The Exile: Cuba in the Heart of Miami - Softcover

Rieff, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0671886274 ISBN 13: 9780671886271

Publisher: Touchstone, 1994

Synopsis

"The Exile" is a fascinating portrait of Miami's Cuban population, the most successful group of immigrants to settle in the United States since the Jews of the nineteenth century. David Rieff, whom the San Diego Tribune called our "modern Alexis de Tocqueville", has provided an engrossing look at a group exiled from its homeland, showing how America has affected these immigrants, and what it means to become an American in the late twentieth century.

About this title

About the Author:

David Rieff is the author of eight previous books, including Swimming in a Sea of Death, 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.

About this edition

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0671886274
• ISBN 13: 9780671886271
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224