The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami

A profile of exiled Cubans living in Miami focuses on their dreams, their feelings about their new country and the one they left behind, and their impact on the town of Miami

In this sensitive and engrossing discourse, Rieff ( Going to Miami ) describes the 33-year-long exile in Miami which many Cubans are beginning to recognize may actually be immigration. For these Cubans, Havana is still the center of the world, but their nostalgia is for the spiritual capital of la Cuba de ayer , that sophisticated, chic, intellectual, artistic and, most importantly, pre-Castro city they now mythologize and try to reconstitute in the streets of Miami. Though cleaving fiercely to their Cuban origins and constantly dreaming of return, many have become more American than they realize, and there is now a second generation whose native home is Miami, observes the author. Rieff accompanied one couple on a brief visit to Havana, and he describes their surprise on finding that they had become Americans after all. "We Cubans have become a different people in America," says the wife, "and what I learned during our trip to Cuba is that they have become different down there too . . . the truth is that we are never going back." While his subject is the Cubans in Miami, Rieff uses the differences between their migration and that of other immigrants--particularly the Jewish diaspora--to give striking insights into the common pain of all exiles.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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.

Updating Thomas D. Boswell and James R. Curtis's The Cuban-American Experience ( LJ 6/1/84), journalist Rieff ( Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World , S. & S., 1991) assesses the present social processes in Cuban American Miami. Past immigrants had come to the United States to stay, but Rieff shows that the motto of Miami's Cubans was "Next year in Havana." More economic than political refugees (Castro's "New Man" demanded sacrifice from the more successful), their success here depended on their doing what they did best--making money. As Rieff demonstrates, they also saw to it that we heard only their side, not about the excesses of Batista. Although most Cuban immigrants are or will become U.S. citizens, their sympathies lie elsewhere, and one is left to wonder if the balkanization of America by such groups is good. A thorough investigation for current events collections.
- Louise Leonard, Univ. of Florida Libs., Gainesville
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.