Joan Didion is one of my favorite writers. Her prose is magic, regardless of the subject matter. So when I came across her non-fiction book Miami recently at a used bookstore it was a must have.

I was born and raised in Miami, the son of Cuban immigrants. I'm a first generation American and am strongly defined my the culture I grew up in, which, in turn, was still very deeply rooted in the norms of life and living in Cuba.

Didion's book attempts to capture the dichotomy of living in Miami, an American city, after Fidel Castro's revolution in Cuba sent thousands of exiles, Cubans who never wanted to emigrate in the first place, there to live in the late 1950s and on. So many Cubans, in fact, that the majority of the population in Miami by the end of the 1970s was Cuban.

Didion does an amazing job capturing Miami during the Reagan years. The book was researched and written in the 1980s so much of the book revolves around the Miami characters and events of the time: Jorge Mas Canosa, Xavier Suarez, Raul Masvidal, Reagan himself, Orlando Bosch, and the list goes on.

This was my Miami. I was a teenager there in the 1980s, coming into my own ideas, not my parents' or the community's, about being Cuban American, about Castro, about la lucha, and el exilio. This book takes me back and gives plenty of new perspective and history I was too young to understand or even know about.

It's too much to go into here so I recommend reading Miami. One line from the book, among many, resonates:

The scars el exilio inflicts upon its own do not entirely heal, nor are they meant to.

The Cuban experience in Miami is a complicated one. One thing's for sure, I'm very proud of who I am: a Cuban American with an emphasis on the latter and filled with the pride of the former.

Only in Miami...