Joan Didion's Miami is about how the U.S. government -- after the Bay of Pigs debacle -- decided to pretend to oppose Fidel Castro and lead Cuban-Americans to think that they were planning to invade the island. In fact, they appeared to oppose Castro while while stringing the Cuban community of Miami along. After describing the effects of this behavior among the Miami Cubans, Didion then describes how, over the years, the White House was essentially playing Three Card Monte with the American people on the subject of Cuba.

Toward the end, Didion quotes Anthony Lewis who in 1975 wrote in the New York Times:

The search for conspiracy ... only increases the elements of morbidity and paranoia and fantasy in this country. It romanticizes crimes that are terrible because of their lack of purpose. It obscures our necessary understanding, all of us, that in this life there is often tragedy without reason.

Which very much brings to today's political scene, which is rife with conspiracies that multiply exponentially.

Her book is so prophetic that it is hard to believe that it was published in 1987, during the second term of Ronald Reagan. This is a book which should be read by anyone who wants to know how we got into the fix we are in.

Didion is in icy control of her material. No where does she interject her opinions or reactions to the events she describes.

Joan Didion's writing is a touchstone in my life, has been since The White Album. This book suits her style to a T, urgent, riveting, exposing the underbelly. She has the same fascination I have with sordid corruption in politics and circles of power, and Miami is a city rampant with both. The Nicaraguan war was basically run from Miami. That has been established not just in this book, but in many others. The CIA and conservative Cuban exiles who fled Castro teamed up and turned the city into a center of black ops. The Cubans in Florida did a lot of dirty work for the CIA in return for empty promises that the US would get rid of Castro. Joan Didion knows where to look, and how to reveal volumes in a few short paragraphs. This book is riveting, and should be part of every U.S. citizen's education about what has been done in their name, and the people who have been our partners in crime.

When I read the opening sentence of Miami, I knew, or thought I knew, that I was going to love this book. “Havana niceties come to dust in Miami.” Spare, elegant, beautiful. I anticipated a romantic rendering of the somewhat exotic city that Didion accurately calls “a tropical capital.”

Alas, I was wrong. Few, if any, subsequent passages in the book compare to the stylish economy of this first sentence. Instead, Didion’s prose throughout the book primarily consists of lengthy, meandering sentences. Waiting for the period at the end of a sentence is sometimes as frustrating as waiting for Godot.

Maybe, though, Didion’s prolix style is appropriate to her subject, which is, or at least purports to be, the Cuban exile community in Miami. Many of the exiles focus on the possibility of their return to Cuba or the next action against Fidel Castro. As time passes—the book covers the period from Castro’s accession to power in 1959 to the latter years of the Reagan administration—their hopes are repeatedly dashed one way or another. Godot never does come.

Although this book educated me about aspects of the Cuban exile community in Miami and certain people in that community, I did not find Didion’s reporting to be particularly coherent. Towards the end, for example, the focus is far more on the Reagan administration’s anti-Communism than on Miami. Maybe it’s just that the book was not what I was expecting, but I was disappointed.

I was raised among Cubans (dated and darn near married a couple) during the period described by Didion, although I was on the other Florida coast (Tampa, and the Cuban community there was a bit different in outlook), and I paid rather close attention to the raucous (destructive) cocaine days and racial discord of that wild city east across the Everglades. Politically Cuban Americans can be an intense people, but personally I have found few as welcoming, generous, boisterous, fun-loving, and warm, even to a "white bread" like me. And although the reportage is dated and we have entered a new era (hopefully) with Cuba, and remarkably Castro is still with us, some of the observations are revealing and still accurate, methinks. The title is somewhat misleading, as almost all of it deals with Cuban American issues, from their arrival and expansion (both numerically and in political power) to terrorist activities of its hardened activists. How easy it is to forget our own terrorists. I did like that Didion spent time covering the Cuban American left, spotlighting the opposition and even physical danger (including assassinations and death threats) they endured, especially when they suggested diplomatic approaches to changing Cuban policy. She rightly called out some of the blatant lies that were perpetuated, especially troubling when it comes to the Pedro Pan children. A common theme of complaint is that the United States follows its own policy. Duh. A few times I had the feeling that the book was cobbled together from articles she may have written, and a better editor would have struck some repetitive material, but overall I found a lot that was interesting. But I would have liked a bit broader examination of the town, the gay community, the strip, the nightlife, perhaps even a little on the Dolphins, the U., the wealthy, the Jewish influences, perhaps even the retirees. Maybe even something on the tourists, and boosterism. My goodness, there is so much, and obviously she chose to narrow her focus, but I wanted more.

3.5

iniziato mesi e mesi fa, non proprio nel mood adatto :-( peccato

Sadly, it's too late for me to grow up to be Joan Didion. She does shit with commas that should be illegal all in fifty states, makes it work, and then stands in tropical humid heat, smoking calmly, without breaking a sweat.

If I weren't already dreaming of a move to Miami, this book might have nudged me in that direction. It's not really so much about Miami, per se, but about Cubans there in the eighties. I recommend it, if you're into that sort of thing.

a lana line i want to throw at this book, this book i want to throw at a lana line

SI PREGA L'ULTIMO AMERICANO A LASCIARE MIAMI DI PORTARE CON SÉ LA BANDIERA


Gong Li e Colin Farrell prendono il motoscafo da Miami per andare a bere un mohito a L’Avana nel film di Michael Mann (2006). Mann è stato produttore esecutivo anche nelle cinque stagioni della serie, che ha contribuito a creare e alla quale ha impresso per così dire il suo marchio di fabbrica.

Miami è la città cubana con il più alto numero di popolazione bianca statunitense (anglos).
La ridotta distanza dall’isola, le consente di essere per certi versi parte dell’isola: si può partire da Miami con un buon motoscafo per andare a prendere l’aperitivo all’Avana e rientrare in nottata (Miami Vice, il film di Michael Mann).


Don Johnson/Crockett e Philip Michael Thomas/Tubbs protagonisti della storica serie degli anni Ottanta “Miami Vice”.

Joan Didion la racconta nella sua mirabile maniera, collegando fatti apparentemente distanti, intervistando e incontrando una quantità impressionante di persone, usando acume e ironia a volontà: la racconta nel corso del Novecento, ma soprattutto a partire dagli anni Sessanta, quando JFK ‘tradì’ gli immigrati cubani con la nota sòla della Baia dei Porci, diventando l’uomo più odiato al mondo dopo Fidel Castro; e la racconta ancora più a fondo negli anni Settanta e Ottanta, il periodo in cui lei scrive e pubblica questo reportage.


n  The eyes, chico, never lie!n

Per capire e godere il libro a fondo ho rivisto Scarface di De Palma con un indimenticabile Al Pacino nella parte del protagonista Tony Montana (Tony: Accontentati tu, io prendo tutto, tutto quello che posso; l’amico Manny: E cosa vuoi tu?; Tony: Il mondo chico... e tutto quello che c'è dentro.
E ancora, Tony, colpito da decine di pallottole, piomba nella fontana che arreda l’ingresso della sua casa, con il neon The World Is Yours che rimane l’ultima immagine del film…).

Tony Montana rappresenta la seconda ondata massiccia di emigrazione cubana: nel 1980 Castro lasciò libertà di fuga, e 125 mila persone ne approfittarono per abbandonare l’isola dal porto di Mariel e approdare a Miami, tra le braccia di parenti e amici, ma soprattutto tra le braccia dei poliziotti USA che li rinchiusero nei campi organizzati dal governo – anche perché il ‘regalo’ di Castro comprendeva un cospicuo numero di esuli rilasciati dalle prigioni e dagli ospedali psichiatrici cubani (Jimmy Carter non ha mai dimenticato questo scherzo del dittatore cubano).
È quell’ondata migratoria passata alla storia sotto il soprannome di banana boat.


John F. Kennedy e Nikita Khrushchev, 1961.

Lo spagnolo è la seconda lingua nazionale negli US: ma in tutto il paese è essenzialmente la lingua della classe bassa, dei giardinieri, dei camerieri, dei facchini… A Miami è diverso:
Gli esuli che a New York o a Los Angeles si sentivano discriminati, isolati a causa della lingua che parlavano, a Miami erano sulla cresta dell’onda. Un imprenditore che non parlava inglese a Miami poteva comunque, comprare, vendere, negoziare, fare leva sui suoi punti di forza, speculare in borsa e, se ne aveva voglia, andare in smoking a un paio di galà a settimana.


Bahía de Cochinos- Bay of Pigs: sbarcarono 1.511 esuli cubani emigrati negli Stati Uniti finanziati e appoggiati dalla CIA sperando di congiungersi con le forze anticastriste già presenti sull’isola.

Didion chiama Miami la città "spettacolarmente depressa" dove le vanità dell'Avana vanno a morire.
Racconta la tristeza de Miami fatta di donne con vestiti di seta e sandali col tacco, che si asciugano gli occhi dietro gli occhiali scuri: sembra appartenere specificamente a Miami. Quella degli esuli cubani a Miami è una comunità politicamente artefatta che ha vissuto diversi decenni in una favola o dentro un'opera teatrale: la trama (ai loro occhi) era il tradimento subito.
Parla dell'exilio come di un rituale, una tradizione rispettata, e una visione della politica così centrale per la condizione umana che per descriverla sembravano non esserci parole adatte nel vocabolario della maggior parte degli americani.


L'invasione della baia dei Porci fu organizzata dalla CIA durante l'amministrazione Eisenhower, con tanto di addestramento militare di esuli cubani, ma Kennedy diventato presidente decise di non sostenere il piano. L’esercito cubano sconfisse la forza d'invasione in soli tre giorni di combattimenti

E intanto mette a fuoco i meccanismi che per più di vent'anni (dall'amministrazione Kennedy a quella Reagan), hanno guidato la politica di Washington.
Un libro sulla politica di Washington, lo definisce Joan Didion, spiegando che tutto ciò che a Miami ha assunto la forma di ‘esilio cubano’ è stato generato dalle promesse fatte e non mantenute da Washington, ben rappresentate da quella di un'invasione sfociata poi nella Baia dei Porci.

Ma come molta della produzione letteraria della Didion, è prima di tutto un libro sull’arroganza di Washington e l’intossicazione da potere (I diritti umani, che sono un concetto culturalmente e politicamente relativo…devono essere messi da parte e rimpiazzati da una politica [non interventista] di realismo etico e politico, si legge nei documenti di una commissione parlamentare dell’epoca reaganiana).


The World is Yours e il corpo di Tony Montana crivellato di proiettili e imbottito di cocaina.

Quell’arroganza infarcita di follia che, per esempio, come fosse uscita direttamente da “Catch 22” di Joseph Heller, permetteva che le operazioni autonome facevano parte della cosiddetta strategia di “livello due” che, anche se non si sapesse bene cosa volesse dire in teoria, di fatto significava che la JURE (Junta Revolucionaria Cubana) poteva per esempio richiedere e ottenere esplosivi e granate dalla CIA anche se per il “livello uno” la stessa JURE risultava sotto inchiesta da parte dell’FBI per possesso illegale di armi da fuoco.


Joan Didion e la figlia Quintana Roo.

Good one-liners that captured the interesting history of 60s-80s Miami (“to live in Miami is to gain a fluency in cognitive dissonance”) but writing fell flat and was bogged down in historical innuendos

I really enjoyed this book, which was nothing if not well researched and structured. I appreciated how Didion started small, with the city itself, and grew the book outward, to encompass not just Cuba but other Central and South American countries, as well as other American cities, especially Washington. Her picture of interconnectedness was fabulous, and her diction also great. She used a great deal of repetition in both word and phrase, which I appreciated, as she I'd it when the emphasis was most dire - and it often was.

There were a few things I wasn't crazy about. Mainly, her penchant for separating the main sentence with a million dependent clauses, especially in sentences that were often a paragraph, even a page, long. Several times in each chapter, these sentences were so convoluted that in lost her train of thought and had to reread sections. While her points were always valuable, they were muddled.

I also wasn't crazy for the title, and I wondered if it was chosen more for marketing reasons than anything else - that a book with a one-word title would seem less academic, more NYT best seller. Because the book was about more, and less, than Miami. It was about very specifically Cuban emigre Miami. Other races, ethnicities, and cultures were referred to only insofar as they related to the Cuban experience. And while I think that is fine, as it created an extremely interesting book, I feel like the title is misleading of subject. It should have either had a subtitle, or been called something more like "Cuban Miami."

The first third of Miami seemed to promise nothing more than amusing reportage—when drug traffickers go house-hunting they look for private water access; Tony Montana became a mythic hero almost the instant Scarface premiered—but then it began to hit much harder. Didion is so good that any subject she takes up seems her destined one, the exclusive focus of her brooding brilliance; but reading Miami I was tempted to narrow things down and say she’s truly in her element among covert missions and counterrevolutionary conspiracy, and at her very best when relating brutal ops to the amnesiac innocence projected by our actor-leaders, when contrasting the frank machismo of Washington’s surrogates with Washington’s own circular, coquettish language of power—“a language in which deniability was built into the grammar.” Her presentation of the fraught marriage of the “sacrificial and absolutist” Cuban politicos and pragmatic, desultory Imperial Washington makes this book a keeper.

In many ways, Miami remains our graphic lesson in consequences. “I can assure you that this flag will be returned to this brigade in a free Havana,” John F. Kennedy said at the Orange Bowl in 1962…meaning it as an abstraction, a rhetorical expression of a collective wish; a kind of poetry, which of course makes nothing happen. “We will not permit the Soviets and their henchmen in Havana to deprive others of their freedom,” Ronald Reagan said at the Dade County Auditorium in 1983, and then Ronald Reagan, the first American president since John F. Kennedy to visit Miami in search of Cuban support, added this: “Someday, Cuba itself will be free.”

This was of course just more poetry, another rhetorical expression of the same collective wish, but Ronald Reagan, like John F. Kennedy before him, was speaking here to people whose historical experience had not been that poetry makes nothing happen.

Perhaps what I mean to say is that Didion writes particularly well about politics— because, I now see, with a glance back to her famous 1960s-themed collections, she is really a connoisseur of the fantasies fermenting in our rhetoric—rhetoric that can be taken literally or deployed symbolically, instrumentally—and she has a deep appreciation of personalities and subcultures for whom political speech is an exhilaration, a medium of metaphysics.

That the wish to see Fidel Castro removed from power in Cuba did not in itself constitute a political philosophy was a point rather more appreciated in el exilio, which had as its legacy a tradition of considerable political sophistication, than in Washington, which tended to accept the issue as an idea, and so to see Cuban exiles as refugees not just from Castro but from politics. In fact exile life in Miami was dense with political distinctions, none of them exactly in the American grain. Miami was for example the only American city I had ever visited in which it was not unusual to hear one citizen describe the position of another as “Falangist,” or as “essentially Nasserite.” There were in Miami exiles who defined themselves as communists, anti-Castro. There were in Miami a significant number of exile socialists, also anti-Castro. There were in Miami two prominent groups of exile anarchists, many still in their twenties, all anti-Castro, and divided from one another, I was told, by “personality differences,” “personality differences” being the explanation Cubans tend to offer for anything from a dinner-table argument to a coup.

This urge toward the staking out of increasingly recondite positions, traditional to exile life in Europe and Latin America, remained, in South Florida, exotic, a nervous urban brilliance not entirely apprehended by local Anglos, who continued to think of exiles as occupying a fixed place on the political spectrum, one usually described as “right-wing” or “ultraconservative”…Still, “right-wing,” on the American spectrum, where political positions were understood as marginally different approaches to what was seen as a shared goal, seemed not to apply. This was something different, a view of politics as so central to the human condition that there may be no applicable words in the vocabulary of most Americans. Virtually every sentient member of the Miami exile community was on any given day engaged in what was called an “ideological confrontation” with some other member of the Miami exile community…

Reminds me of Nabokov’s complaint that Western Europeans and Americans always pictured exiled Russians as former ladies-in-waiting to the Czarina or reactionary, monocle-wearing counts—when, as just one sample of the complexity of that emigration, Nabokov’s paternal grandfather had been Minister of Justice to one Czar; his father had been imprisoned by the next Czar, and then assassinated in Berlin by royalist fellow exiles; and though descended from a deeply anti-Semitic aristocracy, his wife was Jewish, as was his closest literary associate, an editor prominent in the Socialist Revolutionary party, anti-Lenin. I don’t like Castro and can think of few figures more tiresome than Che Guevara, but I have always found it all too easy to picture many of the first-generation Cuban exiles as rightist goons; but now, perhaps no less facilely, I see them in the long roll of “freedom fighters”—“terrorists” when the wind changes—trained and temporarily utilized by the United States, promised much, and then strung along, diverted, their struggles, causes, and plucky wars of independence supported and fulsomely publicized only while it was expedient to do so. I thought of the black soldiers who bled for the Union only to be abandoned to sharecropping and Jim Crow; the Native American scouts and guides who ended up on reservations just like the tribes that resisted; the Cuban and Filipino nationalists whose brief interval of independence from Spain was quashed by their North American allies and “liberators”; the mujahedeen at grips with the Soviets; the Iraqi Shiites and Kurds after the first Gulf War.

3.75 stars ish.

I am a huge fan of Joan and have been for a long time. I picked this book up for my Miami book club and decided I have mixed feelings on it. It started off with a bang, I quickly feel in love with Didion's prose and outsider observations of the city. The first 1/3 of the book felt like a poem or love letter about my city. I found myself annotating and highlighting the book (something I rarely do) and was enthralled by the way she described some of my everyday emotions and feelings about Miami.

As the book progressed, I felt she was less eloquent in her prose and it became a bit more of an info dump, while I still think it is really interesting, I was less in love with the book at the end as I was at the beginning.

Overall, Didion does what she does best. She has a knack for viewing her world from a unique perspective and succinctly analyzing the environment and cultural causes of circumstances. Didion does an excellent job of digging into the underbelly of the city and pointing out some of the less flattering history that makes Miami what it is today. It's obvious once you know, but many of these things are not what we think about daily. It was also refreshing to read about a history of Miami that does not involve the Cocaine Cowboys.

I think time has not been supportive of this book, written in the 80s Didion made some assumptions about the readers knowledge base. Which now almost 40 years later, some of that is lost with many readers.

I would recommend this book to everyone who lives in Miami or is curious about the role it has played in American politics in the 80s. As always Didion has beautiful prose and I am happy I read it but it's not her strongest work.