“In New York Spanish is a language of the kitchen, whereas in Miami it’s the language of power,” Pedro Medina tells me as we drive along Biscayne Boulevard. After reading Warsaw, a dirty novel populated by Miami Beach prostitutes and police, I was expecting a tough, tattooed guy riding a Harley Davidson. The man who turned up instead was a forty-one-year-old Peruvian in shades and a black polo shirt at the wheel of a grey Volkswagen Jetta who has spent most of his adult life here. In this pedestrian-free city, it seems reasonable enough for our interview to take place at fifty kilometres an hour.
“Miami is a place that’s changing all the time,” he declares. That’s why what happened in Miami Vice in the 1980s isn’t unusual. Through clothes, visual effects, and a new wave and techno soundtrack, Michael Mann’s series invented a metropolis that didn’t exist in reality. “But over time reality ended up looking like the series.”
Sonny Crockett and Rico Tubbs’s boss was Lieutenant Martin Castillo, who hailed from Cuban stock. Twenty years later, Dexter arrived and the police inspector changed genre but not origins: Maria LaGuerta also came from the island. Although the present mayor of Miami, Francis X. Suárez, is the son of Cuban-born former mayor Xavier Suárez, the map of power is changing, as is the makeup of the journalistic and literary worlds.
When Medina arrived from Lima at the beginning of the century, the city was mainly Anglo-Saxon and Cuban: “I always point out the novel of that period, Nieve sobre Miami (‘Snow over Miami’) by Juan Carlos Castillón, because the noir genre was in the hands of Anglo writers and it was that book, written by an author from Barcelona who’d spent years in the Americas, which started the process of narrating Miami in our language.”
Over the last ten years, this has been the aim of the Suburbano writers: to encourage journalism, fiction, and criticism written in Spanish through their digital newspaper portal and the publication of books. Books like Viaje One Way: Antología de narradores de Miami, edited by Medina and Hernán Vera (the project’s other founder from Buenos Aires), which has become the reference book if you want to understand the literary transformation of this slowly sinking city. The platform, and Vera’s literary workshop, can count on the support of over twenty writers who regularly meet up; a Latin American scene with authors like Peruvian Rossana Montoya Calvo, Argentinians Gabriel Goldberg and Gastón Virkel, or Venezuelan Camilo Pino. Although the young Legna Rodríguez Iglesias and veterans José Abreu Felippe and Antonio Orlando Rodríguez ensure a Cuban accent is still heard, it’s no longer the accent that predominates in the books written here in the home of Peruvian Jaime Bayly, Argentinian Andrés Oppenheimer, or Mexican César Miguel Rondón.
These urban thoroughfares, island-like districts with their extremes of opulence and dire poverty, this tropical-scented, muggy heat and sinking city and every single hurricane: all are recounted in our language’s every accent.
“Yo hablo perfecto inglés,” a mixed-race girl says in perfect Spanish to a gentleman wearing a guayabera. Not one of the forty-three people currently in the Versailles Bakery—the most famous Cuban restaurant in the world, according to the sign, and it may be true—is speaking English. They’re ordering croquetas, empanadas gallegas, tortillas de pimiento, sándwich cubano, cheesecake, pastel tres leches, tartaleta de manzana or nueces, which they wash down with fruit juice or a cortado with evaporated milk.
Ever since it opened in 1971, the Versailles has been an important rendez-vous point for Cuban exiles. Fidel Castro’s death, on November 25, 2016, was celebrated euphorically here with music and rum. The floor is a green-white beehive of worn hexagon tiles. Rich Cubans no longer live around here, but come to meet their friends or to throw tea parties for their children. CIA agents and Cuban exiles conversed in hushed tones for decades in Little Havana, conspiring and plotting terrorist attacks. Several of those encounters probably took place around these very tables.
“Right now those meetings happen in El Doral, an area of Miami known as Doralzuela, plotting the end of Maduro,” Medina tells me as he takes off his sunglasses. He continues: “In ten or fifteen years we’ll be studying Venezuelan Miami the way we now study Cuban Miami.”
We say goodbye after walking past cigar shops, salsa and mojito joints, and El Parque del Dominó, where old Cubans play as if they were robots, or attractions in a theme park of Cuban exile. “Now I’ll take off my writer’s gear and put on my office suit,” Medina confesses as we shake hands: “I work in a Venezuelan bank.”
It’s forty minutes by Uber and almost half a century of Latin American history from Little Havana to Miamizuela: from 1959 to 1999, from the Cuban Revolution to the start of Comandante Hugo Chávez’s presidency. “My dad’s parents are Cuban and he was born in Cuba, but arrived in Venezuela at the age of three. He knew what a communist regime was like, and declared in the first year of the Chávez government that he wouldn’t stay there, and came to the United States,” says Verónica Ruiz del Vizo—who, at thirty-two years old, has a sparkle in her eye and 115,000 followers on Instagram. “He belongs to the first group of immigrants from Venezuela who arrived at the beginning of this century with lots of money and he bought houses in two areas, Weston and El Doral. He invested, set up businesses, but it wasn’t a wave of immigration that caught the headlines.”
Hers is the one that starts to make an impact in 2014. Protests, repression, and successive crises choke the Venezuelan air: thousands of students, professionals, journalists, and intellectuals started arriving in waves that continue to the present. Most settle in El Doral. And they’ve started to organize like a proper diaspora.
The director of Mashup, the digital-content managing agency that Verónica founded almost ten years ago, when still at university, is now one of the leading voices of that second massive migration from Latin America to Miami. One of the initiatives she is involved in is Dar Learning, an educational program in which several distinguished professionals, with over ten years of experience in their fields, give free online courses to help people in the process of migrating.
“What makes our literature different from Cuban literature,” Verónica opines, “is that pop music and technology were never important to them but have been central for us. What makes our diaspora different from the Cuban one,” she continues, “is that many of the first Venezuelans who arrived here had experience in the corporate world and found positions at the executive level, when they didn’t open branches of their own businesses, and all us young people who arrived later had lots of experience in the modes of expression used on social media.” Twitter, for example, is used by thousands of citizens from Caracas and other cities in the country to get penicillin or blood.
Through Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Twitter, immigrants from the cultural world have been able to link up and organize themselves at an unprecedented rate. El Paseo de las Artes, which shut down in El Doral, for example, has reopened in Wynwood with a great theatre and comedy program. Its venues are full every weekend. In the subculture of exile, George Harris has become a stand-up comedy star by making jokes about Nicolás Maduro, Diosdado Cabello, and even his own mother.
“This has led to an unexpected alliance between Colombian and Venezuelan immigrants, in theatres, art galleries, and handicrafts,” adds this dynamic cultural leader. Even arepas have become a meeting point, chefs from both countries having reinvented them, via nouvelle cuisine, and put them on the menus of their restaurants. The centuries-old debate about who invented the arepa has finally come to a truce in Miami; let’s hope that Chilean and Peruvian immigrants can also find a way to agree on intellectual property rights for the pisco sour.
The most emblematic space of the Venezuelan community in El Doral over the last fifteen years is located in a gas station, this suburb having been an industrial area and dumping ground before the torrent of investments by new arrivals was unleashed. There are several trucks and a statue of Simón Bolívar in the Arepazo parking lot. At 1 p.m. on a Wednesday in September, all the tables are occupied except for three, which have a reserved card with Barça’s crest on one side and Madrid’s on the other. On the wall, under nine plasma televisions, is this arepa and tequeño restaurant’s slogan (“The Venezuela of Yesteryear: How to Forget it”) and several newspaper pages (“Liberation Day. 18 hours of frantic celebrations in Caracas because the dictator has fallen”). No doubt there will be loud celebrations here when Maduro meets his end.
There’s only one cultural space in CityPlace Doral, a mixed-use complex that’s ten minutes by Uber and ten years of Venezuelan diasporic history away. There are three-bedroomed apartments that cost $3,620 a month and restaurants and ice cream parlours on the ground floor. Cinébistro offers a menu of shots and Latino dishes and another of Hollywood films. Ceviche or churrasco with jalapeño pineapple margaritas before seeing, say, Crazy Rich Asians.
“Why don’t you open a branch of Altamira in El Doral?” I ask Carlos Souki, owner of the only exclusively Spanish bookshop in Miami’s Coral Gables. “Because we’re not interested in simply focussing on Venezuelan readers, though that’s what we are, and it’s here, between Books and Books and Barnes and Noble, where readers of our language from the whole city come. That’s why we were keen to be here.”
In Caracas Souki and his wife, Susana, owned record shops, having discovered, in the 1980s, a public interested in English music that couldn’t get what it wanted: “And here we discovered that there was also a public that wasn’t happy, but in the opposite direction, one that was hungry for literature in Spanish, and that’s why we import books from Spain, Mexico, Colombia, and, until not long ago, from Argentina. So all these people can have access to what they want.” After going to the Liber Book Fair in Madrid and reaching agreements with the biggest publishing houses, they realized they could compete with Amazon, which doesn’t enforce as aggressive a pricing policy in the United States as the one driving its sales in English, because it does business through third parties. “Amazon is the bogeyman, then,” smiles Souki, pointing to wooden shelves bathed in green light, “but we have succeeded in ensuring that 80 percent of our titles are offered at a lower price than those from the name we cannot name.”
Seventy percent of Miami’s population speaks or understands Spanish. The Miami Book Fair organizes almost two hundred events a year with Spanish-American authors. But the market is very influenced by social and cultural pressure from the Anglo-Saxon world and Altamira has been struggling for two years to persuade Miami’s inhabitants, accustomed to clock-watching their daily lives and buying on the internet, to come to the Miracle Mile and spend an afternoon among books.
“So you can get an idea what people’s habits are like, even among Latinos, I can tell you that our best customer calls us every third Monday to give us a list of the books he wants three Mondays later, and sends us a cheque; we don’t know him, he lives four blocks away, but we’ve never seen his face: one day we told him we could deliver the books personally, and he told us not to bother him: he preferred us to post them.”