Under The Sun

Argentine journalist and author Hernan Iglesias

Argentine journalist Hernán Iglesias Illa is the author of “Golden Boys,” an expose of Argentines on Wall Street from the ‘80s to the financial boom of this decade.  His current project– a book-length essay on Miami– looks at the influx of non-Cuban Latin Americans into the city over the past decade and how they are remaking it.  The book is being published by Planeta and will be in Miami bookstores later this year.

Under the Sun host Dan Grech invited Hernan to a Saturday morning pickup soccer game at the YMCA near Coral Gables.  Afterwards, they ate Cuban hamburgers at El Rey de la Fritas on Bird Road, where Hernan agreed to answer five questions…

1) There seems to be a small cottage industry in publishing for books about Miami. In 1987 alone, three books came out: T. D. Allman’s Miami: City of the Future, David Rieff’s Going to Miami: Exiles, Tourists, and Refugees in the New America, and Joan Didion’s Miami. All three books were written by people who didn’t live in Miami. What is it about Miami that has made it such an attractive subject for outsiders?

These three authors were all New Yorkers, and I think there is a fascination among New Yorkers with Miami, which in some aspects they see as a New-York-on-the-Beach.  In any case, those books were all published in the late ’80s, when the whole country began paying attention again to Miami, after a couple of decades of neglect, and thanks to the success of Miami Vice, the TV show.  In those books, especially in Rieff’s and Didion’s, there’s a feeling that Miami was slipping away from America and being taken by the cocaine culture and the Cuban exiles and the Spanish language. They paint a pretty bleak outlook for the city.  The funny thing is that none of these authors could foresee the rebirth of South Beach, which was already underway and has arguably been the most influential event in the turnaround of Miami from a racially tense and crime-ridden city to its current incarnation as hub for arts, design and nightlife.  The interesting thing with this renovation is that it has gathered far less attention from sociologists or New York feature writers.

2) What will your book say about Miami that hasn’t been said before?

The book is also a travel book, so there’s a lot of personal ideas and observations about the city.  In a sense, the book is about my Miami.  But I also want to make some bigger points.  The main one is that, though the Cuban community is at the peak of its control over the city, the growth of Miami in the last decade and a half has mainly gone in two directions, none of which has seen a big Cuban influence.  One of these directions is the Art Basel-Design District-Performing Arts Center-South Beach hub.  The other is the Spanish-language creative industries (media, dotcoms, ad agencies, technology companies), which are overwhelmingly managed by Colombians, Venezuelans, Brazilians and Argentines. Cubans have missed the globalization of the city; they are very powerful in the ultra-local businesses but not in the international ones.

3) To report this book, you visited Miami on several occasions, often for several weeks at a time. Could you describe your most memorable experience while here? What did it tell you about Miami?

Before my research, my Miami was very much South Beach-based.  Every time I came I stayed at a friend’s apartment on South Pointe and lived my Miami life on a bicycle from there to Lincoln Road and then to the beach and back. For years, that was my Miami.  In my research trips, I progressively moved west, and spent my last two weeks in the city in deep Little Havana.  That was a very interesting process for me, getting deeper and deeper into the layers of the city.

4) You argue that we are now entering a post-Cuban Miami. What implications will that have for the city over the next decade?

Well, immigration has slowed down in the last couple of years, due to harder requirements for visas and the recession in the US. So we’ll see how these developments play out over the next couple of years.  The Cuban immigrants are still coming (they don’t have visa problems, and conditions in Cuba are far worse than in South Florida, even today), so some analysts are beginning to talk about a re-Cubanization of the city. But this could change quickly.  I think Miami risks dividing itself into two cities: one connected to the rest of the world, very international, not-so-Cuban (but still Latin American), and globalized, and one very local, more-Cuban (and black) and poorer.

5) Describe the experience of living in South Florida in three words.

Sun, traffic, cortaditos.