Miami makes two consecutive entries in my Year of Books for which it's difficult to separate the story itself from my familiarity with the story's location and settings. I lived in Miami for nearly five years, but never bothered to understand beyond the obvious why it was so unique from any other city I had visited in the continental United States. Enter Miami, by Joan Didion.

Didion crafts a vision of Miami from the early '60s through the '80s, a story that weaves the omnipresent yet misunderstood influence of Cuban exiles with the often discordant causes and effects of American foreign policy. From Kennedy and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion to Reagan and the Iran-Contra affair, Miami is brought to life as a place of conspiracies, fleeting allegiances, exiles-not-immigrants, and good ole fashioned, Hollywood-style CIA espionage.

And then there's the author. This is the first book I've read from Didion, and I can understand why she's so revered. The New Journalism style of writing allows the author to unapologetically insert subjectivity and style into the writing, and Joan Didion the author certainly shows up as a primary character in this book. It took me some time to get used to her writing syntax and unconventional use of commas, but once I did, I was able to appreciate her brand of storytelling.

Structurally, I found the book somewhat disjointed. Aside from the occasional mention of the sitting U.S. president, it was easy to get disoriented in time. Didion also introduces a multitude of characters by way of individual quotes that support her point in the narrative but nonetheless seem to lack substance, because who is he/she?

I enjoyed this book. It provided an intimate look into how the city I lived in became to be. If you're a fan of the city itself, the author herself, or simply fascinated by the political instability and machinations of the Cold War, pick this one up.

Not her best or most straight-forward writing, but it does give clear insight into a unique time and place: Cuban-American Miami in the 80s

A pithy bit of reportage—with a slight twinge of Soapdish/The Sun Also Sets banana-hatted melodrama for fun—that would be, I’m assuming, more interesting to those of us that remember another very weird time in America. Yes, the Time of the Shoulderpads and the Llelo Boys. You didn’t have to be there. Seriously. Missed nothing.

Honestly, it’s a miracle what Pacino did with this source material. Coño!

Miami has been a place that has intrigued me since the days of Miami Vice. Recent shows set there include Burn Notice and Dexter. And it is also the setting of the Charles Willeford's Hoke Moseley novels. Joan Didion took a look at the city in the late 80s and then wrote Miami (1987). It is a fascinating look at the city, but mostly through the Cuban exile politics that have taken place there, where John F. Kennedy was the second most hated man after Fidel Castro. So it goes from the effects of the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassination, to Watergate break ins, and establishment of Miami as a Third World capital. The book closes by showing how the policies against Cuba were collated and combined with the Reagan administration doctrine of intervention in Central America. As usual Didion's crystalline style permeates the story.

Didion was a writer I always meant to get around to reading, but it took the several excellent pieces celebrating her work after she passed away a few days ago to give me the push I needed. Here, she digs deep into the culture of the Cuban exiles in Miami, primarily focusing on the first half of the 1980s. Didion is excellent at sorting through all the complexity of events and concerns, and ties together the exiles point of view with the frequently changing actions of the US government.
I had never really thought about the ways the Cubans were impacted by the Iran/Contra dealings, but there comes Oliver North into the picture somewhere near the end of this book. The exiles saw the Contras as kindred souls who were trying to take back their country with the help of the US. They figured if that worked, Castro could be taken out next. As the history of Cuba was one of constantly recharging revolutions, the exiles were always expecting another one would come so they could go back home. Those who disagreed were targeted by car bombs and shootings.
Beyond the fascination of the subject, I was blown away by Didion's writing. These long, meandering sentences, these powerful uses of repetition, the near-constant presence of irony, the ability to present people as they wished to be presented while simultaneously making it obvious she sees behind their presentation. She was as brilliant as everybody said she was.
Then there is this, an observation regarding Florida that makes it out to be a ground zero for our contemporary divisions in the country: I never passed through security for a flight to Miami without experiencing a certain weightlessness, the heightened wariness of having left the developed world for a more fluid atmosphere, one in which the native distrust of extreme possibilitites that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic instutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly.

i feel like i understand everything so much more. everyone who’s lived here should read it.

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

Manuela passed Miami on to me as she was reading it this Summer when we quarantined together. When I was living in Los Angeles, Joan Didion helped me tune into the history woven through out the city. Being from South Florida and back here now, this book helped me piece together while also expanding my ideas about stories I've heard of growing up, names of places, political tensions that still persist today. This read made me more curious about the mysteries of this specific time period in Latin American/ US history. More than answers, this book stimulated way more questions and for that I deem it a successful read.

Read this in the months preceding my move to Miami. It did give me some sense of the city, but I have to say that on the basis of this book, and numerous articles by her in the NYRB, I just don't get why people love Joan Didion so much.

lo q sea de cada quién escribe muy bien la joan didion, me maravilla lo bien hecha que está la investigación (entrevistó gente, pasó tiempo en miami, leyó los periódicos de ese tiempo etc), así como lo bien que está escrita, pueden pasar páginas de relato y luego te recuerda que ella está narrando situándote en un partido de los dolphins o en la cocina de algún líder cubano, o sea, es brillante la forma en la que decide presentar la información + me maravilla la atención que le presta a las palabras, observar que en miami se habla del dinero en términos de líquidos, dejar en español palabras semánticamente pesadas como “la lucha”, “el diálogo”

It seems like it's cheating to rate a book when I didn't actually finish it, but I read about 75% of it. I really enjoyed the first few chapters that were a bit more sociological about North America's only truly Latin American city (for instance, in 1987, only 23% of the population in Miami spoke English as a first language), but it soon began delving into so much of the history of American-Cuban relations that I just got lost. I tried very hard to keep up, but after 100 pages or so of what basically read as so much gibberish it might as well have been written in Spanish, I gave up. A great book for someone who already has a pretty good grasp on Cuban history, and is intimately familiar with the Bay of Pigs (and it might, actually, even help to know a bit more Spanish than I do). So maybe I'll go educate myself and return to this book at a later date and get a bit more out of it. I'll also add that I've just always struggled a little bit with Didion anyway, so it could be that I just don't care for her writing very much.

It is really (not really) shocking how little has changed in 40 years. I still recognize this place, with its dreams and schemes and posturing and wealth and pretend wealth and potential and desired wealth. And it added to my understanding of what was happening then, with the bombings and assassinations and protests and all of that.

It's really fascinating how she can run in the rich circles and sidle up to the powerful and simultaneously trust them completely and not trust them at all. To go "This is what people are saying" and also make it clear that she doesn't believe them but also believes it's what they believe and then deliver a pithy closing line or cutting observation.

And she's right on about the racism of Miami and Florida but also still steeped in her own prejudices, which makes for fascinating reading. To treat Miami as the exotic other, a "Latin American" city in the U.S., is to pick up on something but also to reproduce dichotomies and justify hierarchies. But she always does this: there's really only the regular and right (her) and the world out there, which is by turns absurd, bewildering, cruel, symbolic and all too true, as well as fun to pick up and look at and put into her notebook for later contemplation.

Really interesting to think about the similarities between the Kennedy administration and the Reagan one. The facades and storytelling, the machinations, and all the people who wanted something for themselves by pulling the levers of power (I guess you could put any two admins side by side like this, but the Cuban angle gives her a nice, narrow focus.) And it also helps explain Florida's turn to the right, because national power structures (particularly the dems) really don't get it or know how to talk to it and thus further alienate it into this place of knowing cynicism (the federal government is not to be trusted except to push its own changing agenda) but also "what's in it for me?" and "how can I manipulate it for my own ends until our ways part again?" Not that I have any ideas how to change that...

The writing was convoluted, to a purpose. Appositives within already lengthy asides, vague pronouns and objects, parentheses with extra bonus content: it all reproduces the meandering conversations, the difficulty to pin anything down for people who don't WANT to be pinned down, government or Cuban exile alike. Rumor and innuendo become political stance, policy and action.

It's all too relevant to what's coming. Again.

Further intrigued by Joan Didion after we read a chunk from "Miami" in a journalism course I took junior year called Interpretive Writing. Going back, I consider it a somewhat uneven piece compared with the rest of her work, but it's worth studying. She's out of her elements (California; New York), but that's also what makes it interesting. If I had not discovered "The White Album" a year and a half later, I might not have paid much attention to Joan Didion after this, which seems unthinkable now, but there you go.