Miami by Joan Didion, and Going to Miami, by David Rieff

...If I read her right, she believes that foreign policy is simple, but made to seem complicated by bad people, largely American, who hope to benefit by enhancing their political power behind the confusion they create...

...In the face of thewild anger that would have been stimulated in the Cuban exile community by a Washington effort to block the invasion (there was no middle ground for the U.S...

...Miami is not a second Boston—indeed modern Boston is not in that sense a second Boston—and it is probably the only city in the nation in which you can catch a bonefish against a backdrop of business skyscrapers, but it is an American city, and the really important question is: what's that...

...The better-dressed Miami cops heroically seek to frustrate the wicked federal officers and, in the best tradition, they either win or lose gallantly...

...what I want is the author's description of modern Miami and I will be content to decipher his political position all on my own...

...the vegetation, more tropical...

...The answer may well be "yes...

...government employees, agents of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Agency, or an unnamed covert official body...

...the water is saltier...

...Rieff refers more often than Didion to the "Miami Vice" television show...

...He also finds time to discuss the Jewish communities of Miami and Miami Beach and to suggest that there is more to Miami than the politics of a Cuban risorgimento...

...All claim to be equally determined to bring down Castro, but they do not necessarily agree on why they despise his regime and surely not on the rhetorical question of what kind of government they would choose to replace his...

...In the real Miami, the impression of southernness on American authors who write about it is intensified for the simplest of reasons: the climatic difference between it and the northern regions from which they come is real and not a mere figment of the difference of latitude demonstrated on a map...

...she is secure in the belief that Washington is always responsible when things go wrong, because it is prevented from finding a good answer to its international problems by its own insistence on expedience and its lack of grace in the use of limitless strength...

...Some of these criticisms are valid, and yet they will seem just mainly to readers who started out believing what Joan Didion believes...

...More in the pursuit of political affinity than a simple desire to know more about Cubans, Rieff visited Cuba in 1968 and celebrated New Year's Eve there...

...L In it, the author effectively limits her account of Miami to the Cubans in the city, and among Cubans she singles out those active in politics...

...Didion herself has a much bigger fish to fry: the United States government...

...A few sentences further on, Rieff hastens to plead in gratuitous extenuation of his adolescent self (he was 16 in 1968) not exactly that the American regimes that began and deepened the nation's military involvement in Vietnam were morally equivalent to the Castro regime, but that the war was "every bit the obscenity we thought it was," while Cuba was actually no worse than "militarism with a human (even a sexy) face...

...The author's white gloves are run gracefully over any bit of furniture she finds, Castilian or Federalist, and they come away with dirt, dirt everywhere...

...I don't know, nor, I think, does she...

...Like many who have fled homelands at different stages of the evolution of tyrannies that engulfed them, Cuban groups and individual refugees left at different times for different reasons...

...turn et us tu to the Didion book first...

...And makes their presence ever more galling to the blacks...

...One difference between the book and the TV series is the intense concenMIAMI Joan Didion/Simon and Schuster/$17.95 GOING TO MIAMI: EXILES, TOURISTS AND REFUGEES IN THE NEW AMERICA David Rieff/Little, Brown/$16.95 Roger Starr THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 37 tration of which Didion is capable...

...Some suspicious watchers of "Miami Vice" have speculated that its producers came to Miami by way of Washington where they may have passed some time in the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing think tank...

...While she is an incisive interviewer with access to many factional leaders, not even she can plant in the head of the casual reader their damnably foreign-sounding names, to say nothing of the political differences between them...

...Their crimes are political...

...That, she points out, is what they have been watching on a highly colored and resoundingly orchestrated television series called "Miami Vice...

...Not that the authors resemble each other in the nature of their introspection...

...The progress of the middle-class Cubans expelled by Castro would have been a much slower process in their homeland even if, improbably, a new order in Cuba had indeed made more room for a middle class between the sugar and tobacco aristocracy and the peasantry...

...idion's readers are presumably interested in the author herself and in Miami, the city of their dreams, the "rich and wicked pastel boomtown...

...Always it is too easy, after a failure like the Bay of Pigs, to suggest that the other alternative to the course chosen would have been the correct one...

...Consequently, present opponents of Castro pursue divergent strategies aimed at different goals and sometimes regard each other as more dangerous enemies than Castro himself...

...How, indeed, can the Vietnam war be "every bit" as horrible as that nonspecific "we" believed, now that we (an all-inclusive "we") know that North Vietnam was no more than Castro's Cuba the trustworthy hope of "New Men," that its goal was simply the conquest and capture of the South by whatever means, and that the perilous escape of many thousands of boat people and the death of many thousands more bear witness to the horror with which ordinary people, as well as the leaders of that country, sensibly viewed their captors...

...The book is not sufficiently detailed to serve as a clear historical record of the complicated struggles of Cuban exiles in Miami to return to their homeland, probably for the very good reason that the author herself is not sufficiently interested in that limited aspect of the subject to write such a book and correctly assumes that her readers would not be sufficiently patient to read it if she were...

...It pines for a biographer/annotator/evaluator with tape recorder, good eyes, and enough experience to shuck hyperbole of praise and quasi-Calvinist contempt and give us a true accounting...

...Frank Lloyd Wright was also a huckster: look on his works...

...Their rejections of Castro started from positions as diverse as rage at his attack on the Batista regime and fervent support of his insurrection even after he had taken power...

...There was also a mother, in dark glasses, not only to protect the symbolic virgin but to point out the better angle, the more aristocratic location...

...Now come two Miami books designed not to tell us where best to eat stone crabs and how to get from the Doral Country Club (a hotel) to Coral Gables (a venerable subdivision, as Miami counts its age, in the high Spanish style of Addison Mizner...

...Didion uses her carefully crafted and lovingly polished prose as an enameled lorgnette through which she disapprovingly notes the extent to which the generality of people fall short of her standards of manners and virtues...

...And its immaturity argues for the proposition that a travel book should stick to the subject...

...When a plane door opens, and the visitor steps out into a different climate, he senses the difference instantly and assumes that because the city is very different from anything he has known in his homeland it is also more exotic...

...Anglos are Miami residents who settled in Dade County before the post-Castro "invasion" or came later but speak English as their native tongue or else with an accent other than Hispanic...

...In Joan Didion's Miami and David Rieff's Going to Miami, the authors' interest in themselves absorbs the reader's attention just when he wants to know more about the city and its people...

...It istrue that Addison Mizner, the architect who set much of Miami's colonial Spanish style, was a huckster and that Miami Beach was built and sold by hucksters...

...The central fact in determining the character of modern Miami is that it represents the south to North Americans at the same time that it represents the north to South and Central Americans...

...Anyone who demeans the energy and grit that Cubans in Miami have demonstrated in adapting to American commercial life, to auto repair and a dozen other technologies and strange forms of enterprise, is probably overemphasizing the importance of their political interests...

...They are trying to block Central American good guys from ridding themselves of the nasty dictators to whom Washington adheres...

...Surely the city has exaggerated its own boosterism...

...believes to be a trait of most (read "all") opponents of anti-capitalist movements of insurrection...

...Its surrounding waters are richer in species of fish, aquatic mammals, birds, plant life...

...Short-term visitors remember the difference during the whole of their stay...

...Joan Didion also traces a connection between Washington and crimes in Miami...

...It is absurd for a grown man to believe that he owes the world an apology for his political allegiances at the age of 16, any more than for any of the other notions or bits of behavior which he would no longer consent to be caught dead indulging...

...The city's location, a subject that both our authors regard as more important politically than climatically, probably makes a pallid "earth-colored" Miami unrecognizable...

...She begins her book with references to the native Miami black population, featuring an account of two major black riots brought on by a brutal racist killing by real-life Miami policemen and their subsequent acquittal...

...Since the idealization of the virgin implicit in the quince could exist only in the presence of its natural foil, machismo, there was often a brother around, or a boyfriend...

...That attitude resembles a child's faith in a male parent's power more than a serious adult's appraisal of the awesome problems and ambiguities of foreign policy...

...Aschenbach, protagonist in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, regards Venice (roughly 300 miles north of New York City) as the quintessential southern city because it is far south of Germany...

...W hile blacks are largely ignored in the Didion book except when really atrocious white behavior stimulates them to riot, and while Anglos are condemned for their bigotry, the reader might expect that Didion would view Cubans with sympathy...

...She believes that some violent confrontations between Cuban factions in Miami originated in Washington, as the American government tried to turn the Cuban exiles' plight to its own foreign policy purposes...

...One wonders what exquisite exemplar of good manners could possibly score even a C on her virtue test, and vice versa...

...To the inhabitants of 38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 a northern region, the south is characterized by passion and languor unknown in the chill and repression of their normal surroundings...

...Whatever the extent of the jingoism that, even in South Florida, can only be called "Yankee," persistent anti-Hispanic prejudice only makes more remarkable the commercial achievements of the Cuban exiles and their successes in local politics...

...Rieff is a witty and perceptive writer who has long been interested in Cuba and Cubans, and what he pastes together in Going to Miami is an impressionistic set of overlapping views of the city as it appears to a rather self-conscious New Yorker...

...The seasonal difference between day and night in Miami is much smaller than in the major cities to the North...

...They almost universally detest or patronize Cubans, Didion tells us, and fail to read the social notes printed in Spanish in the Miami Herald...

...Still a resort at first glance, Miami has become as well a frontier city, a port of entry, an airline hub, a manufacturing city, a business city, an old people's colony, a black city, a smuggler's cove, the most prosperous Cuban city in the world, a sports center, and a refuge from persecution, cold weather, and, some insist, from reality...

...It is interesting that she should refer to that program even though it never deals with Miami's Cubans and their political struggle to oust Castro...

...I want to hear neither...

...Both books at hand overlook the city's offerings to middle-class families, the unexciting but ever-present opportunities for vacation, the accessible year-round outdoors, the convenient life-style...

...But from those introductory remarks to the end of the book, Didion's Miami might as well have been emptied of its black population...

...the tides rise and fall much less...

...The author could more gently and accurately have described Coral Gables architecture as a Cuban mother's allusion to Havana, not Castile, and to see in her posing of her daughter an understandable effort to mend a broken link to the family's abandoned culture...

...Of their way of life we are told little...

...It has built a disgracefully underutilized rapid transit system whose failure has had a depressing effect on mass transit finance throughout the country...

...The favored facial expression for a quince photograph was a classic smolder...

...Rieff is more accurate than Didion in describing the recent banking of the political fires among the factions engaged in la lucha and even more accurate still when, in a tone of astonishment, he suggests that a home of one's own on one's own land is not really so bad a pattern of living...

...That might explain why, every so often, the bad guys on "Miami Vice" turn out not to be cocaine traffickers or kidnappers but U.S...

...He describes himself as a "West Side latchkey kid," which may be technically accurate but conveys a rather different impression from what one would suppose after finding out that his mother is Susan Sontag and his father Philip Rieff, author of The Triumph of Therapy...

...Rieff, on the other hand, distracts our eyes from the streets with a morals test that he repeatedly gives himself...

...Inevitably he meets his romantic obsession and his death there...

...It is difficult for the reader to share her concentration, or even to absorb the detailsnecessary to make it interesting...

...The book does briefly, though repeatedly, point to nasty, xenophobic "Anglos" and their ethnic bumper stickers that bear the slogan: WILL THE LAST AMERICAN TO LEAVE MIAMI PLEASE BRING THE FLAG...

...In a small voice, the passage echoes the tone of the book as a whole...

...A sample, characteristic for its tone: Almost any day it was possible to drive past the limestone arches and fountains which marked the boundaries of Coral Gables and see little girls being photographed in the tiaras and ruffled hoop skirts and mariboutrimmed illusion capes they would wear at their quinces, the elaborate fifteenth birthday parties at which the community's female children came of official age...

...She suggests that Washington, driven by the American spirit, is guilty of encouraging the Bay of Pigs invasion of Castroland, of not supporting the Bay of Pigs invasion when it finally happened, of encouraging Cubans to believe that the route to Havana runs through San Salvador, Managua, Grenada, or even the Watergate apartments, and of failing, when those roads were blown up, to support the Cuban victims...

...It's really dirt the author is interested in, not Miami or its Anglos, blacks, or even Cubans, and most of the dirt that interests her leads from Miami to Washington...

...For the new arrivals from the South, Miami, that Northern city, is a place not only for exile but for liberation, not only from the compression imposed on the middle class in Hispanic societies, but from the languor of the islands of the Caribbean...

...long-term residents, aided by the ubiquitous air-conditioning and the homogenization of the continental culture, learn that exoticism wears off...

...1=1 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 1988 39...

...They surely are more conveniently located to confront each other than to assault their common enemy...

...Though he spends the larger part of the book on that Cuban community, he pays serious attention also to the native blacks and especially to the pitiful refugees who arrived in Miami from Haiti as the Duvalier regime in that country neared its climactic end...

...He admits he should have been more suspicious about the Cuban claim to be in the process of creating the "New Man" which suggests that he, like many others of us, regards his ownearly political enthusiasms as somewhat embarrassing...

...Rieff tells the reader that the producers of "Vice" deliberately avoid that palette in the series...

...If she does feel such compassion, the author drowns sentiment in the majestic sniff of her prose...

...Those premises should make a good start, and both books offer interesting reading, but each misses the proper balance point, essential in a truly great travel book, between what we are told about the place and what about the author...

...The story is the fruit of Mann's continuing fascination with the conflicting northern and southern strains in the German psyche...

...If Rieff is as anxious not to be taken for an American super-patriot at 35 as he is not to be taken for having remained a committed Castroite because he was one at age 16, he should set forth his present views and his 16-year-old views with equal clarity...

...Even if the specific city that embodies those troubling and alluring qualities is southern only in a relative sense, its psychic attraction remains strong...

...Must everything about Miami be rendered in the exciting colors and sounds of the series if it is to sustain audience attention...

...Fr hese arguments are not so much I addressed to the merits of Rieff's political views about Vietnam, but to his introduction of them in a book about Miami...

...But uncertainty is not one of her burdens...

...The reality, as aging teaches us, is always more complicated...

...The blacks have had to watch income of Cubans in America (which means mostly in Miami) grow until it is now four times as large as the entire current GNP of the island they left (according to George Gilder, writing in the December issue of TAS) while the blacks' position in Miami hardly changed except, perhaps, for the worse...

...Even if their economic progress were a matter of indifference to her, she should be able to find a certain pathos in their having left their island to make their way in a strange environment, cut off by force majeure from their own memories of home...

...Yes, some have been killed in pursuing those interests...

...The politics that interest her are the politics of la lucha, the struggle to retake the Cuban government from Fidel Castro...

...When she speaks of politics she does not mean participation by Cubans in the political life of Miami itself, although, incidentally, Xavier Suarez, present Mayor of Miami, was born in Cuba and came to Miami, like many others, as a refugee from Castroism...

...His book, in contrast to Joan Didion's, does not allow Cuban Miami to stand as a metaphor for the city as a whole...

...government—it was forced either to encourage or discourage the invasion because it could not pretend that the exiles it had welcomed were not thinking of such a move), would Joan Didion have acknowledged the anti-invasion course to be the right one, or would she have criticized it as she has the course actually taken...

...An enthusiastic on-thespot fellow-traveler of Castroism, as late as seven years after it had exposed itself in power, he wants to be sure his present loss of enthusiasm for the regime has not imbued him with the mean-spirited priggishness that he Roger Starr is a member of the New York Times editorial board and the author of The Rise and Fall of New York City...

...In Going to Miami, David Rieff has produced a lively account of an indeterminate number of trips by air from New York to South Florida...

...These differences and the consequent internecine bitterness and bloodshed fascinate Didion as though they were somehow uniquely Miamian...

...but not a few participants became involved so deeply to relieve the pangs of exile with what they found a distractingly dangerous sport...

...Each tells us instead what to feel about Miami and how to value those sensations...

...The favored backdrop was one suggesting Castilian grandeur, which was how the Coral Gables arches happened to figure...