Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami - Softcover

Rieff, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099386313 ISBN 13: 9780099386315

Publisher: Vintage, 1994

Synopsis

David Rieff has become our most dazzling chronicler of change. In Going to Miami and Los Capital of the Third World, he took us into the streets of the new American city, where waves of recent immigrants are transforming the terrain and creating new patterns of urban life. Rieff's book on Los Angeles, Joan Didion said, was "a disturbing and brilliant examination of the America we have not faced." Rieff's portrait of South Florida's Cubans, torn between the imagined Eden of their home and their success in America, captures their bittersweet experience. He unmasks their fractured, refracted exiled since Castro's rise in 1959 in a foreign city less than two hundred miles from their home, separated from the comforts of the familiar, from homes remembered and imagined, but unable to resist America's still-overwhelming attraction, they have transformed Miami from a tourist town to the paradigm of the twenty-first-century American metropolis. Through the experiences of some unforgettable people; through street scenes, cafes, and clubs; through a trip with two Miami Cubans visiting Havana for the first time; Rieff has assembled a remarkable portrait of a people and place and a haunting psychological profile of our century's most emblematic - and influential - the exile.

About this title

About the Author

David Rieff

David Rieff is a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine. He is the author of seven previous books, including the acclaimed At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention; A Bed for the Night: Humanitarianism in Crisis; and Slaughterhouse: Bosnia and the Failure of the West. He lives in New York City.

From Kirkus Reviews

A skilled journalist's affecting and compassionate take on southern Florida's affluent, middle-aged Cubans--whose collective dream of returning to the fondly remembered island paradise of their privileged childhood has become anguishingly chimerical. Rieff (Los Angeles, 1991; Going to Miami, 1987) focuses on the experience of Cuban-born men and women whose upper-income families fled to the US in the immediate aftermath of Castro's overthrow of the Batista regime. Now in their 40s, these involuntary immigrants have prospered in business, the professions, and government, in the process making Miami rock to a Latin beat. While the people of ``the exile'' (an allusive collective term akin to, say, ``the diaspora'') have resisted assimilation and kept their culture remarkably intact, Rieff leaves little doubt that they are in the throes of an emotional crisis. Having viewed their adoptive city as a sort of halfway house, Cuban-Americans have come to the bittersweet realization that it's probably home. Nearly three years after the Berlin Wall's collapse, Castro still clings to power, and those emigr‚s who make sentimental journeys to Cuba find they have little in common with friends or relatives who remained behind. Nor, on the basis of Rieff's anecdotal evidence, do these expatriates' US-born sons and daughters (now marrying outside the community in ever greater numbers) share the idyllic, if increasingly ambivalent, aspirations of their parents, who not only have been overtaken by events but also have put down roots deeper than they imagined. A tellingly detailed take on a notably cohesive ethnic minority's slow-motion absorption into the melting pot. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0099386313
• ISBN 13: 9780099386315
• Binding: Paperback