Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists and Refugees in the New America

by David Rieff

"In the book's impressionistic and personal moments, Rieff succeeds in capturing the mood of the city. He is pleasantly open to the place he is exploring and generally maintains a stance of naïveté--the mark of a good travel writer."-- New York Times Book Review "A clear, insightful book of firsthand impressions of Florida's once-heralded Magic City and what its flamboyant Latinization since the 1960s means. Rieff looks thoughtfully at Miami as America's New Havana, with a nod to the image fostered by TV's Miami Vice--an easygoing recital of his visits with some of Miami's most influential Cuban leaders, ranging from moderates to possibly murderous, anti-Castro politicos, along with tours of the city's now-famed Calle Ocho stretch."-- Publishers Weekly "David Rieff gives Miami the treatment it an anti-travelogue that tours states of mind and basks in projected images. . . . No cub reporter, he wisely dodges the dry testimony of experts in favor of the hunches that emerge from after-dinner gossip. His factual storehouse is stocked with random bits of the social menus, in-flight movies, graffiti, Toltec pottery, Phil Donahue."-- Commentary "A book that restores one’s faith in the foreignness of America. A shrewd, inquisitive guide to a city that has been over-glamourized, much condescended to (though not by Rieff), and rarely understood—and to one of the world’s oddest and most intensely knit exiled communities, the Cubans in Miami. Read before heading south."—Robert Hughes, author of The Fatal Shore From David Rieff’s preface to the new
"This book is a personal narrative as well as a book about Miami at the moment in the mid-1980s when the transformation of the city by its Cuban exile population was achieving critical mass. . . . I never believed that Miami was, as some people said at the time, 'the new Casablanca' or the capital of Latin America. What I did believe--and continue to believe--is that it was a harbinger of many things about America's future, from the inescapability of the Spanish language and of the further hispanicization of the United States to the broader phenomenon of a radical demographic shift in which the country, in only a few generations, has gone from being comprised largely of people of European and, to a lesser extent, African origin, to being an anthology of the world's peoples. That is now clear." David Rieff is the author of Bosnia and the Failure of the West; The Cuba in the Heart of Miami; and Los Capital of the Third World. His work appears regularly in various publications including the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, The Nation, Esquire, New Republic, and Newsweek . He is a freelance journalist and writer living in New York City.

Genres: Travel

248 pages, Paperback

First published August 2, 1988

About the author

David Rieff is an American polemicist and pundit. His books have focused on issues of immigration, international conflict, and humanitarianism.

Reviews

[Susan · Rating 1 out of 5]

David Rieff’s Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists and Refugees in the New America was first published in 1987, a year which saw the publication of two other non-fiction books about Miami: T.D. Allman’s Miami: City of the Future, and Joan Didion’s Miami. Back then, Miami was hot: Miami Vice dominated the airwaves and the Iran-Contra scandal was playing out.

So it is perhaps understandable that David Rieff’s effort has aged as poorly as Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs’ unconstructed linen jackets and pastel T-shirts. What is less forgivable is its aggrieved air, unapologetic racism and appalling writing, which lurches from the overblown to the non-sequiturial — and sometimes manages both:

“I had forgotten how fast Cuban Spanish was, almost like Spanish jazzed by amphetamine. Nor was it easy to distinguish the words, which fall out of the speaker’s mouth like Marines pouring out of a landing craft onto a hostile beach.”

“Most evenings, I would return home in darkling, wintry New York to the tropical gouaches of days-old Miami newspapers. The tales they had to tell seemed less like the tragedies they overwhelmingly were than like melodramas in which the blood was ketchup and the tears the dubious exertion of method acting.”

If you are interested in the Miami of the 1980s, you would be better off reading T.D. Allman or Joan Didion’s versions — or even dusting off your Miami Vice DVDs.

[Daniel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is just fantastic. So well-written, very funny, and Rieff's eye for the city is impressively sharp for an outsider. To focus on its datedness (Miami Vice reference, etc.), as the other reviewers have done here, is to point out a small and amusing drawback in this otherwise insightful book.

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5

[George P. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dated but still interesting. Rambles a lot; more of the better writing is toward to end.
I don't know of any connection between my family and the author but there may be a distant one. His father was a university professor, Phillip Rieff and his mother was writer-feminist Susan Sontag.