoughts for this world I have entered, the lives of the people all around me.