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Miami
Reportage resists easy definition and comes in many forms - travel essay, narrative history, autobiography - but at its finest it reveals hidden truths about people and events that have shaped the world we know. This new series, hailed as 'a wonderful idea' by Don DeLillo, both restores to print and introduces for the first time some of the greatest works of the genre. A surprising portrait of the pastel city, a masterly study of Cuban immigration and exile, and a sly account of vile moments in the Cold War. Miami may be the sunniest place in America but this is Didion's darkest book, in which she explores American efforts to overthrow the Castro regime, Miami's civic corruption, and racist treatment of its large black community.
240 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1987
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About the author
Joan Didion
95books15.6kfollowersJoan Didion was an American writer and journalist. She is considered one of the pioneers of New Journalism along with Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Tom Wolfe.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
Didion's career began in the 1950s after she won an essay contest sponsored by Vogue magazine. Over the course of her career, Didion wrote essays for many magazines, including The Saturday Evening Post, Life, Esquire, The New York Review of Books and The New Yorker. Her writing during the 1960s through the late 1970s engaged audiences in the realities of the counterculture of the 1960s, the Hollywood lifestyle, and the history and culture of California. Didion's political writing in the 1980s and 1990s often concentrated on the subtext of political rhetoric and the United States's foreign policy in Latin America. In 1991, she wrote the earliest mainstream media article to suggest the Central Park Five had been wrongfully convicted. In 2005, Didion won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for The Year of Magical Thinking, a memoir of the year following the death of her husband, writer John Gregory Dunne. She later adapted the book into a play that premiered on Broadway in 2007. In 2013, she was awarded the National Humanities Medal by president Barack Obama. Didion was profiled in the Netflix documentary The Center Will Not Hold, directed by her nephew Griffin Dunne, in 2017.
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May 24, 2020
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.
The eyes, chico, never lie!
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.
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.
The eyes, chico, never lie!
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.
February 14, 2022
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-ܲí 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.
October 11, 2023
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.
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.
”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.
”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.�
”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.�
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.
”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. . . �
August 17, 2020
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.
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.
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.
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.
June 19, 2024
I have read Joan Didion before, often with interest, but I have never enjoyed her work, particularly, until stumbling across this nonfictional work from 1987. This turns out to have been a really nice companion piece to Jennine Capo Crucet’s wonderful Say Hello to My Little Friend, which has been my favorite book so far this year. Both books are primarily about Cuban-Americans in Miami, one borne of lived experience and one from dedicated and meticulous research. I am embarrassed, as a native (and decidedly former) Floridian about how little I knew about this community.
Example: While I was a schoolboy, I was aware of something called the ‘Mariel Boatlift�, in which Fidel Castro invited anyone who wished to leave Cuba to do so, including those behind bars; I was unaware that about 134,000 Cubans ended up in South Florida as a result, and that it changed the reality of Miami forevermore. Didion showed up a few years later, asking questions. There had been a long-established Cuban power structure there � after all, three former Presidents of Cuba had rebuilt their lives in the upscale Coconut Grove / Coral Gables area � but by the time Didion arrived, 56% of Miami proper consisted of Cuban-Americans (a number that has since grown to about 69%).
Didion was dazzled by the ignorance of Anglo-Miamians to this culture taking root around them and does her best to rectify it.
Unless you live there, why should you care that the ninth most populous county in the United States has essentially become a foreign land? Because it is producing writers like Jennine Capo Crucet, who does not consider herself exotic at all, but simply the product of some accidents of history. That this culture has grown and prospered is an indicator, at some level, that the United States is doing something right.
Example: While I was a schoolboy, I was aware of something called the ‘Mariel Boatlift�, in which Fidel Castro invited anyone who wished to leave Cuba to do so, including those behind bars; I was unaware that about 134,000 Cubans ended up in South Florida as a result, and that it changed the reality of Miami forevermore. Didion showed up a few years later, asking questions. There had been a long-established Cuban power structure there � after all, three former Presidents of Cuba had rebuilt their lives in the upscale Coconut Grove / Coral Gables area � but by the time Didion arrived, 56% of Miami proper consisted of Cuban-Americans (a number that has since grown to about 69%).
Didion was dazzled by the ignorance of Anglo-Miamians to this culture taking root around them and does her best to rectify it.
In February of 1986, the Miami Herald asked four prominent amateurs of local history to name “the ten people and the ten events that had the most impact on the county’s history…[there follows a long list consisting mostly of early landowners and developers]..On none of these lists of “The Most Influential People in Dade’s History� did the name Fidel Castro appear, nor for that matter did the name of any Cuban, although the presence of Cubans did not go entirely unnoted by the panel. For the ‘Events� question, all four of the panelists mentioned the arrival of the Cubans, but at slightly off angles, and as if this arrival had been just another of those isolated disasters or innovations which deflect the course of any growing community, for example the Freeze of 1896, the Hurricane of 1926 and the opening of the Dixie Highway.Didion’s restrained acid tongue shows up again and again in this book, making it (for me) a very fun read:
This set of mind, in which the local Cuban community was seen as a civic challenge determinedly met, was not uncommon among Anglos to whom I talked in Miami, many of whom persisted in the related illusions that the city was small, manageable, prosperous in a predictable broad-based way, southern in a progressive Sunbelt way, American, and belonged to them.
On March 7, 1986, a group called the South Florida Peace Coalition applied for and received a Miami police permit authorizing a demonstration against American aid to the Nicaraguan Contras (an anticommunist insurrectionist volunteer army.) In due course, a second police permit was applied for and issued, this one to Andres Sargen, the executive director of Alpha 66, a group running current actions against the government of Cuba. That the permits would allow the South Florida Peace Coalition demonstration and the Alpha 66 counterdemonstration to take place at exactly the same time and within a few yards of each other was a point defended by Miami police. This was not an assessment which suggested a particularly close reading, over the past 25 years, of either Alpha 66 or Andres Sargen.The later chapters, in which Didion tracks the involvement of violence-prone Cuban-Americans in the Iran Contra scandal that cast a shadow over the Reagan presidency, were less interesting to me, in that they were more about Washington, D.C. than about Miami.
Unless you live there, why should you care that the ninth most populous county in the United States has essentially become a foreign land? Because it is producing writers like Jennine Capo Crucet, who does not consider herself exotic at all, but simply the product of some accidents of history. That this culture has grown and prospered is an indicator, at some level, that the United States is doing something right.
January 7, 2016
"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 or Mailer's
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.
- 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 or Mailer's
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.
May 29, 2017
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)
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)
January 18, 2022
Not my favourite Didion (I’d have benefitted from knowing more about the political context in the US from the 60s - late 80s before going in), but even the less good Didion books are still worth a read.
June 24, 2022
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.
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.
December 23, 2021
A volte la vita è proprio strana: iniziavo a leggere questo libro il 23 dicembre 2019 per concluderlo il giorno dopo.
Era nel tempo per-Sars-Cov2, a poche settimane dallo scoppio della pandemia (in Cina era già iniziato tutto).
Oggi, 23 dicembre 2021, due anni esatti dopo, apprendo della notizia della morte di quella che considero una delle più grandi scrittrici.
Due anni fa vivevo ancora a Padova e ricordo che questo fu uno dei primi libri che iniziai ad audioleggere.
In questo saggio culturale, Joan Didion usa le dinamiche politiche di Miami e del Sud della Florida come lente per investigare e analizzare le politiche statunitensi a Cuba (durante gli anni di Kennedy) e in America Centrale (durante gli anni di Reagan).
“Ma, più di ogni altra cosa, gli americani mancano di «passione». Questa in fondo era la carenza principale da cui scaturivano tutte le altre pecche nazionali. Se chiedevo un esempio di questa mancanza di passione, mi veniva spesso detto che bastava notare lo scarso apprezzamento che avevano per la lucha, la lotta.�
Joan Didion, con lo stile che le è proprio, scava oltre quella patina luccicante che avvolgeva questa città, per andare al cuore della verità:
“Non si trattava della generica lamentela della comunità degli esuli nei confronti di un governo che avrebbe potuto far propria la loro lotta e che invece non lo aveva fatto. Si trattava di qualcosa di molto più specifico: il governo in questione aveva sì abbracciato la lucha, ma solo per soddisfare il proprio interesse, e in ciò gli esuli vedevano un disegno di tradimento che poteva essere ripercorso a ritroso attraverso ben sei amministrazioni. Secondo questo disegno, per il loro modo di vedere, gli Stati Uniti sostenevano e incoraggiavano regolarmente azioni ribelli da parte degli esuli salvo poi, quando questi fatti diventavano imbarazzanti o comunque non in armonia con i messaggi inviati da Washington in quel frangente, scaricare senza tanti complimenti gli esuli coinvolti e qualche volta addirittura � dal momento che la lucha era per sua natura essenzialmente illegale � perseguitarli; in altre parole, li addestravano per il fallimento.�
E lei ci ha insegnato che: “Le parole hanno una conseguenza, e tutte le storie hanno una fine. NICARAGUA OGGI, CUBA DOMANI.�
E che a Cuba non cresceva il C-4 e che “le decisioni prese a Washington potessero ripercuotersi altrove, all’effetto di risonanza di alcune idee e alle loro relative conseguenze.�
Era nel tempo per-Sars-Cov2, a poche settimane dallo scoppio della pandemia (in Cina era già iniziato tutto).
Oggi, 23 dicembre 2021, due anni esatti dopo, apprendo della notizia della morte di quella che considero una delle più grandi scrittrici.
Due anni fa vivevo ancora a Padova e ricordo che questo fu uno dei primi libri che iniziai ad audioleggere.
In questo saggio culturale, Joan Didion usa le dinamiche politiche di Miami e del Sud della Florida come lente per investigare e analizzare le politiche statunitensi a Cuba (durante gli anni di Kennedy) e in America Centrale (durante gli anni di Reagan).
“Ma, più di ogni altra cosa, gli americani mancano di «passione». Questa in fondo era la carenza principale da cui scaturivano tutte le altre pecche nazionali. Se chiedevo un esempio di questa mancanza di passione, mi veniva spesso detto che bastava notare lo scarso apprezzamento che avevano per la lucha, la lotta.�
Joan Didion, con lo stile che le è proprio, scava oltre quella patina luccicante che avvolgeva questa città, per andare al cuore della verità:
“Non si trattava della generica lamentela della comunità degli esuli nei confronti di un governo che avrebbe potuto far propria la loro lotta e che invece non lo aveva fatto. Si trattava di qualcosa di molto più specifico: il governo in questione aveva sì abbracciato la lucha, ma solo per soddisfare il proprio interesse, e in ciò gli esuli vedevano un disegno di tradimento che poteva essere ripercorso a ritroso attraverso ben sei amministrazioni. Secondo questo disegno, per il loro modo di vedere, gli Stati Uniti sostenevano e incoraggiavano regolarmente azioni ribelli da parte degli esuli salvo poi, quando questi fatti diventavano imbarazzanti o comunque non in armonia con i messaggi inviati da Washington in quel frangente, scaricare senza tanti complimenti gli esuli coinvolti e qualche volta addirittura � dal momento che la lucha era per sua natura essenzialmente illegale � perseguitarli; in altre parole, li addestravano per il fallimento.�
E lei ci ha insegnato che: “Le parole hanno una conseguenza, e tutte le storie hanno una fine. NICARAGUA OGGI, CUBA DOMANI.�
E che a Cuba non cresceva il C-4 e che “le decisioni prese a Washington potessero ripercuotersi altrove, all’effetto di risonanza di alcune idee e alle loro relative conseguenze.�
March 20, 2023
's 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:
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.
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.
September 13, 2024
Kiinnostava kirja! Kiinnostava Miami! Samalla tässä tuli niin paljon nimiä ja uusi ihmisiä tiheällä syötöllä, että välillä piti pinnistellä pysyäkseen kärryillä. Mutta kuten Didion toteaa, ”any single Miami story, moreover, was hard to follow�.
December 2, 2024
As a South Florida native, this might be a long review for a book that is only 200 pages haha
I kind of went into this book hoping that a lot of what I grew up around not entirely understanding (the mariel, etc) would be made more clear to me, but this just made me realize how little I actually do know, as I found myself pretty confused through out the book regarding this specific topic.
The political climate when she wrote this in the late 80's is genuinely so close to the current climate today in South Florida, I was so surprised to read a lot of the common buzzwords on the conservative Cuban side of things that are still used to this day. I knew since I was a kid that down here, when you ask a Cuban why they are right-leaning, they usually just say because they're Cuban, which I never understood. I knew it had to do with the 'Bay of Pigs' and the betrayal of the JFK administration but while reading this, I realized the betrayal was so much deeper and longer than any of that. It went on for decades, multiple administrations, right and left, that continued to use and betray the Cuban people in Miami, act as if they were ever going to help their cause, and abandon them over and over again. Its definitely eye-opening and makes it more understandable as to why people are on that side of the political spectrum (in ways) although I do feel like neither party helped them at any point. Reading this just makes me feel like this group of people were doomed no matter what, as so many people mishandled so many things here.
The culture of South Florida cannot be talked about without speaking of Cuban culture, because its completely engrained and truly the base of what South Florida culture is. I have never worked a job where there wasn't a mid-day break to make cafecito, where people in the mornings brought not only donuts, but pastellitos. So many of my friends are atleast half Cuban and the thought of the Cuban people not migrating here is something I can't even truly fathom to what South Florida would look like. I'm glad I got to learn more about that experience especially in the very early years of it. I think the issues that come with speaking on the political aspect of Cuban-Miami culture is truly so complicated, complex and hard to grasp even after reading this.
Some random highlights:
- "They spoke of "diversity," and of Miami's "Hispanic flavor," an approach in which 56 percent of the population was seen as decorative, like the Coral Gables arches" - this stood out to me because I do feel like a lot of tourists come down to Miami and truly see the people as decorative and act as such as well. Its putting something I've thought into words in the best way possible.
-It was funny to see her refer to the people mover as a 'ghost train' considering its so widely used down here today. So much of what was true in 1986~ ring true and shows how much progress this city has undergone, especially in the realm of the violence down here. I truly had no idea it was that violent or had that much CIA involvement down here in the 80's at all.
This was also my first time reading a book by Joan Didion. It was a very interesting writing-style, I read that it was based off Hemingway's, which I have still yet to read as well, but it definitely had me re-reading sentences SO much, that mixed with a lot of the names I've never heard before, it wasn't exactly the easiest read ever. I would give 5 stars but I think also, I wish there maybe was more to say about Miami at that time. I wish it was a bit longer and delved more into other cultures history down here than it did.
I kind of went into this book hoping that a lot of what I grew up around not entirely understanding (the mariel, etc) would be made more clear to me, but this just made me realize how little I actually do know, as I found myself pretty confused through out the book regarding this specific topic.
The political climate when she wrote this in the late 80's is genuinely so close to the current climate today in South Florida, I was so surprised to read a lot of the common buzzwords on the conservative Cuban side of things that are still used to this day. I knew since I was a kid that down here, when you ask a Cuban why they are right-leaning, they usually just say because they're Cuban, which I never understood. I knew it had to do with the 'Bay of Pigs' and the betrayal of the JFK administration but while reading this, I realized the betrayal was so much deeper and longer than any of that. It went on for decades, multiple administrations, right and left, that continued to use and betray the Cuban people in Miami, act as if they were ever going to help their cause, and abandon them over and over again. Its definitely eye-opening and makes it more understandable as to why people are on that side of the political spectrum (in ways) although I do feel like neither party helped them at any point. Reading this just makes me feel like this group of people were doomed no matter what, as so many people mishandled so many things here.
The culture of South Florida cannot be talked about without speaking of Cuban culture, because its completely engrained and truly the base of what South Florida culture is. I have never worked a job where there wasn't a mid-day break to make cafecito, where people in the mornings brought not only donuts, but pastellitos. So many of my friends are atleast half Cuban and the thought of the Cuban people not migrating here is something I can't even truly fathom to what South Florida would look like. I'm glad I got to learn more about that experience especially in the very early years of it. I think the issues that come with speaking on the political aspect of Cuban-Miami culture is truly so complicated, complex and hard to grasp even after reading this.
Some random highlights:
- "They spoke of "diversity," and of Miami's "Hispanic flavor," an approach in which 56 percent of the population was seen as decorative, like the Coral Gables arches" - this stood out to me because I do feel like a lot of tourists come down to Miami and truly see the people as decorative and act as such as well. Its putting something I've thought into words in the best way possible.
-It was funny to see her refer to the people mover as a 'ghost train' considering its so widely used down here today. So much of what was true in 1986~ ring true and shows how much progress this city has undergone, especially in the realm of the violence down here. I truly had no idea it was that violent or had that much CIA involvement down here in the 80's at all.
This was also my first time reading a book by Joan Didion. It was a very interesting writing-style, I read that it was based off Hemingway's, which I have still yet to read as well, but it definitely had me re-reading sentences SO much, that mixed with a lot of the names I've never heard before, it wasn't exactly the easiest read ever. I would give 5 stars but I think also, I wish there maybe was more to say about Miami at that time. I wish it was a bit longer and delved more into other cultures history down here than it did.
Read
August 17, 2021Joan Didion's, "Miami," is an intriguing story that chronicles the time between the 'Bay of Pigs,' and straight into the Reagan administration. In many way it is a sociological study of the different Cuban exile groups in Miami and the different approaches they took in the hope of overthrowing Castro. Of special interest, was how some exile groups did not really believe that the United States was their ally in this fight. They believed that the Kennedy administration had made a deal with the Russians that literally tied the American hands.
The latter part of this book deals with the unrest in Central America during the Reagan administration, and the different stories circulating out of Washington and Miami about the approaches being used to liberate the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador.
I must admit I found the last twenty pages of this book very difficult to follow. It was like reading James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, but the rest of the book was truly stimulating and made incisive statements about Miami during this time that I had no idea about.
The latter part of this book deals with the unrest in Central America during the Reagan administration, and the different stories circulating out of Washington and Miami about the approaches being used to liberate the people of Nicaragua and El Salvador.
I must admit I found the last twenty pages of this book very difficult to follow. It was like reading James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, but the rest of the book was truly stimulating and made incisive statements about Miami during this time that I had no idea about.
April 5, 2023
"To spend time in Miami is to acquire a certain fluency in cognitive dissonance."
I suppose if you are not at all familiar with Miami and the Cuban exile community this very short book may give you a little insight into the very complicated history, unfortunately, the book is way too short and the last part of it is more about the Reagan policy on freedom fighters in Central America than anything else.
I suppose if you are not at all familiar with Miami and the Cuban exile community this very short book may give you a little insight into the very complicated history, unfortunately, the book is way too short and the last part of it is more about the Reagan policy on freedom fighters in Central America than anything else.
December 24, 2018
Joan Didion is a great writer. I don't think "Miami" is a great book, though.
"Miami," does a marvelous job of showing how intrigue, double-crosses, and empty promises are the coin of the realm when it comes to both the Washington intelligence establishment and the expat community in Miami who dreamed of a Cuban reconquista by the exiled propertied classes. The problem, for this reader and reviewer, though, was that this note was struck so constantly and redundantly that it became the journalistic equivalent of a long atonal music experiment by a minimalist composer. Didion's voice-mostly deadpan and sometimes droll, usually laced with cynicism and soaked in irony-is probably perfect for a column-length piece. Over the course of a book, though, it became a bit excruciating, sort of like the "New School" journalism perfected by Michael Herr or ramped up to ten by Hunter Thompson, only if the Good Doctor had spent more time with Thorazine than LSD and Herr spent less time in Huey gunships and more time in the Broward County Library scouring through reams of microfiche.
The book is effective in places, and Didion is capable of laser-like insight and breathtaking prose. But the short glossing allotted the other cultures simmering in the melting pot of Miami (from the Haitians to the American blacks) felt like either an oversight or a snub, as Didion concentrated not just on Anglo-Cuban relations, but almost solely on the only sometimes-substantiated rumors of the intriguers in these two communities, to the exclusion of everything else.
No, I wasn't expecting the pastel neo-noir of Miami Vice, but Didion is too good a writer and Miami too sensuous a locale for her to forego physical and sensory description (for the most part) and to focus on the staid corridors of power in D.C., ignoring the flesh-and-blood world she was no doubt steeped in when writing this book.
Mileage may vary, though, and digested in the right portions, as a string of essays rather than a coherent work, you might get more out of it than I did. The notes at the end provide a nice trove of primary and secondary sources worth raiding.
"Miami," does a marvelous job of showing how intrigue, double-crosses, and empty promises are the coin of the realm when it comes to both the Washington intelligence establishment and the expat community in Miami who dreamed of a Cuban reconquista by the exiled propertied classes. The problem, for this reader and reviewer, though, was that this note was struck so constantly and redundantly that it became the journalistic equivalent of a long atonal music experiment by a minimalist composer. Didion's voice-mostly deadpan and sometimes droll, usually laced with cynicism and soaked in irony-is probably perfect for a column-length piece. Over the course of a book, though, it became a bit excruciating, sort of like the "New School" journalism perfected by Michael Herr or ramped up to ten by Hunter Thompson, only if the Good Doctor had spent more time with Thorazine than LSD and Herr spent less time in Huey gunships and more time in the Broward County Library scouring through reams of microfiche.
The book is effective in places, and Didion is capable of laser-like insight and breathtaking prose. But the short glossing allotted the other cultures simmering in the melting pot of Miami (from the Haitians to the American blacks) felt like either an oversight or a snub, as Didion concentrated not just on Anglo-Cuban relations, but almost solely on the only sometimes-substantiated rumors of the intriguers in these two communities, to the exclusion of everything else.
No, I wasn't expecting the pastel neo-noir of Miami Vice, but Didion is too good a writer and Miami too sensuous a locale for her to forego physical and sensory description (for the most part) and to focus on the staid corridors of power in D.C., ignoring the flesh-and-blood world she was no doubt steeped in when writing this book.
Mileage may vary, though, and digested in the right portions, as a string of essays rather than a coherent work, you might get more out of it than I did. The notes at the end provide a nice trove of primary and secondary sources worth raiding.
February 15, 2024
"𝘐𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘴𝘩𝘪𝘮𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳. 𝘐𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘬𝘦𝘱𝘵 𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘤𝘰𝘭𝘰𝘳, 𝘧𝘢𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘨𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘭𝘰𝘶𝘥𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘴𝘶𝘯 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘯𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘭𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵𝘴. 𝘐𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘰𝘥 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘱𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘺 𝘱𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘥, 𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘣𝘢𝘤𝘬𝘭𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘥𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘧𝘭𝘶𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘤𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘸𝘢𝘵𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘷𝘰𝘪𝘤𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘵 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘢𝘣𝘭𝘦 𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘯𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘥𝘦𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘮𝘦, 𝘔𝘪𝘢𝘮𝘪."
And though the pink swirls, it ends up becoming a warning sign. Miami, for Didion's time, was an unpredictable landscape where money flowed and people disappeared. The last half of the book splays out in political paranoia. Who to trust. Who to look to. Whose hands? Whose blood?
An interesting look that perhaps propels the plot of her novel or even .
February 26, 2015
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.
March 18, 2011
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.
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.
January 2, 2022
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!
Honestly, it’s a miracle what Pacino did with this source material. Coño!
July 15, 2011
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.
September 14, 2024
Super interesting subject but either it’s too dense or I am
February 18, 2019
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.
April 26, 2021
Most of what I know (if not all) about Miami comes from my partner, who grew up in the city as a second generation Colombian American. He recommended this book to me as one of the only books that really captures what he thought and experienced as he grew up and I do admit that this book added a lot of background context to much of what he’s told me about the city and his own lived experiences.
A lot of this book is still relevant today: Florida (and particularly Latinx Florida) became a big storyline in 2020 election. Many people were confused by how Miami, a city with an enormous Latinx population, could still be pro-Trump� but no one community is a monolith. I see so much of the conservative/pro-Trump rhetoric alive today living in the pages of Miami and the history of the city in the past few decades, post-Cold War.
A lot of this book is still relevant today: Florida (and particularly Latinx Florida) became a big storyline in 2020 election. Many people were confused by how Miami, a city with an enormous Latinx population, could still be pro-Trump� but no one community is a monolith. I see so much of the conservative/pro-Trump rhetoric alive today living in the pages of Miami and the history of the city in the past few decades, post-Cold War.
December 20, 2020
Premessa importante : volevo leggere qualcosa di Joan Didion e questo libro mi è capitato tra le mani per caso, senza sapere nemmeno di cosa parlasse.
Mi aspettavo qualcosa di romanzato ma mi sono trovato di fronte ad un saggio giornalistico ultra dettagliato, pieno di nomi, date e città.
Quindi riconosco sia estremamente interessante ma non era quel che stavo cercando e per questo mi è pesato abbastanza.
A questo punto mi chiedo anche se tutti i libri della Didion siano su questo stampo o se c'è qualcosa di più adatto ai miei interessi ...
Mi aspettavo qualcosa di romanzato ma mi sono trovato di fronte ad un saggio giornalistico ultra dettagliato, pieno di nomi, date e città.
Quindi riconosco sia estremamente interessante ma non era quel che stavo cercando e per questo mi è pesato abbastanza.
A questo punto mi chiedo anche se tutti i libri della Didion siano su questo stampo o se c'è qualcosa di più adatto ai miei interessi ...
February 27, 2012
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.
Read
June 15, 2023i now have infinitely more than the zero knowledge i had when i started
July 8, 2022
An insightful and revealing look at the Cuban exile community in Miami in the early 1980s.
October 1, 2023
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?
January 31, 2022
� 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.
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.
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