An interesting look into a city that is constantly in news, foreign and domestic, from the 80s and through the lens of Didion herself.

Miami is a city that everyone knows about globally, regardless of where they live. It is a city of exorbitant wealth, and a hotspot destination that rivals many others. If you watch the US elections you’d know that Miami is part of a larger county in Florida named Miami-Dade county, and it is the most populous county in Florida and holds a lot of influence over the way Florida votes.

Miami is not a city often discussed during history classes. It was not a large metropolitan city for a long time and during the development of the US, it’s geographic location, being so far south, put it off the beating path for most people, except for Latin American immigrants, especially from Cuba.

Cuban immigrants have shaped the city of Miami, and surrounding area, into the city it is today. Reading about the Cuban influence in this American city during the 80s was an unique perspective I hadn’t read about before. It was a peak into the politics and culture of this city and how it interacted with Washington and other parts of the state and country.

Didion also writes about issues current to her time which include the Cuban missile crisis and the reign of Fidel Castro, two events that have massively shaped America and American foreign policy as well as immigration into America. I enjoyed reading the excerpts of her conversations with influential Cubans and Cuban-Americans in Miami and hearing their stories. It was very interesting to read her descriptions of the city and it’s language and culture and compare it to my perceptions of the city today.

Overall I found this to be an engaging look into a part of the US that isn’t discussed much during the time these essays were written.

This book hasn’t stood the test of time in my view. Perhaps if I was American I would be feeling somewhat differently, but even so I suspect I’d find this particular book of her not a book but rather a piece of extended reportage made into a book, and reprinted more recently because Didion is not just famous but a legend. I was interested to a certain extent to learn about Cuban exiles in Miami but the amount of intricate details and interviews fast became irrelevant. At first I decided to persevere with the book for the sake of soaking in Didion’s prose which I adore, but in this book the prose is often pedestrian, and she assumes the ordinary mantle of an ordinary journalist. There is no sense of timelessness behind the particulars of the story she tells, the way there is in her first two collections of essays.

This was a thrift store offer I couldn't refuse; a Joan Didion book I'd never heard of for a nickel. But did I really care to read her impressionistic musings on the city of Miami (as of the mid-1980s, when this was penned) and the complicated influence/history of the Cuban-exile community on it? Maybe not, but Didion hooked me right off the bat.

Reading the comments of some others here, I find some predictable grousing about Didion being as a sort of female, white-privileged, racist interloper; thus inherently unqualified, evidently, to observe and study and engage the town and its people to come up with her own informed impressions and well-laid-out reportage. Sorry, folks, but until someone in the "community" writes a study this clear, this entertaining, this precise, this thoughtful and this fleet and comprehensible on the subject -- as well as this cheap and easily obtainable (it was a national bestseller) -- I'm giving Didion the benefit of the doubt. Not that I have any. She can write, and anyone who wants to attack her artistry can come at me full bore and enjoy my wrath.

The other criticism I've seen on here, which is an ongoing pet peeve of mine, is that the book is allegedly "dated," as if a book written at a certain time period, about said time period and the years before it, has no value. History books written about history and about the history of their time aren't dated, whatever that even means. The fact that things have happened since is not the fault of the author and doesn't reflect on the quality or value of the information therein and its interpretation. It's an idiotic criticism, usually forwarded by people who provide no backing or context or any real substance, or who can't articulate a real deficiency in the book. Reminding us of bygone times is not dated. If you lived in the 1980s and ever had big hair or watched Family Ties, then you're dated! See what I mean? Irrelevant.

What Didion gets at, rather unconventionally and in a breathless, whirlwind manner, is the psyche of a town like none other in the nation. A town split by class and racial divides and more than half populated by a unique community of exiles in an uneasy peace with their ostensible benefactors -- an exile community that is even at war with itself, grappling with idea of exile, about the idea of repatriation, about the futility of lost homeland and the passion of restoration.

In painting her portrait, Didion actually comes to timeless observations, particularly about the American political monster that has not much changed from the time of Reagan to the time of Trump. A lot of what she observes in the book remains unchanged and the portents she hints at are eerie.

This is not just a book about Miami and its Cuban exiles, but also about the nation as a whole, about the way Washington and provincial politics make strange bedfellows who continue down the same misguided road to the same foreign policy disasters. In the case of the Cuban exiles, Didion explores how duplicitous Washington has promised, deceived and thrown them under the bus, just as the exiles seem to take it in their stride.

Didion finds in the Cuban exiles a vitality, passion and sophistication of thought missing in heartland of America. These are some choice passages:

"Americans, at one and the same time, acted exclusively in their own interests and failed to see their own interests, not only because they were undereducated but because they were by temperament 'naive,' a people who could live and die without ever understanding those nuances of conspiracy and allegience on which, in the Cuban view, the world turned."(pp. 77-78)

"Miami was ... 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.'"
(pp. 128-129)

"Making a choice between terrorism of the Right and terrorism of the Left was incomprehensible to him. Maybe he was right. As time goes by I think that men who were unable to make choices were more right than those who made them. Because there are no clean choices." (pp. 148-149; about a Cuban exile radio host drawing comparison between Albert Camus' political thought and the dilemma of Cuban exiles)

I would give roughly the first half of Miami five stars for piquant and fetching insight as it races out of the gate in impressionistic style and then settles into impressive reportage, but would downgrade it a bit for morphing overmuch in the last quarter into an analysis of the modus operandi of the Reagan presidency. The conservative attitude in America and its effect on Latin American foreign policy (tied inextricably into the concerns of Miami's Cuban exile community) is necessary for context, but it seems to get too far away from the initial subject of Miami, and the book seems to hang there, ending abruptly.

Nonetheless, I learned a lot and would recommend this as go-to entre quick primer on an important and little-understood, or misunderstood, social, cultural and political American phenomenon.

(BTW, I smoked a Padron while reading this book... It seemed appropriate).

(KR@KY 2017)

Dense but very interesting. Ask me anything you want about the political and social climate of Miami between 1960 and 1988

Hidden in this New Yorker style book about Cubsn American politics is David Gergen explaining in real time that Ronald Reagan's job was to be a communicator and let the professionals run the country : "He doesn't need to know who's playing tennis on the White House tennis court. The last president (Carter) had an encyclopedic knowledge and look where that got us."

Moments of this were fascinating, but on the whole this book felt so scattered and unfocused that, by the end, when I think I was supposed to be feeling a rising tension, what I actually felt was relief that it was over.

This one took me a while to get into. The narrative, if you will, is non-linear, opaque, and often confusing and contradictory sounding. But that's the point. Didion stirs a tropical cauldron of politics, actions, laments, lies and reversals. The end result is a heat-dream snapshot of a Miami often closer culturally to Cuba than America.

3.5⭐️ so glad I learnt about the history of Cuba first. It meant that this book made so much more sense.

“In many ways Miami remains our most 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 (the "supposed promise," the promise "not in the script," the promise "made in the emotion of the day"), meaning it as an abstraction, the 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 (2,500 people inside, 60,000 outside, 12 standing ovations and a pollo asado lunch at La Esquina de Tejas with Jorge Mas Canos and 203 other provisional loyalists), 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.”

One of the most challenging and rewarding reads. This is like AP Didion, Didion+, full of ginormous sentences packed with data, names, faces, and places. It’s easy to get a little lost and, honestly, bored.

Miami is a journalistic view of Miami with the primary focus on the 1980s under the Reagan administration and the escalation of the Cold War. Joan Didion brings her excellent reporting skills and her way, although sometimes seeming a bit askew, is dramatic as she pulls on previously unknown threads to weave a sometimes alarming tapestry. Her previous journalistic essays were related to her native California, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, but in this book Didion immerses herself in Miami, Florida and in the fluid immigrant community, primarily from Cuba.

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”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 possibilities that tended to ground the temperate United States in an obeisance to democratic institutions seemed rooted, if at all, only shallowly.

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”Here between the mangrove swamp and the barrier reef was a 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.”

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”Americans, it is often said in Miami, will act always in their own interests, an indictment. Miami Cubans, by implicit contrast, take their stand on a higher ground, la lucha a sacred abstraction, and any talk about ‘interests,’ or for that matter ‘agreements,’ remains alien to the local temperament, which is absolutist, and sacrificial, on the Spanish model.”

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I have long thought of Miami as one of the most beautiful cities in the United States, with magnificent bridges and waterways bordering on the Atlantic coast, beautiful Spanish and art deco architecture, diverse and ethnic neighborhoods and restaurants. But Miami is a book more about politics rather than urban living, focusing on the Kennedy administration and later and primarily the Reagan administration, including the Iran-Contra scandal that haunted the Reagan presidency. At times the book is very granular when Didion interviews individuals claiming to know the underlying story of arms that had been provided to the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Central America.

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”David Gergen had worked at the White House during three administrations, and acquired during the course of them an entire vocabulary of unattributable nods and acquiescent silences, a diction that tended to evaporate like smoke, but the subtext of what he was saying on this spring afternoon in 1984 seemed clear, and to suggest a view of the government of the United States, from someone who had labored at its exact heart for nine of the preceding thirteen years, not substantively different from the view of the government of the United States held by those Cubans to whom I later talked in Miami. . . “

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This book is part travelogue, part sociological study of the subcultures that make Miami "Miami," but primarily a study of the Cubans in exile, post Castro, in Miami.

The snippets of news, Didion's first hand reporting, and her incorporation of revelations from public documents, draw a straight line of Cuban exile involvement in CIA plots and White House schemes: from the broken promises of the Bay of Pigs, through the Kennedy Assassination, on through the Watergate break-in, then the Church Committee and other Congressional inquiries on Assassinations and CIA misdeeds, to the fiasco of Reagan's funding of "Freedom Fighters" who instigate violent street warfare against the leftist government in Nicaragua and against the rebel leftist citizens in El Salvador . . . All the headaches in the Caribbean and in Central America seem to all converge in Miami.

Anthony Lewis wrote, in 1975, that "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 at all."

This observation by Anthony Lewis may be true in some cases, but given the stories recounted here, by Didion, in only the way that Didion can recount such stories, this observation may be less true, or not true at all, in Miami.

joanie was cooking with this one (but then again when is she not)