Author Tom Wolfe is turning his acerbic talents on the melting pot culture of Miami, writes Paul Harris
Francisco "Pepe" Hernandez sits behind his desk and remembers arriving in Miami with his mother and two sisters as refugees from the Cuban revolution in 1959.
They had scoured the streets looking for a flat to stay in.
"We could not find anything. Why? Because there were signs that said, 'No blacks, no Cubans, no dogs'," he says. "It is hard to believe now."
Hernandez, president of the Cuban-American National Foundation, has an office a few blocks away from the street on which he once searched in vain for a room.
Now that street is known as Calle Ocho and is at the heart of Little Havana.
The neighbourhood that had once rejected him is now the symbol of Cuban power in Miami.
Cuban restaurants line the pavement, Cuban flags fly everywhere and Latin music pumps into the air over the loud patter of dominoes being slapped down on tables by old men playing Cuba's unofficial national sport.
It is a classic Miami story of success and reinvention and, in its way, a tale of America, too.
No wonder that the novelist Tom Wolfe has chosen this sun-drenched Florida metropolis as the setting for his next eagerly awaited book.
Back to Blood is set to be a publishing sensation when it comes out later this year.
The plot is set against the bewildering racial, sexual and class politics of Miami, a city that is emerging as a 21st-century melting pot for America in the way that New York did in the 19th century.
Like every Wolfe novel, it features a sprawling cast of characters, including Haitians, Russians, French and, of course, Cubans.
Many expect the book to capture far more than just the spirit of Miami.
Throughout his career, the white-suited Wolfe has shown himself to be a great chronicler of the American zeitgeist.
His book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test seemed to sum up the drug-addled 1960s and The Bonfire of the Vanities came to symbolise the moneyed excesses of the 1980s.
Many are now wondering what Wolfe's depiction of Miami will say about modern America as a whole.
The city seems to encapsulate many modern themes in American life. As debates about immigration rage across the political spectrum, Miami is the unofficial capital of Latino America.
The region is also at the centre of the property boom and bust that has devastated America's economy.
And Miami's culture of extravagant wealth, superclubs and beaches have come to symbolise some of the cultureless vanities of the modern age exposed by the financial crisis.
This is a place where the very rich go to party within a few miles of some of the poorest people in America.
It is a city where political corruption has become a way of life - rich territory indeed for Wolfe's touch.
Through looking at Miami, Wolfe may reveal much more than the tales of a single city. He may be once again chronicling the state of the nation.
"Miami has always been a place where people have run to reinvent themselves. It is a place of escape," explains Dr Michael Hall, who has turned the city's desire for reinvention into a very lucrative business.
Hall runs the Hall Longevity Clinic, specialising in laser treatments, Botox and myriad other ways that the denizens of Miami can fight off the march of time.
"I call it the Miami smile," he says of people living here.
"You get the bright light, the bikinis and the good-looking people in the streets. It is sexy."
Hall sits in his doctor's surgery wearing a pair of flip-flops and his shirt split open to the navel to reveal a muscular chest.
He never opens his surgery before 11am and he spends evenings at the bars of top Miami Beach hotels, mingling with celebrities.
A bottle of champagne is chilled in his fridge alongside vials of medicine.
The world Hall services is one of brazen excess in a city that has become one of the top playgrounds in the world for the ultra-rich.
It is a place of super yachts, fast cars and excessive parties, all fuelled by either Saudi petro-dollars or South American narco-dollars.
"I don't really know what 'over the top' means any more. It is Disneyland for the rich," Hall says.
The story of Miami, and especially Miami Beach where Hall works, does seem to read like a microcosm of American capitalism, producing the very rich and the very poor.
Only 150 years ago the entire place was wilderness and swamp, inhabited by a few hardy Indian tribes. Then came a bunch of European settlers who kicked off successive waves of incomers and speculators who each arrived as outsiders and then took over.
After the Anglos came a wave of Jews, and after the Jews came the Cubans and other Latinos.
The city was a powerful magnet luring people with the promise of instant riches beneath constantly sunny skies.
Many of those riches were based on property.
Florida was the centre of the 1920s property boom that preceded the 1929 Wall Street crash. Likewise the 2000s saw another outlandish boom in property prices that almost defied belief.
Now the newest downturn has destroyed a fresh generation of speculators and left many of Miami's buildings empty or bankrupt.
"If you go to one of these hotels for a drink, it will look beautiful.
There will be lots of art on the wall. But you have no idea that it is actually bankrupt. It is an illusion," says Gerald Posner, author of the recent book Miami Babylon, which charts the scandalous history and development of Miami Beach.
Yet Miami still parties on. On Ocean Drive the roar of Ferraris and Lamborghinis is as loud as ever.
Huge yachts sail in and out of the harbour. The plastic surgeries are still doing business carving newer, bustier, trimmer bodies for the girlfriends of the very wealthy.
Given Florida's soaring unemployment rate, some might think there should be a riot.
Yet Posner believes that there is a simple explanation why Miami's enormous disparities do not erupt into social problems.
"The immigrant cleaning woman with three jobs does not feel anger at all the luxury hotel suites she cleans. She has a sense that her children may be part of it. It is the great carrot of the American dream," says Posner.
Yet in Miami, as in America as a whole, there is one group that has remained largely outside the dream: black Americans.
Despite the election of Barack Obama, black Americans have suffered more during the economic crisis than any other ethnic group.
Black America remains at the bottom of the US social ladder.
Marginalised away from Cuban Miami and the excesses of the beaches, black Miami exists in the enclave of Liberty City.
Though only a 15-minute drive from Miami Beach's party scene, it is a desperately poor neighbourhood, riven by joblessness, crime and drugs.
Almost one-fifth of its inhabitants suffer from HIV or Aids.
"When everybody was doing good, we were doing bad. Now everybody is doing bad, how do you think we are doing?", says T. Willard Fair, president of the Urban League of Greater Miami which is based in Liberty City.
Fair came to Miami in 1963 and says the black community - which has suffered from the collapse of a strong nuclear family - is in worse shape now than it was during the days of racial segregation.
"We are on the bottom of the totem pole in this city," he says.
Yet even Fair has a streak of Miami optimism. He believes education can save his ravaged community.
He feels Miami - and thus perhaps America as a whole - can still give hope and opportunity to proud black Americans, despite the long history of doing precisely the opposite.
"I love the weather. This is paradise. No one has his foot on my neck," he says with a laugh. "We will have our place in the sun."
That sunny place, however, is occupied by the Cubans and Hispanics. They dominate the politics and the culture. Sitting in a Miami Beach cafe, Posner's wife Trisha says: "If you don't have command of the language in this city, you are in trouble. The language being Spanish."
Such comments are a source of fear to many conservative white Americans, nervous that they risk being swamped. Scare stories over the threat to English in America regularly break out in the media. Yet the Cubans were not typical immigrants to America: their huge influence in Miami was almost an accident.
They arrived in the wake of Fidel Castro's revolution fully expecting to go home within a few years. They considered America a place of exile, not opportunity.
"We all thought it was temporary. Ironically that became a shield against some of the questions that other immigrants face," says Hernandez.
But their eventual success showed the huge attraction America had - and still has - for immigrant newcomers. The Cubans may have planned to go home, but they never did.
Five decades later, they have instead transformed their new homeland. Miami is now a thoroughly bilingual city. Its politics are dominated by the needs of the Cuban population, often to the begrudging admiration of other ethnic groups.
"Everything is defined and organised by recognising the importance of Cuban culture. It is a numbers game and we [black Americans] are just not big players," says Fair.
And what goes for Miami is increasingly going for America, too.
Hispanics are the largest single minority in America. Their growth rates are fast and their birthrate is high. America may have a black president, but in terms of demographics black Americans are declining in importance.
So, too, are whites.
This is the complex new world that Wolfe is stepping into. It is a rapidly changing whirlpool of new racial, social and economic boundaries; a place of fast-moving rises and falls, corruption and success, and the emergence of a new order of things. It is happening in Miami, where reinvention and change has become a way of life. But it is spreading to the rest of America.
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