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.

 

Book Review: Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History by Kathleen Lopez

      If you’ve studied the history of Cuba, you might have noticed that almost every book written on the subject mentions the Chinese population of that Latin American island. You might have also noticed that these books rarely contain more than a paragraph or two on the subject of Chinese immigration. Now that Cuba has opened up to the world after the late 20^th century fall of communism and the fading influence of Fidel and Raul Castro, a little more interest has been shown in this matter. It is about time that the story of this under-represented ethnic group gets told especially since they have done more than most people realize in building the Cuban nation. The social historian Kathleen Lopez tells this story in Chinese Cubans: A Transnational History.

The story of the ethnic Chinese population in Cuba begins in the mid-19^th century. Cuba was a colonial holding of the Spanish crown that depended heavily on African slave labor to maintain their agricultural industry, primarily centered around sugarcane and secondarily on tobacco and citrus fruit. But slavery was coming to an end as support for abolitionism grew. The European nations banned it outright, followed by the end of the slave trade in the United States, and later in Brazil. Although Cuba did not ban slavery until close to the end of the 19^th century, the availability of slave labor dwindled. The landowning colonialists needed a source of manual laborers to do the most back breaking work they were too weak and lazy to do for themselves. Therefore they looked to China.

Chinese migrant workers were never brought to the Caribbean as slaves. Rather they got hired as coolies, another word for indentured servants. This meant they worked on contracts, got paid for labor, and were not released from those contracts until they paid off their debts or the contracts expired. Many of them were coerced into signing multiple contracts making it impossible for them to leave Cuba. Indentured servitude may sound better than slavery in theory, but practically speaking, living conditions were no different. When word got back to China about how cruelly the migrants were being treated, the government opened an embassy in Havana to to handle labor and immigration disputes.

During Cuba’s Wars of Independence, Chinese migrant workers fought alongside Creole Spanish, Afro-Cuban, and mulatto populations in hopes of a better future. When Cuba was liberated from Spain in the 1890s by the United States, Cuba nominally became an independent nation and the Chinese soldiers were initially recognized as war heroes. But old habits die hard and the dominant white population, with support from the United States, relegated the Chinese Cubans to second class status, or maybe even third class, status. Many Chinese people had difficulty obtaining citizenship.

But the end of indentured servitude did bring some good results. Some of them thrived as businessmen, even becoming rich in some cases. Living conditions for manual laborers was still tough, but more fair since a lot of migrant workers were then managed by Chinese bosses who spoke their language and understood their culture. Just like in the North American continent, small business owners thrived in running laundries, stores, and restaurants. Many of these were located in Havana’s Chinatown, El Barrio Chino which became a popular destination for tourists and strolling Cubans on their evening corsos.

Although Chinese Cubans lived in the margins of society, they did sometimes mix with different classes and races, more with the mulatto and Afro-Cubans than the white people. Sexually, their population was heavily skewed towards men because indentured servants were almost entirely male. Therefore, Chinese men were more prone to marriage with mulattas and Black women, but marriages with white women were not unheard of. Many Chinese men paid for sex with prostitutes and homosexuality was rampant in their community. After Independence, Chinese women migrated more freely to Cuba. Mutual aid societies and social clubs played a large role in stabilizing the Chinese Cuban community too.

At that point in time, the Chinese community was emerging on its own, forging its own identity as a distinct ethnicity within a larger host society. With national independence and opportunities for upward class mobility, communal self-perception changed too. Monetary remissions were sent back to China, immigration standards were loosened, and travel back and forth between Asia and the West Indies resulted in a transnational identity in which Chinese Cubans felt as though they occupied a place bridging two different cultures without fully belonging to either one.

This transnational identity became strained with the rise of communism. The community in Cuba was divided as the Communist Party under Mao Tsetung took over China. The Cuban government, with backing from the United States, cracked down on communism on the island. Chinese Cubans were forced to take sides when the Cuban Revolution happened in 1959. Many of them chose to support the revolution, yet after Fidel Castro took over, a political wrecking ball swept through Chinatown in the name of equality and some businessmen lost everything they had worked for. Some Chinese Cubans fled to Miami or New York as refugees while others stayed behind as the Caribbean nation sunk deeper into poverty and totalitarianism. Actually though, Lopez does not go deeply into the subject of the Castro years and how it affected the nation’s Chinese population.

Now that Cuba has opened up, some Chinese Cubans have sought out contact with ancestors back in Asia. Some have even returned there to build Cuban Chinese communities in villages where their forefathers originated. On a larger scale, China has grown to be one of the biggest economies in the world and they have opened up political ties with Cuba. The two countries are now trading partners and Chinese-manufactured electric vehicles are gradually replacing the antique cars on the roads of Cuba that once made the country so fascinating to outsiders.

Lopez’s account of Cuban Chinese history is thorough and presented with a lot of fine details. Her social analysis of that group is also precise and minutely described. And the book certainly ends on a positive note regarding the benefits of migration and multiculturalism. It is, however, written in a dry, academic style that may be off-putting to some readers. The subject matter is interesting enough to override any objections you might have to its lack of literary style. But still, it isn’t always the most accessible book to read.

The only really bothersome part of the book is the over-emphasis on the idea of Chinese Cubans expressing their ethnic identity. Expressing ethnic identity has become an overrated and over-stated part of sociological studies in recent years as if an ethnic groups’ sole purpose for existence is to announce to the world that they have an identity that separates them from everybody else. That doesn’t mean ethnic identities don’t exist or aren’t important; it just means that most people within those groups aren’t overly preoccupied with announcing it to the world. The Asian people I know are more concerned with video games and football than they are with their identities. They eat Asian food because it’s what they like, not because they want to show everybody in America how Asian they are. I sometimes find the sociologists’ obsession with identities to be a little bit harmful, sometimes even racist, towards the people they claim to speak for. They condemn othering, but overlook the fact that parading people’s ethnic identities around can result in the kind of othering they claim to be against.In-groups function in opposition to out-groups so by creating more in-groups with more exclusive identities, a greater number of out-groups will inevitably be the result. This exacerbates the problem they are trying to solve by constantly drawing people’s attention to it. Kathleen Lopez isn’t that bad though, or that amateurish, and this book is written in good faith with nothing but respect for the population she is writing about. She doesn’t exaggerate the issue to any extreme. But the handful of times she brings up the subject of Chinese Cuban expressions of identity it feels like I’m walking around with a pebble in my shoe.

Chinese Cubans is a great examination of the historical forces that a transnational identity is rooted in and also an exploration of what it means to be transnational. The author shows us what struggles this migrant community had and what they did to survive, and in many cases, thrive because of the adversity. It makes you appreciate the lives of immigrants and the will they have to contribute something of value to their chosen country. It also shows how they can give back so much to their place of origin after migration. It’s not about exoticizing them or othering them by treating them as a curiosity. It’s about bringing them closer so we can see what they have in common with the rest of humanity.