Book Review & Analysis: The Cult of Trump by Steven Hassan PhD

The Cult of Trump

by Steven Hassan PhD

      A cult is any group of people you disagree with. That is the definition of “cult” in The Devil’s Dictionary, a satirical 19^th century work by Ambrose Bierce. The word “cult” is often used as an epithet. I remember in the 1980s when fundamentalist Christians used to say that punks and goths were cults. (We used to say the fundamentalists were a cult as well) But there are cults and then there are cults. High control groups that use deception for recruitment and social engineering techniques to manipulate the thoughts and behaviors of their members do exist. Heaven’s Gate, the Church of Scientology, the Hare Krishnas, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses all come to mind. Then there are those that say mind control doesn’t exist and these groups are just ordinary religions like the Methodists or Presbyterians. They just choose to worship in different ways. Yeah right. Try telling that to the ghosts of those who died in Jonestown.

By now we all know how much people hate our current president Donald Trump. What baffles the rest of us is how fanatical his followers are who believe everything he says, worship the toilet he shits in, think Melania’s face and tits are organic, and believe he is a messianic figure sent to save America from who know what. Immigrants? Communists? Space aliens? Whatever. The rest of us see him as an ordinary demagogue. A failed businessmen, a criminal, a pervert, and a bumbling Homer Simpson-type in the early onset stages of frontal lobe dementia. To us, his followers look and act like they are in a cult. Psychologist Steven Hassan has been studying cult psychology for several decades and has decided that MAGA and some followers of Dementia Don are, in fact, members of a cult. He lays out his case in The Cult of Trump. The question now is does Hassan succeed in proving his case?

Steven Hassan himself has an interesting story. He was once a high-ranking member of a cult, the Unification Church a.k.a. the Moonies. After being deprogrammed, he went on to study psychology and now works as a therapist helping ex-cult members, human trafficking victims, and domestic abuse survivors cope with their trauma and reorient to reality. His technique involves making his patients aware of the mechanics of brainwashing, mind control, and undue influence. He designed a metric called the BITE Model which is easy to use and can be applied to any social group to evaluate how authoritarian and controlling they are. By using BITE Model metrics, Hassan demonstrates how Trump, MAGA, and the current Republican party lean in the direction of an authoritarian mind control cult.

It all starts with the leader. Trump gets diagnosed as having a narcissistic personality disorder which is another name for the clinical, technical diagnosis of anti-social personality disorder. NPD was originally described by psychologist Eric Fromm who set out to prove that Hitler was mentally ill. NPD is commonplace among cult leaders and may actually be a common diagnosis for all of them. Incidentally, Trump’s father used to take him to a cult-like church called the Marble Collegiate Church led by Norman Vincent Peale. Although it was called a church, their teaching had nothing at all to do with Christianity and had everything to do with magical thinking and, some would say, methods of committing fraud. Hassan continues on with the biography of Trump, pointing out the factors that contributed to his NPD and the patterns that indicate he has been a cult leader in the making since childhood.

Then there are the followers in different degrees. The behaviors of advisors, business associates, cabinet members, family members, lobbyists, the right wing media, and other assorted entities with bad intentions are feeding into this. Hassan also analyzes the MAGA base and how they are manipulated by those in between them and Trump. He demonstrates the use of cult mind control techniques in the media and at Trump rallies. These include love bombing, black and white/false dichotomy thinking, scapegoating, phobia inducement, thought stopping phrases, and other rhetorical tricks. Hassan demonstrates how Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is used to disarm and soften up the audience. One example is how Trump will give a speech that inexplicably degenerates into nonsense. He starts talking about Hannibal Lecter or choosing whether he wants to be electrocuted or eaten by a shark. Left wing podcasters have made a big joke out of this and claim it is a symptom of mental illness. Hassan’s take is something darker. He claims it is an NLP technique meant to confuse people because when people are confused or scared they are more vulnerable and open to suggestion. It might be worth studying patterns of what Trump says after he spews gibberish to test Hassan’s theory.

Something else to watch for is the diminishing of individual identity in the MAGA cult. Cheering and chanting crowds at rallies can act to suppress individuality thereby merging each individual into a collective identity that is, if softened up and vulnerable enough, easily directed in thought and behavior by the person leading the crowd. Hassan identifies this as a form of trance. Red MAGA baseball caps are also used to erase a person’s individuality, submerging them into a visually recognizable group which they identify with through emotional attachment. Cults use uniforms in this way and that is why Hare Krishnas shave their heads and wear orange robes. That is why female Wahhabi Muslims wear full black hijab. That is why the Manson Family shaved their heads, drew X’s on their foreheads, and sat in a circle outside the courthouse while their leader was on trial. Notice that MAGA members wore bandages on their ears after the first attempt on Trump’s life during the 2024 campaign. When the group identity supercedes the individual identity, people are easy prey for mental manipulation.

So what about individuals who choose to go to Trump rallies and wear MAGA hats? Hassan would say that cult members choose to join cults, at least on a superficial level. Cults don’t directly control people’s minds; instead, the nudge them in the direction they want them to go in. Stage magic sleight of hand works the same way by nudging your attention towards what the magician wants us to see and away from what he doesn’t want us to see. Advertising is designed to control people by nudging them too by preying on their desires and insecurities. Cult leaders use the same mind control techniques that advertisers and propagandists do which should tell you something pretty scary about American society.

Hassan argues that cult members are actually mentally ill and can be diagnosed with a disassociative identity disorder. It is the same thing that causes people to stay in traumatic, abusive relationships. In colloquial terms it is called “battered wife syndrome”. Cult members, like victims of mental or physical abuse, disassociate by creating a false identity, thereby hiding their true self. This would explain why some cults like est and Rajneeshpuram physically, verbally, and sexually abuse new recruits as part of the indoctrination process. But a cult doesn’t need to go to such extremes to make this disassociation happen; it can be done through things like hazing rituals, scapegoating, ad hominem attacks, conspiracy theories, hypnosis, and repetitive fear mongering. Fear of shunning works this way too. This is also why information control is such a big part of indoctrination. A cult leader doesn’t want you listening to opposing points of view, using a closed feedback loop to regulate what you think, believe, and feel. This is what Trump is doing when he tells you not to listen to the fake news of the mainstream media. This is what internet algorithms are programmed to do in order to create information silos. Trump once said at a rally, “Don’t believe what you see or hear. Believe what I say.” He flat out admitted in public that his intention is to control people’ssceptions of reality.

Hassan also says a lot about cults at the macro level of society. There is a lot of disagreement about cults and whether or not they actually exist. For the sake of understanding Hassan’s argument we have to accept his definition of a cult as a group following an authoritarian leader who uses undue influence to manipulate their follows and indoctrinate them into believing the leader holds the ultimate truth. Many cults are religious but also many aren’t. They can be political like the Symbionese Liberation Army or Lyndon LaRouche. They can be business-oriented like Mass Level Market Schemes, pyramid schemes, Amway, or Koch Industries. They can be therapeutic like est, Synanon, or Scientology. They can also be political at the national level like Saudi Arabia, North Korea, the Soviet Union, or Hitler’s Germany. Hassan uses his metric to identify MAGA and the Trump movement as a personality cult with elements of religious, business, and political cults mixed in. The consolidation of those institutional elements is also a standard, traditional definition of political fascism.

Aside from the MAGA rank and file, the Trump movement acts as an umbrella group that unites several cults and cult-like groups under one banner. Hassan identifies several of these groups as having direct ties to Trump. They include well-known cults like the Moonies, Scientology, and Falun Gong. Fundamentalist Christian cults like the Pentecostals, New Apostolic Reformationists/Dominionists, and Opus Dei who have two Trump appointed members on the Supreme Court and one cabinet member named Bill Bar who is Trump’s ex-Attorney General. The Heritage Foundation, who designed Project 2025, literally wants to turn America into a white Christian nationalist dictatorship, a Christian version of Saudi Arabia or Iran. White supremacist and neo-Nazi groups are also all in with the Trump cult as are some sects of Ultraorthodox Jews. Ayn Rand libertarian groups are mentioned as well as paramilitary and militia brownshirt groups like the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, and the Boogaloo Bois. Brief mentioln is made of Qanon. Through not mentioned in this book, National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, who was also a CIA operative in charge of PSYOPS, is an associate of the Montana new age doomsday cult the Church Universal Triumphant.

Hassan’s method is to identify techniques of cult mind control, show how they are used by other cults, and then show how they are used by Trump and his cohorts. This serves two functions: one is to make it easy to show MAGA members how they are falling into the same patterns as cult members always have and the other is to raise awareness among non-cult members about manipulation techniques on the principle that such awareness makes it more difficult for a person to have their mind controlled. Afer all, most cult members don’t know they are in a cult. They think they are following the truth when in fact they are being tricked into following a lie. And not just any lie, but one that can waste their lives and lead to devastation and destruction.

So does Steven Hassan succeed in proving MAGA is a cult? Yes he provides enough plausible evidence to support that claim but it is qualified with Hassan’s own admissions that MAGA is not quite as authoritarian as the Moonies or Scientology and also that not everybody who voted for Trump or supports him in any way is a member of a cult. The further away from Trump you are, physically or psychologically, the less you are under his spell.

But not all is well with this book. None of it is based on primary research. A lot of the evidence supporting the analysis of Trump’s personality is anecdotal and taken from the memoirs of Omorosa Manigault Newman and Tony Schwartz, the ghostwriter of The Art Of the Deal. He never reports any information from primary sources, asdide from his experience in the Moonies, like MAGA members or ex-members. He would have benefited from providing a case study or two to demonstrate how the mind control process works. Hassan does identify clear patterns of similarity between Trump and MAGA in comparison to other dictatorships and cults, but he doesn’t depend on large data sets to prove his point. Hassan goes wide but not so deep.

Also a lot of these mind control techniques are common logical fallacies familiar to anyone who knows about logic or rhetoric. He could have emphasized that while most people mistakenly use logical fallacies due to a lack of self awareness, cult leaders, advertisers, propagandists, politicians, and whatever manipulative jerk you dated during high school deliberately craft them and exaggerate them because they work so effectively at guiding people’s emotions and perceptions. Of course his intention is to reach a general audience, not a committee of scholars and researchers, so he can be forgiven for writing an overly simplified book. And since literacy and IQ levels have dropped sharply since the cell phone came on the market (I like to call it a DLD or Digital Lobotomy Device), you can’t expect this to be an intellectually rigorous study considering the message is being pitched to ordinary mooks on the street, most of which never bother reading a book anyways. This book is also a bit dated since it was written during the first half of Trump’s first term in office. Hassan’s message obviously didn’t get through seeing as Toddler Trump won again in 2024. The American democratic republic has ended. The idiocracy is upon us.

In closing, I’ll say that cult leaders and dictators are a lot like Mickey Mouse in the Walt Disney movie Fantasia. Mickey Mouse dons a wizard’s costume and casts a spell that makes a broom replicate itself an infinite number of times over. Then he commands the cloned brooms to do his menial tasks for him. This is what cult leaders think of their followers. They erase their individuality and make them do their shitwork while taking their money and living it up in places like Mar a Lago and Epstein Island. Cult leaders are only after three things: sex, money, and power. That’s what Trump wants and he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about you or anybody else but himself. But remember that in Fantasia Mickey Mouse’s brooms go out of control and after they are destroyed he is nothing but an ordinary mouse. Not a wizard. Just a mouse. Trump is just a dumb old man with a stupid looking haircut. He’s getting weaker by the day. Cults don’t last forever. Dementia Don will die soon. MAGA won’t be around much longer. I am seriously worried about what state the world will be in when this is all over though. It’s hard to imagine we’re on the road to anything good. 

 

Book Review: The Black Jacobins by C.L.R. James

The Black Jacobins:

Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

by C.L.R. James

      Haiti has always been a troubled place. But like all troubled places, it has had a few bright spots too. One of those was the Haitian Revolution led by Toussaint L’Ouverture. The Trinidadian Marxist historian C.L.R. James gives a thorough account of this man and his political movement in The Black Jacobins, considered by many to be the authoritative history on this subject.

Back in the 18^th century, the Caribbean island of Hispaniola was known as Santo Domingo, most of which was a Spanish possession during the colonial era. The small section of the island west of the Dajabon River, at the time, was a possession France and known as Sainte Domingue or San Domingo as it is called in this book. This colony had very little in the way of government or military. It had a class of rich colonial overlords, a larger middle class of free whites and Mulattoes, and a lower class of free Creole Africans, mostly ex-slaves who had bought their freedom. San Domingo was the jewel in the French crown being the wealthiest and most productive of all their Caribbean territories.

Like the other Caribbean colonies, plantation owners in San Domingo used slave labor to farm sugarcane, tobacco, and coffee. In the middle of the century, according to James, a voudouist houngan named Boukman led the first major slave rebellion in the territory. Although quickly put down, it sparked a series of smaller rebellions that eventually culminated in the later Wars of Independence.

When the French Revolution happened at the end of the 18^th century, word of Europe’s most vital and modernizing political upheavals spread to the colonies and inspired rebellions against the wealthy colonial overlords. Haiti had the most to lose from the point of view of the French monarchy, but nothing could be done to stop the unleashed tide of anger once it began to spread.

Out of the rebellions, which were scattered and uncoordinated, mostly located in the south and west of San Domingo, an illiterate ex-slave emerged as a revolutionary military leader. He was Toussaint L’Ouverture and despite being uneducated, he had a natural gift for military strategy and political organization. Eventually he united all the anti-slavery troops under one banner, established a government with him at the head, and set out to declare national independence.

Lines of demarcation were not so clear though. Most Mulattoes and some free Blacks supported the white colonial authorities because they were concerned about preserving their privilege and status. Allegiances were fluid though and could change quickly depending on circumstances. But once L’Ouverture got Black military leaders like Dessalines and Petion on his side, along with the northern Mulatto leader Christophe, the waves of revolutionary violence became unstoppable.

Back in France, an anarchist faction of the Jacobins formed called Friends of the Negroes; their ambition was to make all races equal in the eyes of the law without exception. In the French National Assembly, they introduced a bill to end slavery in France and all the colonies. It passed easily with almost no opposition and widespread support from both the left and right wings of the newly established parliament.

Toussaint L’Ouverture rose to become head of the San Domingo colony and he laid the groundwork for making Haiti a sovereign nation. Napoleon Bonaparte, however, had L’Ouverture seized, brought to France, and imprisoned. Napoleon then reinstated slavery in San Domingo and all other French territories. But the backlash was severe and Dessalines led a new revolutionary War of Independence, one on which the French colonialists didn’t stand a chance. Dessalines declared himself the King of Haiti, the first sovereign state to be founded by ex-slaves in the history of the world. Dessalines did not last long as monarch though since Jacques Petion had him assassinated, making himself the first president of Haiti, a newly formed republic.

Large portions of this book are accounts of battles. For readers interested in military history, there is plenty to appreciate here. Another large portion of the book is about politics themselves. The chapters on the French Revolution and the National Assembly in France get a little murky at times. As I like to say, it is about obscure men having obscure debates about obscure ideas. Keeping track of who is allied with who as alliances constantly shift is a little frustrating too. The chapters about politics in Haiti are easier to follow and overall are more relevant. A few sections are made up of word for word letters that L’Ouverture dictated, later to be sent on to friends. There are also some letters and diary entries from his enemies. Mostly all the writing is straightforward and descriptive enough to leave little room for interpretation. More controvertially, the author is a Marxist-Leninist and on occasion he applies this theory to his version of events. But mostly these passages are few and far between and don’t contribute much to an understanding of either Marxism or the Haitian Revolution. If the Marxist bias bothers you, don’t worry since it doesn’t interfere with his telling of the history.

The Black Jacobins is as good a place as any to start learning about Haiti, the West Indies, or colonialism in that region. It is clearly written and straight to the point. The biggest criticism is that it doesn’t say enough about the life of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s life before he became a revolutionary leader, but that probably isn’t the author’s fault because there isn’t much information in the historical record about his formative years to begin with.

 

Book Review: The Devil's Butcher Shop: The New Mexico Prison Uprising by Roger Morris

The Devil's Butcher Shop:

The New Mexico Prison Uprising

by Roger Morris

      Prisons have to be the worst places on Earth. Living conditions can get so bad that the inmates explode and outright mayhem is the result. That’s what happened in February of 1980 in the Penitentiary of New Mexico. Roger Morris’s The Devil’s Butcher Shop: The New Mexico Prison Uprising provides all the details of what happened when the riot exploded.

Morris starts his account with a history of New Mexico with the focus in the small city of Santa Fe. New Mexico is somewhat anomalous in American history, being a predominantly Latino and Native American population that clashed with white invaders. Over the years, the three cultures have learned to co-exist, but, according to Morris, an uneasy tension lies below the surface. Over the years, a culture of graft and institutional corruption has also flourished. This has manifested in the management of the Penitentiary of New Mexico (PNM).

Located off the stretch of highway linking Santa Fe to Albuquerque, the prison occupies a dusty area surrounded by desert scrub and hills visible in the distance. As charming as the New Mexico landscape can be, the weather can be harsh with little rain, intense heat and sunshine for three quarters of the year during the day time and night temperatures that sometimes plummet into the 50’s. Winters are light compared to what Northerners are used to, but for people who are accustomed to the heat, the cold gets uncomfortable. The PNM is especially susceptible to the weather because in 1980 it had neither air conditioning nor heat. For inmates the climate was unbearable most of the time.

Incompatibility between the prison’s architecture and the weather was not the biggest problem. Overcrowding of the bunker style cells guaranteed outbreaks of violence. Food had little nutritional value and was barely fit for human consumption. Living spaces were unsanitary and rarely, if ever, cleaned. Recreational, educational, and rehabilitation programs were insufficient, giving prisoners nothing to do all day but scheme up ways to cause trouble. Worst of all was the corrupt prison staff that abused, exploited, and blackmailed prisoners for their own gain. The penitentiary was a truckload of TNT speeding downhill with no brakes into a forest fire.

When violence broke out late on a February night, the prison guards were caught off guard despite having been warned ahead of time by other inmates. Some guards escaped. Others were taken hostage. and tortured, or killed. When the rioters seized the main guard room, the situation became hopeless. Inmates ransacked every corner of the prison complex. But the real massacre started when they broke into the isolated ward where the most vulnerable prisoners were kept for their own protection; the roster included the elderly, the mentally ill, snitches, and child molesters. It became a frenzy of mutilation, bloodshed, rape, and murder. Reading about the riot is comparable to the most anarchic passages in William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch. The biggest strength of this book is Roger Morris’s finely detailed descriptions of everything that happened during the uprising based on interviews he did with inmates.

Many of the prisoners didn’t want to riot. It wasn’t long before they started surrendering. Some needed medical attention. Some were having trouble finding food. Some, like the small African American inmate population, needed protection from the majority of Latino and white inmates who were targeting them for racially motivated violence. One prisoner acted as negotiator between the police, military, and rioters who were holding some guards as hostages. The uprising lasted for about three days. This is believed to be the most violent and destructive prison riot in the history of America.

As detailed as the descriptions of the riot are, they only take up about one third of the pages. The final stretch of the book is about the years following the uprising and an analysis of the corruption endemic to the penal system of New Mexico. To be brief, the authorities did not uphold their end of the bargaining that brought the uprising to an end. The reforms demanded by the inmates never happened until long after it had receded in the minds of the American public. The riot resulted in nothing but a return to the normal, miserable conditions that caused the frustrations in the first place. Otherwise PNM remained a hotbed of criminal activities, not committed by the prisoners, but the kind committed by the warden and the guards. They extorted protection money from inmates, stole supplies like medicines and food to be sold on the black market, laundered money, trafficked drugs, and cooked the prison books in any way they could. Some reforms eventually happened when scandals leaked out to the press. This is the weakest part of the book; the content is relevant, well-documented, and plausible, but the writing suffers in quality since the author writes as if he is trying to jam pack as much information into his paragraphs as he can while trying to beat a journalistic deadline. It just doesn’t flow with ease. Even though it is just as interesting as the chapters about the violence, it isn’t as engaging. It actually reads as though it were written by a different author altogether.

Crime and criminal justice are perpetual problems that likely have no solution. One thing is certain though, you can’t simply warehouse violent criminals like cattle in pens, leave them there, and try to forget that they have human needs. Doing so is a recipe for disaster. Unfortunately in the long run, more prison uprisings will happen just so long as the authorities refuse to acknowledge their role in causing them. Life without comfort for the most poorly adjusted members of society is nothing but volatile and if the people running prisons don’t accept responsibility for their role maintaining a healthy environment, don’t be surprised when the stinking outhouse blows up in their faces. The inmates may be criminals deserving of punishment, but failing to take human nature into account can lead to nothing good. The Devil’s Butcher Shop shows just how bad it can get. It’s an adequate book for those interested in prison life and is of some interest to those of us who love New Mexico. It may be the Land of Enchantment as the state motto goes, but the brighter the sunshine is, the darker the shadows that get cast.

 

Book Review: Michael Manley: The Making Of a Leader by Darrell E. Levi

Michael Manley:

The Making Of a Leader

by Darrell E. Levi

      Jamaica is a nation that got off to a rough start. As a post-colonial Caribbean country granted sovereignty from Great Britain in 1962, they have been plagued by political and economic turbulence ever since. In the 1970s, Jamaicans elected a Prime Minister who was seen as a savior by some and a menace by his opponents. Darrell E. Levi’s Michael Manley: The Making Of a Leader tells his story.

Michael Manley was born into a middle class family of importance to Jamaica’s development. His father founded and ran the left wing People’s National Party (PNP) in opposition to the right wing Jamaican Labor Party (JLP). His mother was a prominent artist and political activist. Manley’s cousin, the conservative and authoritarian Alexander Bustamante, was elected Jamaica’s first post-colonial prime minister in 1962.

During World War II, Michael Manley enlisted in the Canadian air force and then went to university in London. There he worked as a journalist before returning to Jamaica to work as a labor union leader in association with the PNP. He wasn’t just an ordinary union leader though; he rose to prominence because he went on the job and worked side by side with the laborers who were given the most back breaking work in Kingston. He didn’t just show up for photo ops with teams of ditch diggers; he picked up a shovel and helped them dig for as long as their work shifts lasted. He continued in his willingness to get his hands dirty with the most impoverished of workers long after he became a politician. His sincerity took him a long way in Jamaican politics.

Levi doesn’t just tell the story of Michael Manley’s life. He provides a fair amount of context to help people outside the country understand its political climate. He explains the 1960s under Bustamante as a time of uprisings, police brutality, and the West Kingston Wars. Bustamante stayed aloof to Jamaica’s problems as the country struggled to get on its feet. Levi also demonstrates how Jamaican politics differ from those in the developed nations to some degree. It is a system of bicameral parliamentary governance, but with high levels of graft the prime minister makes most decisions unilaterally. Politics are more tribal and territorial, something which has led to gang warfare over the years. Class and ethnicity are closely related; dark skinned, lower class Jamaicans mostly align with the PNP and the light skinned middle and upper classes align with the JLP. In political discourse, passionate speaking is valued more than nuanced debate. Political favors granted to neighborhoods or territories that vote in blocks are common. When one party gets into office, they repay the favor to voters who supported them with things like free food distribution or the upgrading of houses, something denied to neighborhoods that didn’t support the party in power. This sometimes leads to gangs forcing people in their territories to vote at gunpoint for their party of affiliation. Politics are mostly localized with the national government almost exclusively managing affairs in Kingston while paying little attention to the rest of the country. The Rastafarian movement has been most closely affiliated with the PNP and are big supporters of Michael Manley.

Despite Jamaica’s grim political practices, Michael Manley got elected Prime Minister in 1972 on a platform of social justice. Racial equality, worker’s rights, education, and the raising of living standards for the poor were the issues that won him a significant majority. He ruled by committee, setting up community organizations subordinate to the PNP to address all aspects of governing. Manley became massively popular throughout the 1970s despite a long list of political setbacks. His political philosophy was that of democratic socialism. Even though the emphasis was on “democratic”, his practice of soft socialism led him into conflict with the United States who were backing his conservative rival Edward Seaga through affiliations with the CIA. His personal style made him look messianic in the eyes of the lower classes and he earned the nickname Joshua, possibly an influence from the Hebrew-inspired Rastafarians.

Aside from placing social justice at the forefront of Jamaican politics, Manley also played the role of statesman. Levi writes about how Manley brought Jamaica into the post-colonial Non-Aligned Movement of nations that began in Indonesia after World War II. He spoke at the United Nations as an advocate for international cooperation and put Jamaica on the map as a viable participant in world affairs. Some of his alliances proved to be contentious though. Manley kept close ties with Cuba and had a lifelonh friendship with Fidel Castro who never pressured him to turn communist. Manley also maintained diplomatic and trade ties to the Soviet Union. As a result, the USA kept him at an arm’s length despite his desire to make Jamaica a neutral force in the Cold War.

While Jamaica remained a small, impoverished island nation, America could not so easily dismiss Manley. The aluminum industry depended on mining the raw material bauxite there, something they were doing at a very low cost because of Bustamante’s policies in the 1960s. Jamaica owed America money anyhow. Manley borrowed from the World Bank to kick start the Jamaican economy, but when they failed to meet the growth demands set by the IMF, they came close to defaulting on their loan. As Jamaica sank deeper into economic crisis, Manley raised taxes on bauxite exports so the American mining companies withdrew from the island. Even worse, the US placed tariffs on the products Jamaica imported from America, and this led to further economic hardship. Manley picked up some extra money for the nation by building tourist resorts and putting on music festivals, but this was never enough to stabilize the economy, let alone promote its growth.

The CIA were by then backing Manley’s rival Edward Seaga and a fierce propaganda battle ensued that harmed Manley’s stature in the eyes of the middle and upper classes. The CIA imported guns to Jamaica as a plan to destabilize the country with escalating violent crime rates and gang warfare to turn the population against Michael Manley. Assassination attempts against Manley happened three times, all of which he survived.

Manley remained popular though until he lost the election to Seaga in 1982. Seaga remained Prime Minister until the late 1980s. He failed to deliver on his promises to control the crime rate and bring economic prosperity to Jamaica, although he did succeed in building up Jamaica’s infrastructure. Michael Manley returned to power in the election of 1988, but by then the two rival Prime Ministers agreed to stop fighting and worked together to further Jamaica’s development. Manley resigned from the office of prime minster soon after getting re-elected because of health problems. That is something not covered in Levi’s book because this biography ends with Manley’s return to office as prime minster.

Levi’s political biography of Michael Manley is a slow read. That isn’t because it lacks excitement. It actually is an exciting book considering it is about the politics of a nation that is not often discussed in the wider world. It is only slow moving because it is so densely packed with information that it takes a good deal of time to absorb it all. It really is a book worth reading if you want to learn anything about West Indian politics or the economic struggles of the Third World. Otherwise, Darrell Levi is heavily biased in favor of Michael Manley and some people might find fault in that as he doesn’t go deeply into the problems Manley’s shortcomings as a politician. He doesn’t ignore those problems, but he just doesn’t say enough to make this a balanced biography. It would be interesting to learn more about Edward Seaga too since many Jamaicans consider him to be equally important, and controversial, as Michael Manley in the political history of Jamaica.

Michael Manley is presented here as a sincere prime minister with a heart of gold and as an intellectual with a taste for the finer things in life. His biggest crimes were naivete and lacking the pragmatic skills necessary for advancing Jamaica towards being a Caribbean nation of peace and prosperity. He wasn’t entirely to blame for that because Jamaica did not have a history of independent rule to fall back on or to learn from. He did the best he could with what he knew. He was more of a visionary than a politician, but he got others to believe in his vision and sometimes those visions are necessary to instigate action. Jamaica has been through more hard times since Michael Manley died, but his dream isn’t dead.

Recent years have seen an incremental drop in crime and a strengthening middle class due in part to Jamaican immigrants in the US and UK remitting money back home and buying property. Sites associated with Bob Marley are becoming places of pilgrimage and tourist dollars are trickling in. Jamaica has a long way to go still, but with enough economic momentum and the desire to pursue dreams, they just might make it some day. Go visit this interesting country and see for yourself.

 

Book Review: In the Belly Of the Beast by Jack Henry Abbott

In the Belly Of the Beast:

Letters from Prison

by Jack Henry Abbott

      The story of Jack Henry Abbott is tragic. First incarcerated at the age of twelve, he spent most of his life in government institutions. After reaching the age of 18, he was briefly released as an adult and committed a crime soon after that sent him straight back to prison. He began keeping journals and later struck up a correspondence with Norman Mailer who was impressed with Abbott’s writing skills. Mailer went on a campaign to have him released on parole. It became a cause celebre and Abbott got out. Mailer collected some of his writings and published them as a book, In the Belly Of the Beast: Letters from Prison. But Jack Henry Abbott got into a fight with a man in the alley behind a restaurant. He stabbed the man and got sent straight back to the penitentiary. Mailer felt humiliated by this incident and kept his distance from Abbott until the end of his life.

In the Belly Of the Beast is a collection of excerpts from the letters Abbott sent to Mailer over several years before being released on parole despite misgivings from forensic psychiatrists. The excerpts vary widely in quality, dealing with issues like prison society, the purpose of prisons, the effectiveness of prisons, and the way prison culture mirrors the culture of outside society. Abbott considered himself a Marxist and often makes attempts at writing from that theoretical perspective.

The good news is some of Abbott’s descriptive writing about prison life is excellent. He describes the cells, the cafeteria, the relations between prisoners, the behavior of guards, and other relevant things. He doesn’t just describe the appearance of the prison interior though; he describes the subjective miseries, frustrations, distress, and overwhelming sensations of hopeless he experiences in this environment. The highest points of his writing explain how it feels to spend long stretches of time in solitary confinement. This isn’t easy reading and it isn’t light. It’s downright depressing and you can see how it can drive prisoners insane. Abbott is at his absolute best when describing his emotions and states of mind.

Something else Abbott is good at is examining more abstract ideas of justice and the treatment of prisoners. Many people debate whether prisons are for rehabilitation or punishment. From reading this, you get the sense that that debate is addressing the wrong question. Abbott’s point is that, while prisons function more as punishment than rehabilitation, neither the punishment nor the rehabilitation prepare inmates for life outside the prison. The rehabilitation, educational and vocational programs are half-assed and don’t go far enough to do anything more than make it look like something is being done. It’s little more than window dressing. The punishment is harsh, unpredictable, and oriented towards maximizing control over inmates. It’s dished out in equal doses of brutality to all whether the prisoner was arrested for a non-violent drug offense, shoplifting, or mass murder. The result is that inmates adapt to this environment in such a way that when they are released into society without any help in the transition, most of them break down psychologically and either commit more crimes or kill themselves. His accusation is that prisons operate as crime factories, training inmates to be violent, paranoid, unstable and incapable of living with the freedom to make choices for themselves. Therefore, when crime rates escalate, the government uses this as an excuse to militarize the police force and strip people of their civil liberties. It also creates a social climate outside prisons where people can never feel safe. Life in the straight world is just a softer version of penitentiary life. This again plays into the hands of the government who uses the rhetoric and practice of more law and order to strengthen oppressive authoritarian structures and limit citizens’ options for the pursuit of freedom. This may be a conspiracy theory, but at least it is one that prods you to think about the criminal justice system, its effect on the wider society, and why America has such high rates of crime and incarceration compared to other developed nations. We are obviously doing something wrong and, being Americans, we are too pigheaded to solve the problem. Nor can we even effectively address it.

Now for the bad news. Abbott considered himself a Marxist and a communist. That doesn’t necessarily mean that his ideas are illegitimate. Even if you don’t agree with those theoretical frameworks, that doesn’t mean that people who use them can’t have legitimate ideas about the nature of social structures. The problem is that Abbott’s understanding of Marxism and communism are so flawed that his philosophizing often degenerates into nonsense. You shouldn’t even bother trying to relate his ideas to communist or Marxist critiques.

At his best he tries to connect prison inmates with the proletariat and the prison guards with the bourgeoisie, but that is too much of a stretch to be plausible. All he really says is that prisoners need solidarity and guards are oppressors who will be overthrown in some future revolution. Without understanding his own framework, he simply uses it to justify a black and white, us vs. them mindset. It’s more about hating the authorities and fantasizing about a violent uprising rather than solving the world’s problems. It’s a juvenile’s daydream of vengeance mislabeled as political philosophy. And that’s when the writing is at its clearest.

Most of his thoughts on these matters are little more than babbling and should have been edited out. It comes across as even more psychopathic because never once in all these essays does he mention his own role in his situation. He never takes responsibility for his crimes, writes about himself as being a victim of social injustice, and blames everybody else for his life behind bars. There is an ounce of truth to this. As mentioned before, he was raised as a ward of the state and spent most of his life being socialized in institutions for warehousing criminals, but he never looks at prisons from any other point of view. A true Marxist critique would take into account why prisons exist in the first place and then deconstruct the institution from inside the framework of the institution. Abbott is more concerned with burning everything to the ground without a plan for what to do afterwards. It’s an immature approach to politics, an empty howl of rage.

Jack Henry Abbott is an American tragedy. It’s hard to say, or even believe, that he could have become a well-adjusted member of society. But with effective mentoring, he could have pursued a career as a writer, maybe even becoming a spokesman and advocate for prisoner’s rights and prison reform. His important insight is that prisons rob inmates of the possibility of reform before parole, turning them into dysfunctionalcrime-committing machines. This results in high rates of recidivism and destabilizes society overall. But Abbott didn’t live up to his potential as a human being and In the Belly Of the Beast doesn’t live up to its potential as a book. Still, it’s worth reading as a work of outsider literature.

If you want to pursue Jack Henry Abbott’s insight a little further, the Australian film Ghosts...Of the Civil Dead, co-written by Nick Cave, is based on In the Belly Of the Beast and brings some of Abbott’s best passages to cinematic life in a highly disturbing way. It’s offensive and violent, and it will give you nightmares, but it’s also unforgettable and worth hunting down if obscure hidden gem movies are your kind of thing.

 

Book Review & Analysis: A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

A Brief History of Seven Killings

by Marlon James

      Reggae music exploded in popularity during the 1970s. At the forefront of this musical movement was Bob Marley. Not necessarily the best reggae musician but certainly a great one and the most famous, he was perfect as a leader when it came to bringing reggae to the world. A lot of his softer pop songs had commercial appeal without being shallow or fake like so much top 40 music of the era. But he also had an angry side that was steeped in politics and the mysticism of the Rastafarian religion that appealed to young people moving on from the hippy movement without abandoning their counter cultural stance. Rastafarians were proponents of marijuana smoking and had a distinctly cool image with their dreadlocks and colorful clothes. As Bob Marley’s fame grew internationally, so did interest in Jamaica as an emerging nation, a country with a vibrant music scene and a tourist oriented economy. Reggae also had a strong influence on the punk, ska, and new wave music scenes that began in the mid to late 70s. A lot of reggae lyrics called for peace and love along with laments about violence and political injustice. Probably most reggae listeners weren’t aware of the events and political climate of Jamaica in the 1970s that served as inspiration for those lyrics. Gangs tied to Jamaica’s two political parties were fighting in the streets and Kingston could possibly be thought of as having a low level civil war at the time. Marlon James portrays the violence between Kingston gangs and their relation to Bob Marley in his novel A Brief History of Seven Killings.

Bob Marley is at the center of this novel...kind of. Without being mentioned by name, he is referred to exclusively as The Singer from beginning to end. The novel’s plot lines all relate to an assassination attempt on his life to prevent a free concert, his attempt at ratifying a peace treaty between Jamaica’s gangs, and his death. The Singer’s life is more of a framework for the novel and functions more as the narrative device we call a McGuffin.

This book is all about characters and situations, of which there are many. It is not a plot driven novel. The large number of people introduced to the story shouldn’t bother you. Most of them play peripheral roles and only stay around for a short time after their introduction. But there is a moderate group of central characters that stay around for large parts of the story.

One of the central characters is Papa Lo, the don of the Copenhagen City gang. Copenhagen City is a neighborhood in Kingston with ties to the right wing Jamaican Labor Party or JLP headed by Edward Seaga. They are in constant war over territory with other gangs tied to the People’s Nationalist Party or PLP headed by the democratic socialist and prime minister Michael Manley. While these gangs are politically affiliated, the parties play only a minimal role in the story. Anyways, Papa Lo is reaching middle age and starting to be concerned about surviving. He notices that there are hardly any elderly Jamaicans and he is growing weary of the gang violence even though he tells other people he isn’t. He begins taking interest in the message of the Rastafarians and is in dialogue with The Singer who has hired him to manage security for an upcoming concert. The Singer is affiliated with the left wing PNP in opposition to the Copenhagen City gang, but his intention is to bring peace to the city.

Second in command of the Copenhagen City gang is Josey Wales, named after the outlaw from the Clint Eastwood western movie. Josey Wales recognizes that Papa Lo is aging out of his position. He starts plotting behind Papa Lo’s back to lead a gang of dugged up teenage assassins on a mission to assassinate The Singer. The origins and purpose of this plot are murky, but it is clear that Josey Wales has ties to the CIA who provide him with weapons, drugs, and guidance. Josey Wales’ liaison with the CIA is the freelance asset Doctor Love, a Miami Cuban exile and Bay of Pigs veteran. Doctor Love is an explosives expert who helped to blow up an airplane over Barbados in an anti-communist terrorist attack. Doctor Love also has ties to Colombian drug cartels who he later introduces to Josey Wales. This part of their relationship is of later importance in the chapters that come after The Singer’s death.

The two other characters that carry the most weight are Alex Pierce and Nina Burgess who subsequently changes her name twice before the book concludes. Alex is an American journalist for Rolling Stone magazine, sent to Jamaica to cover The Singer. He is a rogue journalist though and breaks with Rolling Stone to pursue a more lurid story about CIA connections to gun running and gang activity in the Kingston ghettos. As he pursues his story, he ends up being one of only a handful of people who know that Josey Wales is the ringleader of the hit squad that attempts to assassinate The Singer. This has consequences for him later as Josey Wales sends hitmen out to kill anyone who has knowledge of the failed assassination attempt. The danger follows Alex to New York City where he continues working as a journalist covering the Jamaican gangs, called “posses”, that are responsible for the crack epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s.

Nina Burgess is a young, middle class Jamaican woman who wants nothing less than a chance to emigrate to America. After being seduced by The Singer at a party, she deludes herself into thinking he loves her and hangs around outside his house, hoping she can convince him to get her a plane ticket and a visa out of Jamaica. She thinks her own country is too backwards and dangerous for her. Nina is all about class mobility.

We later find her working as a prostitute in Montego Bay under the name Kim Clarke where she hooks up with an American businessman named Charles who works for a bauxite mining company. She moves in with him. The two of them use each other. Charles uses Kim for sex and as an unpaid domestic servant. Kim doesn’t love him but pins all her hopes on his promises to marry her and take her to live in America. When the Jamaican government raises taxes on bauxite exports, the American company closes down its Jamaican operations, Charles leaves and doesn’t take Kim with him. Nina/Kim later shows up in New York under the assumed named of Dorcas Palmer.

Then there is Weeper, a character of lesser importance in the beginning, but one that becomes more significant in the later New York City chapters. Weeper is an educated man, an atheist and reader of Bertrand Russell, and he is also gay. He tries to follow the honest path of education upwards out of the Copenhagen City ghetto, but gets arrested and tortured in prison by the police. After getting out, he becomes Josey Wales’ closest associate and later moves to New York to oversee the crack dealing operations there.

Otherwise there is a large cast of peripheral characters. Most of them are gangsters or gang affiliated. Despite the large numbers, there isn’t a wide range of characters though. One of them is, however, the duppy, or ghost in Jamaican English, of a man who died in the West Kingston Wars of the 1960s. Unseen by the other characters, he gives surreal narratives of murder scenes, telling us what happens before the killing and what happens to souls on the other side.

The plot, as explained above, is simple. The subplots are a bit more complex, but not by much. The complexity is in how interwoven they all are. But this novel is less about plot and more about character. More specifically, it is about Jamaica as seen through different subjective points of view. And the subtext of the novel is about thwarted ambitions for class mobility. The Singer, for instance, seemingly at the top of Jamaica as a type of prophet or king, is thwarted in his ambition to bring peace to Jamaica. First assassins try to rub him out and then gangsters use violence to make his peace treaty fall apart. After that he dies and the text carries a heavy suggestion that the CIA had a hand in his demise.

Papa Lo’s desire to retire and live to old age in peace is thwarted when he gets killed in a police ambush, probably orchestrated by Josey Wales who takes over as don in the Copenhagen City gang. Both Josey Wales and Weeper initially tried to move up in life through channels of vocational work training and education, but were beaten down by the police and found no other outlet for their desire to grow other than in criminal gangs. Josey Wales does succeed in expanding his operations by working with Colombian drug cartels to traffic cocaine to America, but meets his match when he crosses a competitor in New York. Weeper also gets killed. In New York, he finds liberation because he is able to live with minimum hassle as a gay man, unlike in the oppressively homophobic society of Jamaica. But he dies in a gang hit there too.

The desire for class mobility is further emphasized in Josey Wales when examining his motivations. As mentioned before, he tries to advance himself by learning a skilled trade, but then gets shot five times during the wars of the 1960s. As he rises to the position of don, we learn small details like how he wants a flush toilet in his house, something given to him as a payoff from the JLP, and how he refuses to talk about the business of killing and drug trafficking before finishing his morning tea. At the end of his life, his son attends a prestigious private school. His aspiration is for a middle class existence like the family that Nina/Kim comes from. And she wants to escape her middle class life by fleeing to America to escape from the crime that plagues Jamaica, making it unsafe for middle class people.

After The Singer dies, the last two sections of the novel mostly take place in America, sometimes in Miami but mostly in New York. Jamaican posses that deal crack are the central part of these back end sections.

Nina/Kim, however, does achieve her dream when she takes on another fake name, this time Dorcas, and emigrates to New York. She finds herself, in a way, by working as a caretaker for a man with amnesia. The significance is that every day, he forgets who she is and she wants nothing more than to forget her past and become someone else. This becomes another thwarted ambition since people recognize her Jamaican accent no matter how hard she tries to lose it. She later becomes an emergency room nurse and realizes something big is happening because Jamaican posse members keep showing up with bullet wounds. In the end this shows how her Jamaican-ness is a permanent part of her no matter how hard she tries to hide or eliminate it.

It is in New York City that the white journalist Alex Pierce shows up again too. While continuing to work as a journalist and author of a biography about The Singer, he meets with an inmate of Rikers Island prison. Tristan Phillips is a member of the Ranking Dons, the coke dealing posse that rivals the Storm Posse which is the American arm of the Copenhagen City gang led by Josey Wales. Tristan is a fallen Rastafarian who is a signatory to the peace treaty The Singer tries to uphold back in Kingston. Alex uses his journalist credentials to get in touch with Tristan, but he has a hidden motive. Alex fears for his life because he is one of only a couple people who knows that Josey Wales is the man who orchestrated the assassination attempt on The Singer. He also lives in fear because he killed the man who they sent to murder him in a bid to eliminate everyone who knows Josey Wales’ secret. Alex looks to Tristan for inside advice on his safety. It is through Tristan that the novel takes on a meta-narrative quality since he insists on Alex writing a book about the Kingston gangs and how they tried to assassinate The Singer. Alex, the white journalist, thereby becomes a literary persona representing Marlon James, the Jamaican author of this novel. The novel’s title is also a reference to an article written by Alex Pierce.

After Tristan assures him he is safe, Alex returns home to find a gang of Jamaican thugs waiting for him. Alex has been writing a serialized work of investigative journalism about a massacre in a Brooklyn crack house. The articles are revealing too much about the posses in involved. After a brutally violent confrontation, Alex learns that he will be allowed to live only if he continues writing articles that are approved of by the Storm Posse. This may be good news, but his wings are clipped so that his ambition to be a truth-telling journalist is thwarted. To a certain extent, all the major characters in this book get only a fraction of what they want. That fraction doesn’t go far for any of them. The theme of thwarted ambitions reminds me a bit of the poem “Dream Deferred” by the Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes.

The most amazing part of this novel is how it is written. Every chapter is told in the first person by a different narrator. That way we get a subjective, kaleidoscopic view of everything that is happening. The story lines and subplots are interwoven into a web of multi-dimensional perspectives so that we see each character from both their own subjective point of view and the subjective point of view of others. It’s an amazing accomplishment that this writing, in all its subtlety, is so easy to follow.

It’s also amazing how effectively this works in character building. Each of the main characters are so distinctly written that it is easy to tell them apart. They really come to life as individuals through their narratives. You might notice in the beginning that each chapter heading is the name of the character speaking. By the end of the book, these chapter headings are absent and yet it is still obvious which character is speaking. This is even more interesting in how Nina/Kim/Dorcas takes on three different names in three different locations, yet it is clear that she is all three people without the author ever explaining this. He never explicitly says, “and then Nina changed her name to Kim.” He just shows us how she is as she is and allows for us to make the connection of our own.

And the stand out narrative for me is when Tristan is talking to Alex in prison. The only speech in these passages is that of Tristan; the speech of Alex isn’t written into the text. It is like sitting next to Tristan in a prison visitor’s booth where he is separated from Alex by a plexiglass window as they communicate over a telephone. These passages are especially good because of the change Tristan goes through during the conversation. At first he is hostile towards Alex, but after learning about Alex’s secrets, Tristan becomes relaxed, interested, and friendly. This is done by showing us only Tristan’s side of the conversation and his change in mood is delieverd so effectively because of the actual language used. Again the author shows us this change without explaining it.

One other great thing about this novel is the crafting of the language. It is mostly written using Jamaican English or Patwa as it is sometimes called. Marlon James, being a Jamaican author, has a natural understanding of the language and he writes it so well that he captures its rhythms and nuances in pronunciation and vocabulary. In fact, the shifting narratives give it the feel of reggae music. When listening to reggae you will notice the instruments don’t all play at once. Pauses and empty spaces in the rhythms create a depth that can’t be achieved in other ways. You might notice the call and response patterns in reggae rhtyhms too; the horns play a line of notes then stop to allow the bass and keyboards to run for a measure then stop to allow the horns space to play again, so on and so forth. The structure of shifting and alternating first person narratives operates with a similar logic. You will also learn some new vocabulary too if you read this. Words like “raascloth”, “battyboy”, “pussyhole”, and “fuckery” are repeatedly used throught the text. If you finish this and “fuckery” hasn’t been permanently etched into your brain, you probably weren’t paying much attention to what you were reading.

Finally, this book is not about the CIA’s involvement in Jamaica, but that element is a root cause of the problems being portrayed in the story. The novel starts fourteen years after Jamaica gained post-colonial independence from Great Britain. Within less than a decade, the CIA began a destabilization program in this small West Indian nation that was struggling to get on its feet and stay there. When the democratic socialist PNP party came to power in a landslide election, the CIA armed JLP affiliated gangs with heavy ammunition and the result was disastrous in two ways: the brutal violence of a rapidly escalating crime rate and a growing narcotics trade. Both of these problems spilled over into America and may have permanently damaged Jamaica as a nation. To paraphrase Josey Wales, America creates monsters and then acts surprised when they act monstrous. All this is in the name of fighting communism although I’m convinced the American government doesn’t actually care about fighting communism. They scapegoat communism for the purpose of imperialism and hegemony. If this is the case, maybe we deserve some of the crime that drug cartels have brought to our shores. Our meddling in other countries’ affairs is only perpetuating the problems we claim to be fighting against.

A Brief History of Seven Killings fills a gap in people’s knowledge of Jamaican history and culture. If you search around for books covering this subject in the decades of the 1970s to the 1990s, almost nothing can be found. Yet people worldwide are familiar with Jamaica through its music, most especially the monumental work of Bob Marley. Although this novel is fiction, most, if not all, the events in it really happened. This can be corroborated by checking a wide variety of legitimate academic sources. Marlon James crafts all that information into a novel and makes it accessible to the general reader. The Jamaican Patwa and the descriptions of extremely brutal violence might make it difficult for some people to read, but it is possibly the most important book about Jamaica that has been written so far.

 

Book Review: Miami by Joan Didion

Miami

by Joan Didion

      The United States of America attracts a lot of different kinds of immigrants for a lot of different reasons. One community of immigrants that remains a mystery to many Americans is the Cuban exile community in Miami. Joan Didion, in the 1980s, wrote Miami, a work of investigative journalism, to find out who exacty these Miami Cubans are and why they are so cut off from the rest of America.

It’s impossible to discuss the Cuban-Americans post-1950s without discussion Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution. Democracy didn’t work so well in Cuba after they gained independence from Spain at the end of the 19^th century. Politics and the economy were dominated by corruption, nepotism, gangsterism, and the influence of the American Mafia and government. Democracy eventually gave way and life under the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista continued to get worse. Then Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista regime and established a communist dictatorship that still exists in 2026. For the impoverished masses of this Caribbean island, the Revolution was a blessing. For the upper and middle classes that supported Batista, it was a disaster. A large chunk of the Cuban population took the daily hour long flights to Miami and settled in the USA. But they didn’t take to America so easily. Many of them settled in Miami and said, “To hell with the rest of America,” while establishing their own Cuban outpost in a city that was otherwise full of Jewish retirees and white ancestors of the Confederacy.

Didion identifies three main groups in the first wave of Cuban refugees. One is the far-right wing supporters of the Batista dictatorship. Second is the business and ownership class whose property was seized during the Revolution. You can certainly see their point. If the government took my property, I’d be pissed off too, not that I have any property worth seizing, but that’s a different problem. The third is supporters of the Revolution who were disappointed with its results. Understanding where these immigrants are coming from goes a long way in understanding the mindset and culture of Cuban Miami and their approach to life in America. Didion also mentions two groups in a second wave of Cuban migrants. One is orphaned Cuban children who were brought to America by Catholic charities. The other is the people of the Mariela Boatlift. The latter came over when Castro trolled America by emptying his prisons and asylums, putting the inmates on boats, and sailing them off to Florida where they were granted immediate citizenship under the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966. You have to give Fidel some credit for having such a wicked sense of humor.

Didion doesn’t revisit the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, probably because it has been written about so extensively in other places. She does, rather, bring up the sense of betrayal the Miami Cubans felt when John F. Kennedy snubbed them in the wake of the failed invasion. He never followed through on his promises to remove Castro from power. This anticipates what comes later in this study when Ronald Reagan wins the American presidency.

White Americans in Miami could never make sense of the Cuban exiles who don’t follow the typical immigrant path by learning English and becoming a part of America. The Miami Cubans refuse to learn English and, although they establish themselves in high ranking political and business positions, they go through extreme lengths to keep separate from the citizens of their new country. In fact, some of them use their high rank to ensure that other Americans stay away.

By interviewing some Miami Cubans, Didion finds that there are cultural differences that traveled to America as baggage with the refugees. One source of cultural conflict is the approach to politics. While American politics have become more tribal in recent times, it is still fair to say that our political tribes are rooted ideologically in values, beliefs, and morals. Cuban exiles don’t work that way. While they are politically tribal, their politics are more about group loyalty than values or ideology. Winning means everything and if hate and violence are necessary to win, then so be it. Miami’s right-wing Cubans are not concerned with things like human rights or Constitutional law; they are only concerned with defeating their enemies by any means necessary. There is something infantile in Didion’s portrayal of Cuban exiles. They hate Castro and they hate anybody who isn’t just as hateful to him as they are. They react with confusion and disdain when other people don’t get as worked up as they are about the Cuban Revolution. It’s as if they can’t comprehend that other people could have interests in things that aren’t directly related to overthrowing Castro. This insulates them from the rest of America, as well as the rest of humanity, and they really don’t even care if that’s true.

Didion is amused at how Miami Cubans say they hate Tod Koppel because he doesn’t shout over guests with opposing opinions or resort to ad hominem attacks or name calling. They think he is weak. They were probably happy when Fox News came on the air and ushered in the professional wrestling style of toxic politics that are embodied in assholes like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity. This quasi-fascistic, anti-intellectual attitude has led to friction with other Americans. For example, Cubans mobs have violently attacked anti-war demonstrators and right wing Cuban exile terrorists have blown up airplanes a number of times. At one point in the 1970s two Cuban-Americans tried to lob a bomb at the United Nations.

Didion does take a nuanced look at these people. While the majority of Miami Cubans are loyal to the Republican party, roughly 35 percent of them are Liberals registered as Democrats. They are a bit more intellectual and open to talking to white people. Didion spends a great deal of time listening to their side of the story as well. The way the Liberal Cubans put it is that most of Miami’s right-wing Cubans would act a bit more sane if the CIA weren’t actively whipping them into a frenzy over anti-communist politics. Some examples of this are given including the use of propaganda in Spanish language news media and clandestine military training camps in southern Florida. Some Cubans have easy access to stocks of guns and explosives being cached by the American intelligence and military agencies. Cuban exiles are learning how to make bombs and the government in Havana isn’t behind it.

This leads to the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. As a journalist, Didion was privy to a number of Republican sponsored conferences. These meetings discussed plans to eliminate communism at any cost and the uptick in these conferences came at the same time the media started reporting on an emergency situation involving a communist uprising in Nicaragua. At the same time Reagan was actively courting support from the Miami Cuban community in a renwed fight against communism with the implication that there was an imminent plan to invade Cuba once again. Didion isn’t direct in what she says, but she implies that Reagan is planning on building up Cuban exile troops to use as proxy American fighters in a war in Central America rather than the Caribbean. By pairing Reagan’s rhetoric with commentary on Kennedy’s betrayal of the Cuban freedom fighters, it appears that Didion is issuing a warning to Miami Cubans. The warning is that America is manipulating their passions and using them to do their dirty work while the government keeps their hands clean. Reading between the lines, she is telling them not to be suckers again. If so, this is a bold statement coming from Joan Didion who was a lifelong Republican.

This is probably Joan Didion’s best work of journalism. Her other, more popular books like Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album are superficial, trivial, and underwhelming. Aside from her novels, which tend to be brilliant, Miami is the one that goes deep and wide into her subject matter, capturing nuances that her other works of journalism don’t. Despite the harsh evaluation of Miami Cubans that can be immediately extracted, she writes with a tone of neutral detachment. While she clearly doesn’t agree with some of the things the extremist Cubans are up to, she doesn’t approach them with derision. She investigates, drawing on multiple sources, and reports to us what she finds. Her conclusions are understated, but her sense of neutral curiosity when entering an alien territory is sound and fair. She has found some alarming things in the Cuban exile community of the 1980s, but she makes an honest attempt at understanding where these people are coming from without being overly judgmental. That is the strong point of this study.

The weaker point is that her writing tends to be loopy. The non-linear narrative that skips and jumps all over the place isn’t so hard to follow, but some of her run-on sentences are. There are times hen the thematic thread becomes obscured and arcane as some sentences drift on for whole pages without punctuation. Sometimes it’s like listening to a drunk in a bar mumbling to herself, weaving in and out of coherence. Not all of the book is like that, but when it happens it’s annoying. I read that Joan Didion studied Ernest Hemingway obsessively when she was young because his writing taught her how sentences work. I find that odd because Hemingway wrote terse, concise sentences that were direct in their meaning. Didion does the exact opposite. Her sentence constructions lean more in the direction of Faulkner or Joyce. Maybe at her best she is more like Norman Mailer who constructed long, complex sentences that usually made a lot of sense if you don’t have a short attention span, especially when combined with other sentences to form highly organized paragraphs.

If you’re interested in the subject matter, Miami is a good book. It would be interesting to hear what Cuban exiles think of her portrayal of them. I’m sure some of them wouldn’t like what she had to say. But I can’t find any reactions to her book online coming from their point of view, so who knows? Miami came out about thirty years ago so an updated study of Miami Cubans would be interesting too. Since then we’ve had another wave of Cuban refugees in the 1990s, an upsurge of interest in salsa and cigars in that same decade, the Elian Gonzalez controversy, an influx of sleazy Cuban politicians, like Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, into our government, and death came to Fidel Castro although his communist government still holds power. Cuban-Americans rallied behind Donald Trump although for some reason they couldn’t see that he has much more in common with Castro than any Democrat ever has. Trump has been deporting Cuban refugees too so I wonder what they think of that. Cuban immigrants have spread to all corners, both urban and rural, of the United States. Most of them now have roots here and will never return to Cuba to live permanently. As for the extremist politics, all I can say is that of all the Cubans-Americans I have encountered, most of them have been good, intelligent, hard working people who are more passionate about dancing than anything else. And that’s what’s most important.