impulsive bookshop purchase in miami was an insightful post-trip history lesson

It was a difficult read. But I'm glad I finished it. What Joan Didion did with this book I later discovered is called "new journalism" - that is to say the every dry bits and pieces of information doesn’t find its way on the book, rather the author uses some of the materials in a creative way, not to be confused with coherent, to write her piece. That doesn’t always maintain a sequence of events, which naturally should perplex a lot of readers like myself who are not very grounded on the Cuban- American history post- Batista era. Not to mention, there’s quite a lot of complex and compound sentences which were often hard to follow- I often had to reread them twice or more. But, I think it is a beautiful piece of writing, what Joan Didion accomplished here is nothing short of extraordinary. Other than the form itself, she doesn’t make Miami a bone dry historical anthology, rather often an opinion piece. I found her insights quite interesting, especially the relationship between the Cuban- Anglo community, the different sections of the "el exilio" and their hopes, aspirations, frustration and sense of betrayal. There’s a small almost forgotten little chapter about the African population and their role in the complicated dynamics in a potpourri of ethnicities in 60s-80s Miami. It's not a comprehensive history of the cold war era Miami, rather a glimpse behind a curtain which made me serious about learning Fidel Castro and Cuban history. I feel real closeness with the Cubans on both sides of the divide as they are as passionate as us Bangladeshis with their politics and ideologies which was a matter of derision and confusion for the white Americans. Also, Joan Didion is brilliant. She's a treasure.

Lying (uncharacteristically) by the pool outside my hotel here just after dawn, I am struck by how completely recognisable Miami is through sheer visual aesthetic alone. The blue water, waving palmettos, Art Deco angles and pastel-pink awnings could, perhaps, conceivably be somewhere else, but when you see them all together you think immediately and only of this city, which is, as Didion says, ‘not exactly an American city as American cities have until recently been understood but a tropical capital’, oriented towards the Caribbean. My menu is in Spanish and when I pick up the Miami Herald, the front-page story is about the Haitian prime minister.

Which is good, because sometimes the pleasure is in having your expectations met. Walking jetlagged through South Beach yesterday afternoon, I passed first an enormously obese man holding a venti Starbucks cup, and then a blonde babe in heeled sandals and a Wicked Weasel bikini; overhead, a light aircraft pulled a fluttering banner which read ‘SHOOT MACHINE GUNS’, though whether this was an advertisement for a local gun shop or just a general exhortation for Floridian life I couldn't tell.

I have spoken more Spanish than English since I arrived. This is not so unusual in the US, but Didion highlights the crucial difference between Miami and, say, Los Angeles, where Spanish tended to be

the language spoken by the people who worked in the car wash and came to trim the trees and cleared the tables in restaurants. In Miami Spanish was spoken by the people who ate in the restaurants, the people who owned the cars and the trees, which made, on the socioauditory scale, a considerable difference.

In Miami this means primarily the Cuban diaspora, which has contributed not just to the city's amazing linguistic and cultural mix, but also to its political disposition. Didion records a conversation with someone explaining that John F Kennedy is the ‘number two most hated man in Miami’ (after, of course, Fidel Castro), and the general opposition to Communism, and hence leftist politics, and hence the Democratic party, has continued ever since (Miami Cubans were big Trump supporters in 2020) – though Didion cautions that their outlook is not necessarily ‘rightwing’ in the sense that this is understood in American terms.

She doesn't spell out why not, exactly, but she does lay out the background with some care. The articles comprising this book were written in 1987, when the city was just emerging from its cocaine wars, but from reading this book you might never know they happened at all. She isn't interested in Scarface and Miami Vice; what she's interested in is the way in which Miami was a site of warring ideologies in American political life in general, and in its foreign policy in particular.

It is not Tony Montana that looms over this book, but Kennedy; not Medellín, but the Bay of Pigs. Didion's Miami is a place haunted by its past as a major secret intelligence base, where codenames and cryptic references are everywhere, and where ‘an impressive amount of the daily business of the city is carried on by men who speak casually of having run missions for the CIA’. The irony built deep into the book is that these operations always seem to founder on some misunderstanding: ‘few lessons get learned’, as she puts it. When she writes, in her elegant opening sentence, that ‘Havana vanities come to dust in Miami’, she isn't just talking about Cuban vanities.

There is a strange sense in this book of a divided community, where the Anglos, at least, have almost no idea of what's happening in the Latino world and often (to Didion's amazement) have no knowledge of, or inclination to learn, Spanish. The examples she gives of two cultures existing on top of each other put me in mind at times of China Miéville's The City and The City; she characterises the white Miami at one point as a self-styled ‘beleaguered raj’.

Striking phrases like this recur in her long, elbowy sentences; her main tools are repetition, irony bordering on cynicism, and a technique of what you might call grammatical postponement: contingent parts of a clause are stretched to opposite ends of the sentence, distantly connected like entangled particles; a finite verb is separated from its object by innumerable long subordinate clauses, so that reading her often feels like waiting to reach the end of a particularly fiendish sentence in German. We are told, for instance, that Miami is

a city in which people who express their opinions on the radio every night tend, particularly since 1976, when a commentator named Emilio Milian got his legs blown off in the WQBA-LaCubanísima parking lot, to put a little thought into the walk to the car.

A comparison between Castro and Reagan is said to be

not, since even those exiles who voted in large numbers for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 did so despite their conviction that he was bent on making a secret deal with Fidel Castro, an endorsement.

And one sentence begins with the following almost Proustian diversion:

Not until later, after I had managed to attend a few Outreach meetings, febrile afternoons in 1984 and 1985 during which the United States was seen to be waging the war for the minds of mankind not only against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua and the FMLN in El Salvador and the Castro government in Cuba and the Machel government in Mozambique but also against its own Congress, against its own State Department, against some members (James Baker, Michael Deaver) of its own executive branch, and, most pointedly, against its own press, did it occur to me that this particular series of unreturned telephone calls may well have been specific…

…where an adverbial phrase is separated from the main clause (‘not until later…did it occur to me’) by a parenthesis fully 88 words long! The end of a sentence often has you casting your mind back to the distant, halcyon days when you first began to read it, when the world was young and everything seemed possible. You can also see in that extract her love of repetition (against, against, against) and of throwing endless new names at the reader, all of which can make reading her a proposition which, while very rewarding, demands concentration and an alert, upright reading position. Reading her while lying beside the pool was therefore not entirely advisable; but it put the Miami Herald in context wonderfully.

Parts read like the Florida Man origin story, and it's great. I was unaware of a lot of this history. I think this drags at the end, but it's overall worth a read for anyone who is obsessed with — or has a perverse curiosity — in Florida and, specifically, Miami.