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Joan Didion

Miami Kindle Edition

by Joan Didion (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

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An astonishing account of Cuban exiles, CIA informants, and cocaine traffickers in Florida by the New York Times–bestselling author of South and West.

In Miami, the National Book Award–winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking looks beyond postcard images of fluorescent waters, backlit islands, and pastel architecture to explore the murkier waters of a city on the edge.

From Fidel Castro and the Bay of Pigs invasion to Lee Harvey Oswald and the Kennedy assassination to Oliver North and the Iran–Contra affair, Joan Didion uncovers political intrigues and shadowy underworld connections, and documents the US government’s “seduction and betrayal” of the Cuban exile community in Dade County. She writes of hotels that offer “guerrilla discounts,” gun shops that advertise Father’s Day deals, and a real-estate market where “Unusual Security and Ready Access to the Ocean” are perks for wealthy homeowners looking to make a quick escape. With a booming drug trade, staggering racial and class inequities, and skyrocketing murder rates, Miami in the 1980s felt more like a Third World capital than a modern American city. Didion describes the violence, passion, and paranoia of these troubled times in arresting detail and “beautifully evocative prose” (The New York Times Book Review).

A vital report on an immigrant community traumatized by broken dreams and the cynicism of US foreign policy, Miami is a masterwork of literary journalism whose insights are timelier and more important than ever.

Print length

187 pages
Language

English
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Publisher

Open Road Media
Publication date

May 9, 2017
File size

3710 KB
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Editorial Reviews

Review

“The world Miss Didion describes in beautifully evocative prose is that familiar landscape we have learned to expect from her novels and essays, a world of menace and elliptical connections. . . . The story [she] tells is a compassionate tale of Washington’s ‘seduction and betrayal’ of the Cuban exiles.” —The New York Times Book Review

“In book after book, essay after essay, in fiction as well as nonfiction, she writes and thinks with exceptional rigor and originality, makes connections both abstract and specific with skill and grace, and brilliantly marshals masses of detail. . . . Miami [is] Joan Didion’s most ambitious nonfiction work yet. . . . A brilliant book.” —The Washington Post

“[Didion] has an excellent eye for detail, a sense of the phrase or image that tells the whole story. . . . An insightful book.” —The Christian Science Monitor

“Finely tuned . . . [Miami] turns much sunny light into a murky underwater darkness full of sharks and evil shadows.” —The New York Times

“To understand America . . . I recommend Miami.” —New Statesman

“Didion’s Miami is a kaleidoscope of impressions, and a litany of violence, intrigue, vengeance, political manipulation, and broken dreams.” —The Boston Globe

“By combining her novelist’s ear and journalist’s eye, Didion gives the reader a sense of the never-ending feeling of exile that is locked in the heart of every refugee. . . . Masterful.” —Library Journal

Praise for Joan Didion
“She has been an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time, a memorable voice, partly eulogistic, partly despairing; always in control.” —Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

Joan Didion is the author of five novels, ten works of nonfiction, and a play. Her books include Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Play It as It Lays, The White Album, The Year of Magical Thinking, and, most recently, South and West: From a Notebook. Born in Sacramento, California, she lives in New York City.

From the Inside Flap

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.

From the Trade Paperback edition. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From the Back Cover

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. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

From Publishers Weekly

PW reported that Didion's style, "while it suffers overload, will delight her readers as she swims in the mainstream of the growing run of 'Miami' books." She portrays today's Miami as a hotbed of conspiracy and endless meetings among wealthy Cuban-Americans plotting Castro's overthrow.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

To Didion, contemporary Miami is a "tropical capital" closer in ambiance to Caracas or Bogota than Atlanta or Boston, a city shaped by the Cuban community and its dominating exile mentality. The objective here, however, is not so much a profile of the city as a political analysis of the Miami Cuban minda mind, we are told, that remains obsessed with el exilio (the exile), la lucha (the struggle), and a deep and bitter sense of betrayal of the expatriate cause by the U.S. government from Kennedy to Reagan. As in her earlier Salvador , Didion brings the novelist's ear and journalist's eye to her work. The result is a masterful polemic. A similar though less analytical book is David Rieff's new Going to Miami: exiles, tourists, and refugees in the New America (Little, Brown, 1987). Kenneth F. Kister, Pinellas Park P.L., Fla.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B072L6M5MG
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Open Road Media (May 9, 2017)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ May 9, 2017
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 3710 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 187 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #191,639 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #29 in History of U.S. Immigration
- #49 in United States Local Government
- #108 in History of Southern U.S.

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Joan Didion

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Joan Didion was born in Sacramento in 1934 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1956. After graduation, Didion moved to New York and began working for Vogue, which led to her career as a journalist and writer. Didion published her first novel, Run River, in 1963. Didion’s other novels include A Book of Common Prayer (1977), Democracy (1984), and The Last Thing He Wanted (1996).

Didion’s first volume of essays, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, was published in 1968, and her second, The White Album, was published in 1979. Her nonfiction works include Salvador (1983), Miami (1987), After Henry (1992), Political Fictions (2001), Where I Was From (2003), We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order to Live (2006), Blue Nights (2011), South and West (2017) and Let Me Tell You What I Mean (2021). Her memoir The Year of Magical Thinking won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2005.

In 2005, Didion was awarded the American Academy of Arts & Letters Gold Medal in Criticism and Belles Letters. In 2007, she was awarded the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. A portion of National Book Foundation citation read: "An incisive observer of American politics and culture for more than forty-five years, Didion’s distinctive blend of spare, elegant prose and fierce intelligence has earned her books a place in the canon of American literature as well as the admiration of generations of writers and journalists.” In 2013, she was awarded a National Medal of Arts and Humanities by President Barack Obama, and the PEN Center USA’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

Didion said of her writing: "I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.” She died in December 2021.

For more information, visit www.joandidion.org

Photo credit: Brigitte Lacombe

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5

181 global ratings

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4 star		22%
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2 star		8%
1 star		5%

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Dana Garrett

A Story Perhaps Only a Novelist Can Tell Well

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 27, 2004

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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.

19 people found this helpful

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John E. Walker

One I enjoyed was the White Album

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 7, 2016

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This was written some time ago, but much of it is relevant to today - especially as we currently have two Cubans running for the presidency. If either of them get close then this book becomes required reading.
Joan Didion's writing style is probably not for everyone, but if you stick with it for a few chapters you'll pick up the harmonics and find yourself wondering if maybe you should check out some of her other books as well. One I enjoyed was the White Album. Among the great images she implants in your mind is a tour she took of Ronald and Nancy Reagan's house in Sacramento. She noted how there were no bookcases, and therefore no books in evidence. How could this happen - that we would elect someone who doesn't read? Well it did happen, and it marks the point at which GOP voters started dumbing down and voting for people with whom they'd want to share a beer - and not someone with a vision, wisdom, and the skill to take this great experiment to the next level.
We brought this greatly diminished GOP on ourselves, and it's up to us to fix it - and restore a loyal opposition that works for the common good.
Brief rant aside, my recommendation is to read this book if you're interested in the backstory about the unusual relationship our elected and unelected officials have had with the Cuban community over the years.

5 people found this helpful

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retired guy

Real noir by a master

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 4, 2010

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I am one of those who absolutely love Didion's style. Her long meandering sentences, laden with subordinate clauses that wind down a long trail of adjectives and phrasings, remind me of Hunter Thompson on Sherry instead of meth, until reaching a conclusion that is at once obvious and profound. Ah, where was I?

Oh yes, I was captured by Didion's "The Year of Magical Thinking" after losing a loved one, and found her book to be the only one that came close to capturing the sorrow and ennui of that period of my life. I love her ideosyncratic style, and it served "Miami" well. She serves up the threats unveiled and the danger open and unguarded as she talks political assassination and murder in the same breath as Cuban literature and culture. This book captures the mundane face of the patriot in exile who will stop at nothing to regain his homeland, even when that homeland no longer effectively exists. Miami has truly become America's Casablanca, and she looks it in the eye without flinching. A political and social study that is more timely than many current tomes.

12 people found this helpful

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Robert B. Lamm

I Used to Love Her, But It's All Over Now

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on June 24, 2013

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I used to grab anything that Joan Didion wrote for the sheer pleasure of reading her stiletto-like prose, her sarcasm, and the intelligence of her observations. However, I guess I'm over her; perhaps I've dumbed down, or perhaps this book is just too dated (it was written in 1987, and while the more things change the more they may stay the same, a great deal HAS changed). At a minimum, I have to agree with Mr. Blanton's review in many respects; Ms. Didion is writing more for herself than for any reader, though I would add that what I used to think of as sarcasm now seems extremely holier-than-thou and so impressed with itself as to be off-putting to the max.

I also have to assume that the book is a compilation of articles that were intended to be read over time - perhaps over a long time. If that's correct, then putting them into book form does a disservice, because after a while you feel like you're reading the same thing over and over again. The sense that you're being beaten over the head with repetitious and smug observations is overwhelming and makes for a most unsatisfying read.

If you want to read the best of Joan Didion, go back to "The White Album" or "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" - though I'm not going to re-read them for fear that it really IS all over now.

18 people found this helpful

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drjonty

Cuban dreams

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on January 28, 2018

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Didion writes with typical brilliance on the febrile Cuban exiles and their desperate politics of conspiracy and endless plotting. Sharp and fascinating.

denis crump

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 15, 2016

Verified Purchase

excellent

One person found this helpful

Jean Montambeault

Possibly the best american writer of modern times

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on January 31, 2018

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Mrs Didion minimalist style goes right to the heart of the matter which may coincidentally may be the readers heart, and then ouch, but not to dwell on it. Possibly the best american writer of modern times, she's a thinking mirror of us.

One person found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Interesting but unlike any other Joan Dideon book I have ever read Very much like a textbook Hard reading

Reviewed in Canada 🇨🇦 on December 14, 2017

Verified Purchase

Would not recommend unless you are a dedicated history buff .
Very interesting history of the relationship between Cubans and the American population in Miami

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