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Miami | 
 enlarge | Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Vintage
Category: Book
List Price: $12.95
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Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 408935
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st Vintage International ed
Pages: 240
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8 x 5.2 x 0.7
ISBN: 0679781803
Dewey Decimal Number: 305.86872910759381
EAN: 9780679781806
ASIN: 0679781803
Publication Date: September 29, 1998
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Product Description
It is where Fidel Castro raised money to overthrow Batista and where two generations of Castro's enemies have raised armies to overthrow him, so far without success. It is where the bitter opera of Cuban exile intersects with the cynicism of U.S. foreign policy. It is a city whose skyrocketing murder rate is fueled by the cocaine trade, racial discontent, and an undeclared war on the island ninety miles to the south.
As Didion follows Miami's drift into a Third World capital, she also locates its position in the secret history of the Cold War, from the Bay of Pigs to the Reagan doctrine and from the Kennedy assassination to the Watergate break-in. Miami is not just a portrait of a city, but a masterly study of immigration and exile, passion, hypocrisy, and political violence.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 OK November 19, 2006
David Blanton (New York, New York)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
This is a complex and detailed history chiefly of Cuban exiles in South Florida and the influence they have been able to wield regionally and internationally with and without the help of various U.S. administrations. In that sense, it is the story of two cities - Miami and Washington - and two peoples - Americans and Cubans.
I have an objection, though, with the stone-hard style in which this volume is so meticulously, even gorgeously at times, written. Didion strives to be so achingly academic that there is little real heart to this book and, worse, the result is a cold, humorless, colorless story that is at times an unappealing example of ideological abstractions and alphabet soup.
The author, in her conspicuously clean and parenthetical prose, apparently is so charged by the subject of her research that she has forgotten there are people on the other end - readers. It is, in that sense, a boring little disaster of a book.
Outdated---Ancient History September 13, 2006
J. McLean (Colorado)
0 out of 4 found this review helpful
Exiled Cubans in Miami up to 1987. This is real old stuff. I wonder why this book is still being published. Felt like a collection of shorter magazine--newspaper articles compiled to look like a real book. Many long, disjointed sentences. Could use an updating. There must be better books out there about this topic.
 Masterful detail July 13, 2006
Lisa E. Grose (Greenwood, SC United States)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
Didion produces a masterful detailing of Miami history through Cuban immigration and their rise to power in the city. Highly recommended.
A Story Perhaps Only a Novelist Can Tell Well September 27, 2004
Dana Garrett
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
The story of the Cuban exiles in Miami deserves to be told with drama and passion because that is what it has been. In this page-turner, Joan Didion captures the rejection and racism that the Cuban exiles first encountered in Miami when they emigrated from Cuba after Castro assumed power. She shows how some of the Cubans became successful businesspersons, political powerbrokers, shapers of local culture, renowned humanitarians and philanthropists, expert propagandists, able diplomats, drug runners, muggers, and internationally renowned terrorists.
We see the close relationship the Cuban exiles formed with the USA government, especially its clandestine agencies. We learn that in the 1960s Miami essentially became a CIA recruiting and operational-staging center. Didion tells us that the CIA had as much as 120,000 "regular agents" (full and part-time) stationed in south Florida. It had a flotilla of small boats (often used for terrorist raids on Cuba), making it the third largest navy in the western hemisphere at the time. It owned airline companies in the Miami area and holding companies that lent itself loans for covert operations. "There were [also] hundreds of pieces of Miami real estate, residential bungalows maintained as safe houses, waterfront properties maintained as safe harbors" as well as "fifty five other front businesses" and "CIA boat shops," "guns shops," real-estate, travel and detective agencies (pp. 90-91).
Yet the relationship between the Cuban Americans and the USA has been a troubled one. Although the Cuban Americans find themselves dependent on the USA for maintaining their struggle against Castro, they also don't trust the government, blaming it for their loss at the Bay of Pigs and for adopting policies soft on Castro. Likewise, the USA finds some Cuban Americans helpful in its secret foreign adventures (Chile, Nicaragua, Angola, etc.) as well as a nuisance when these terrorist elements assassinate foreign diplomats, blow up airplanes and banks, and murder USA citizens.
Particularly poignant is Didion's description of the Cuban Americans' personal and often internecine struggle over understanding themselves as immigrants or exiles. These struggles have resulted in broken friendships, shunning, public ridicule, financial loss, bodily harm and death.
The book only covers Miami until 1987. I wish Didion would update the book, although it might be dangerous for her to do so.
This is a great read and well worth the purchase.
Excellent perspective on Miami March 7, 2002
Maslow (New York, NY)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I read this book so many years ago, but I just now realized I had never shared my opnions about it. I had lived in Miami for about eight years, and I think I was in my 5th year or so when I finally heard about "Miami" by Joan Didion. It was only after I had finally moved to the Beach that I happened upon it, at Kafka's. At any rate, it is an excellent book. I think about it every time I hear on the news about the bumbling CIA or news of Castro makes the NYTimes. Incidentally, 1987 also saw the publication of "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face," by Edna Buchanan, another equally excellent non-fiction book about this city. I also highly recommend "A Book of Common Prayer" by Ms. Didion.
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