Reviews

Miami by Joan Didion

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lindong524's review against another edition

informative reflective slow-paced

Havana vanities come to dust in Miami. It's a shame Didion's long sentences didn't.

Miami is not really a book about Miami. It's a story of Cuban exiles and political intrigues that unfold from Miami. I enjoyed the part of the story that actually took place in Miami, even though it was hard to follow at times (Joan Didion does not coddle readers and you are expected to have an understanding of Miami, US-Cuba relations, and Cubans in Miami during that period). I was so excited when she brought up the African-American community in Miami, believing that she would dive into the dynamics of three different populaces struggling to thrive with scarce resources (there is always a noose, just depends on whose neck it's around). But alas, they were false promises. This was a book strictly about Cubans and false promises.

I started falling off the second half of the book. I felt like I was trapped in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’ One Hundred Years of Solitude once again, another group of Cubans battling yet another group of Cubans in ideology, with the U.S. government quietly in background moving pieces forward and back on a chess board. It's hard to tell whether Didion finds D.C. a bunch of fools or master manipulators (except for Reagan, it's clear she finds him a puppet), and I think she might not even be sure either.

The part I did appreciate about the book was la lucha between Cuban exiles new to Miami then and the "native" white populations. The fundamental misunderstanding that comes from a place of drastically different cultural, social, and economic backgrounds. It seems as if some of the emigrants didn't really both attempting to assimilate, while most of the white Miami residents just simply overlooked a large Cuban population. Their cultures were tools that added "flavors" to the city's tourism industry. But at the same time, the Cubans brought their struggles to the Miami and to the U.S., leveraging terrorism at time to force the hands of the U.S. government against communist regimes of their motherland.

What promises were they given by the U.S. government in terms of freeing Cuban? Beyond a lip-service promise given by JFK in the heat of the moment, the book doesn't really explain (even though "many such efforts foundered, on the familiar shoal of Washington hubris"). It seems that there was an implicit understanding, but barely any actual promises. I struggled here, ideologically. I have always thought myself left-leaning in social issues, but I don't know how Americans were to embrace an entire community that had brought violence and political struggles from their motherland to their homes. I do not know if I can be generous in that position.

Didion's writing could be construed into sympathy for the Cuban exiles (I cannot be sure as honestly so much of her nuance went right over my head, lost in the plethora of commas and the descriptions they surrounded). It is difficult to be forced to leave your country, but not everyone is always given the opportunity to leave. Your mobility is always determined by your resources. Most of those who left, at least in the very beginning, had the most to lose from a communist regime.

I read this book while I was also listening to Born a Crime by Trevor Noah, it was an interesting juxtaposition. One tells his stories of his homeland from the lens of an insider, unabashed and unapologetic. The other tells the story of an immigrant community through the lens of an outsider, cautious and carefully ambiguous.

History is always the hardest to write. You have to be cautious of your own biases and pride getting in the way of that. Didion is certainly careful, but I think the parts where her voice shined were the best.