Questo è stato il mio primo approccio con Didion, della quale ho sempre sentito lodare la prosa e la capacità narrativa.
Sicuramente l'errore di partenza è stato mio, Miami è tutto tranne che narrativa.

Un'indagine approfondita e dettagliata della società e della politica di Miami (e, di riflesso, degli Stati Uniti) tra gli anni '60 e '80 con un focus particolare sulla comunità cubana e sulle questioni sudamericane.

Ho trovato il volume davvero interessante a livello contenutistico. Mi è mancata, però, la scintilla. Quel qualcosa in più che mi fa dire "si, questo reportage, quest'inchiesta è scritta da una penna incredibile". E' come se Didion fosse nascosta dietro le righe del reportage e non ne uscisse mai. Mi è mancata l'autorialità del volume. Insomma, fatico a pensare a questo come ad un libro rappresentativo di Didion autrice.
Riproverò con altri titoli della scrittrice.

✰ 2.5 ✰

miss didion, this just wasn't the one. firstly, i was misled by the blurb so this wasn't really what i expected it to be. secondly, i feel like miami needed three more rounds of editing. didion's sentences were repetitive and never-ending, with a serial use of commas. the irony of this book is that didion writes about the ignorance towards the spanish language, but the fact the book was inundated with spanish words with no translation meant most the time i had no idea what was going on. i love joan didion's work, but i feel like i've come away from miami learning nothing.

I've got a bone to pick with Joan Didion, but first let me say that "Miami" is a simply brilliant piece of noir journalism that, in every paragraph, reflects a different aspect of "the Capital of Latin America." Odd that 1987 saw three major non-fiction Miami treatments, all differently motivated: David Rieff's "Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists and Refugees in the New America," T.D. Allman's "Miami: City of the Future," and Didion's book. Yeah, yeah, at the time, Miami was hot hot hot, Crockett and Tubbs were in the middle of their run, but...Iran-Contragate was also playing itself out, and Miami was an epicenter of Reagan-era, better-dead-than-Red, Contra War intrigue. Didion captures the period beautifully in suitably ominous, conspiratorial tones. She introduces us to a cast of chilling characters--no, wait: she means for us to UNDERSTAND her characters as the driven, chilling, formidable products of "el exilio" and "la lucha"--and leaves no doubt that these are serious men, men who "get things done," men capable of, well, anything.

And my bone? Didion is a wonderful writer who cannot, however, resist long, convoluted, patience-trying Germanic sentences, frontloaded with the universe, embellishing adjective after adjective, wending their way down the page, forestalling all gratification, clarity, or meaning, until finally hitting us between the eyes with the final word-punchline, which invariably leads our eyes to course back up the page in an effort to reconstruct, to rediscover "just where were we going with this." Small price to pay for so delicious a book.

I’ve read this before, in 2014 when I moved to Miami the first time. I feel romantic about and haunted by the version of the city Didion encountered in 1986 (the year I was born!), all swampy and simmering. Now in 2023 I’ve lived in multiple Miamis, and mine and Joan’s are all stacked on top of each other in interesting ways so when she talks about watching lightning “turn the bay fluorescent and the islands black” from a high-rise on Biscayne, I’m like, what year is it again?

Miami in the 1980s was a fractally strange place, and I enjoyed watching Joan Didion impose order upon it, and raise some strange beast aloft like a demiurge who knows she’s showing you only what you asked to see, the perfect trap. Alas I could not gaze directly at such a thing, my glancing views reminding me of America in 2020 before I had to look away. And as always, a long frisson of pleasure from Didion’s dry lightning prose.

This book is ok. Has a few moments where it deviates from the path it’s meant to be on. Unsure if this was a book on Miami or Ronald Reagan in some parts and unfortunately this book suffers from if you weren’t present when it was happening, your less likely to understand the name drops and references that will only become more obscure as the years go by.

Reading this on a flight to Miami, just days after Didion’s passing, made for an individual experience that I won’t soon forget. Needless to say, every word was grounded in a way that I haven’t experienced with literature in some time.

You can’t help but revel in what often feels like genuinely cutting-edge, risky, necessary, enthralling reportage. On the surface, it seems like no stone is left unturned - racial tensions, Castro, the Reagan administration - it’s all there. There’s also a splinter of romanticism apparent with which Didion writes about this city. It’s this lust that offsets the pithy, decisive analysis I had expected when picking this book up. Just joyous writing, really.

“Not a city at all […], a kind of waking dream”

“To spend time in Miami is to acquire a certain fluency in cognitive dissonance”

Where it falls flat is in its overwhelming focus on social climate and events in place of actual, insightful political commentary. The relationship between the two is right there, but not recognised nearly as much as I hoped it might be by such a great. It’s also reported in a sometimes mystifying order that arguably fails to guide the reader quite as well as it could. Glad to have read it, all the same.

Rest peacefully, Ms. Joan.

Felt a little bit like when I read Didion's The Last Thing He Wanted, even though that's a novel and Miami is nonfiction. Both felt like I needed more context for what was going on in current events at the time. I suppose Miami did go a long way to explain what was happening, which was interesting.

One long piece of reporting non-fiction on Miami in the 70s and 80s, focusing on the situation of exile Cubans.

Some notes:

- it's striking how similar the divide between US Americans and Cuban immigrants is to all other migrant divides - you could replace 'Cubans' by 'Turks' and set the whole thing in Germany and it would work mostly equally well (except for that whole revolution and bay of pigs thing)

They spoke of "diversity", and of Miami's "hispanic flavor," and approach in which 56 percent of the population was seen as decorative, like the Coral Gables arches.
Fixed as they were on this image of the melting pot, of immigrants fleeing a disruptive revoution to find a place in the American sun, Anglos did not on the whole understand that assimilation would be considered by most Cubans a doubtful goal at best.

- The majority of the book focuses on the CIA's involvement in anti-Communist activities and how the US again and again abused the trust of Cubans. This makes for very interesting reading in these Trump times where the weirdest characters pop up in the US, since I realised that these people were there for the longest time.

I recall one particularly heady Outreach meeting, in 1985, at which one of the speakers was a fantast named Jack Wheeler, who liked to say that Izvestia had described him as an “ideological gangster” (“When the Soviet Union calls me that, it means I’m starting to get under their skin���) but was identified on the afternoon’s program simply as “Philosopher, Traveler, and Founder of the Freedom Research Foundation.”
[...]
On such afternoons the enemy was manifold, and often within. The “Red Empire” was of course the enemy. “Christian communists” were also the enemy. “Guilt-ridden masochistic liberals” were the enemy, and “the radical chic crowd that always roots for the other side,” the “Beverly Hills liberals with their virulent hatred of America.”
[...]
This was not a group which would have appeared to need much instruction in administration policy in Central America. This was not a group apt to raise those questions about Central America commonly raised in less special venues. In fact there was for many people in Room 450 just one question about Central America, which was why the United States was compelled to deal through surrogates there when it could be fighting its own war for the minds of mankind, and it was this question that the briefers addressed by tapping into the familiar refrain: the United States was forced to deal through surrogates because of the defeatists, because of the appeasers, because of the cowards and the useful fools and the traitors, because of what Jack Wheeler had called “that virulent hatred for America as a culture and as a nation and as a society” which was understood, by virtually everyone in the room, to infect the Congress, to infect the State Department, and above all to infect the media, which were, as Otto Juan Reich had said not long after he was appointed coordinator of public diplomacy, “being played like a violin by the Sandinistas.”

This sounds exactly like the replies to a regular Trump tweet, and this is from 1987! (The man still runs a blog, and all the articles read exactly like you'd expect, no need to link here)

- In a similar vein, concepts similar to 'alternative facts', this gaslighting where the 'opposite' side is perpetrating all these cruelties to get the public on their side, was back then a staple of US politics, Reagan was already good at that.

“There was no blacklist of Hollywood,” Ronald Reagan told Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times during the 1980 campaign. “The blacklist in Hollywood, if there was one, was provided by the communists.” “I’m going to voice a suspicion now that I’ve never said aloud before,” Ronald Reagan told thirty-six high-school students in Washington in 1983 about death squads in El Salvador. “I wonder if all of this is right wing, or if those guerrilla forces have not realized that by infiltrating into the city of San Salvador and places like that, they can get away with these violent acts, helping to try and bring down the government, and the right wing will be blamed for it.” “New intelligence shows,” Ronald Reagan told his Saturday radio listeners in March of 1986, by way of explaining why he was asking Congress to provide “the Nicaraguan freedom fighters” with what he called “the means to fight back,” that “Tomás Borge, the communist interior minister, is engaging in a brutal campaign to bring the freedom fighters into discredit. You see, Borge’s communist operatives dress in freedom fighter uniforms, go into the countryside and murder and mutilate ordinary Nicaraguans.”

What's going on right now is nothing new.

This is great, dense, political non-fiction, several magazine articles put together into a longer report. not an easy read because reality isn't a nice straight story, names appear and immediately disappear, small places of action appear only to be forgotten by history itself - impossible to keep track of everything...

P.S.: I learned a new word, 'inchoately', being only partially in existence or operation

"Havana vanities come to dust in Miami."
- Joan Didion, Miami



"The shadowy missions, the secret fundings, the conspiracies beneath conspiracies, the deniable support by parts of the U.S. government and active discouragement by other parts--all these things have fostered a tensely paranoid style in parts of our own political life, Didion suggests.

Miami is us, and the tangled tales we heard recently of private armies and retired generals fighting their own lucrative wars provide something of a retrospective support for a thesis developed long before the Iran-gate hearings."

- LA Times Review by Richard Eder

The brilliance of this book is Didion's ability to capture the swampyness of the politics of Miami and South Florida, or what Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described as Miami's "murky underwater darkness full of sharks and evil shadows," and use that as a lense into the US policies in Cuba (during the Kennedy years) and Central America (during the Reagan years). The swampy feel, however, was both a plus (atmosphere) and a negative (narrative-flow). This book reminds me of the feeling I got when reading Delillo's Libra or Mailer's Oswald's Tale

This book is a dark, wet narrative of paranoia, government conspiracies, and a nation and city that has lost control of its dark arts. It is still relevant and the paranoia is still rich. I was reading this book and the character of Jack Wheeler sounded interesting. I remember he had been a figure in Rick Atkinson's [book:The Long Gray Line. He advised President Reagan and Both President Bushes on Central America. So, I decided to look him up since, like Zelig, he also played an interesting part in Didion's book. 23 years after Didion's 'Miami' was published and 4 years before I read it, Jack Wheeler was killed while conducting a review of the legal authority to engage in nation-state offensive cyberwarfare. His body was seen by a landfill worker "falling onto a trash heap in the Cherry Island Landfill". Sounds like it could have happened in Miami.

learned a lot about miami/cuban history I should’ve known. last 50 pages were pretty convoluted

Didion describes “la lucha”—that group-jihad rage that powers Miami’s Cuban-American exiles—in pre-ideological, almost hormonal or phlegmatic terms. These are people almost literally born to hate. One can see the beginnings of that generations-long hate in the Dawn of the Deplorables here, now.

The first half of this book is one of the sharpest accounts of immigration and racism in America. The second half contains some strange-ranger nuggets—like the entire transcript of a conversation between Ronald Reagan and some astronauts, which is like a dazzling sidelong virtuoso set piece in a movie.