Miami was for example the only American city I had ever visited in which it was not unusual to hear one citizen describe the position of another as ‘Falangist,’ or as ‘essentially Nasserite.’ There were in Miami exiles who defined themselves as communists, anti-Castro. There were in Miami a significant number of exile socialists, also anti-Castro, but agreed on only this single issue. There were in Miami two prominent groups of exile anarchists, many still in their twenties, all anti-Castro, and divided from on another, I was told, by ‘personality differences,’ ‘personality differences’ being the explanation Cubans tend to offer for anything from a dinner-table argument to a coup.
This urge toward the staking out of increasingly recondite positions, traditional to exile life in Europe and in Latin America, remained, in South Florida, exotic, a nervous urban brilliance not entirely apprehended by local Anglos, who continued to think of exiles occupying a fixed place on the political spectrum….
This was something different, a view of politics as so central to the human condition that there may be no applicable words in the political vocabulary of most Americans. Virtually every sentient member of the Miami exile community was on any given day engaged in what was called an ‘ideological confrontation’ with some other member of the Miami exile community, over points which were passionately debated at meals on the radio and in the periodiquitos, the throwaway newspapers which appeared every week on Southwest Eighth Street…. Analysis was close, and overcharged. Obscure points were ‘clarified,’ and immediately ‘answered….’
There seemed in fact very few weeks in Miami when, on the informal network the community used to talk to itself, one or another exile spokesman was not being excoriated on or defended against this charge of being insufficiently separated from American interests.
"— Joan Didion, Miami, 1987.
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“Every day like Mardi Gras / Everybody party all day / No work, all play, okay” - Will Smith, “Miami,” 1997
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