Amid the ongoing repetitions of “Not this shit again!” as news about the incoming president’s plans trickles out, Twain’s old saw is lurking in the background. Looking for the small escapes as well as trying to figure out how to push ahead, I was reading a collection of Joan Didion’s essays. Didion has been one of my many blind spots over the years. I nod sagely when her name is mentioned, frantically scrabbling around in my mind to see if I have even the thinnest base of knowledge for my sagacity. As usual, I do not. So, working through her essay “Miami” I am at last coming to be better acquainted.
Didion’s prose does not set me on fire, but I very much like her structure and approach to detail. Miami in the 1980s (the essay was published in 1987) is a topic that, retrospectively, offers fertile ground for any kind of talented writer, fiction or nonfiction. Nonetheless, it feels as though Didion executed superb judgement in the threads she chose to weave together, and the image that appears as she weaves is a portrait with depth and breadth while still remaining nimble and digestible. I have yet to finish it, but already I – someone whose primary exposure to Florida, other than two brief trips as a teenager, is through popular culture – feel as though I can draw connections and divisions between Didion’s “real” Miami and the more familiar version of it from Miami Vice, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, and the novels of Carl Hiaasen. This almost certainly isn’t true, but the fact that it feels so is a credit to Didion.
1987, coming at the tail end of the Reagan years, is also – at time of writing – just about spot on for the birth year of the median American. These years just before our birth, when the stage hands were setting up the scenery that would – up curtain! – quicken alongside us feel alternately inevitable, unbelievable, and mystical. One of the joys of aging is unearthing the truths about what came before, and then realizing, as you turn to shout your outrage to your contemporaries, that many of them are simply doing the same old shit. Hats off to Mr. Twain. But to return to the Reagan years. The Reagan administration’s status as the pre-dawn or origin administration for most millennials, along with the almost mythical status conferred onto Reagan by the Republican party (I cannot think of a comparable figure for the Democrats, save perhaps Jimmy Carter, whose status is more dependent on his longevity and post-White House good works than his policy accomplishments) makes it a much larger signpost, or even a genesis, for our current age. What makes Miami such an astonishing read today is seeing how possible it was for things to be different, how inevitable today feels in response to the decisions of yesterday, and how frustratingly impossible it feels to prevent the pendulum from swinging back to where we were back then. I had to look up from reading this multiple times, to see if someone was playing a joke on me or if Didion’s ghost would be standing by, shaking her head (or fist or both) in frustration.
This is a multi-page excerpt, consisting of most of Part 3, Chapter 14:
When I think now about mirror tricks and what might or might not be built into them, about the ways in which frustrations can be kindled and furies unloosed, I think of Guillermo Novo, called Bill Novo. Guillermo Nova was known to FBI agents and federal prosecutors and the various personnel who make up ” terrorist task forces” on the eastern seaboard of the United States as one of the Novo brothers, Ignacio and Guillermo, two exiles who first came to national attention in 1964, when they fired a dud bazooka shell at the United Nations during a speech by Che Guevara. There were certain farcical elements here (the embattled brothers bobbing in a small boat, the shell plopping harmlessly into the East River), and, in a period when Hispanics were seen by many Americans as intrinsically funny, an accent joke, this incident was generally treated tolerantly, a comic footnote to the news. As time went by, however, the names of the Novo brothers began turning up in less comic footnotes…
Guillermo Novo himself was among those convicted, in a 1979 trial which rested on the demonstration of connections between the Cuban defendants and DINA, the Chilean secret police, of the assassination in Washington of the former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and of the Institute for Policy Studies researcher who happened to be with him when his car blew up, Ronni Moffitt. This conviction was overturned on appeal (the appellate court ruled that the testimony of two jailhouse informants had been improperly admitted), and in a 1981 retrial, after the federal prosecutors turned down a deal in which the defense offered a plea of guilty on the lesser charge of conspiracy, plus what Guillermo Novo’s attorney called “a sweetener,” a “guarantee” by Guillermo Novo “quote “to stop all violence by Cuban exiles in the United States,” Guillermo Novo was acquitted.
I happened to meet Guillermo Novo in 1985, one Monday morning when I was waiting for someone in the reception room at WRHC-Cadena Azul, Miami, a station the call letters of which stood for Radio Havana Cuba. There was about this meeting nothing of either moment or consequence. A man who introduced himself as “Bill Novo” just appeared beside me, and we exchanged minor biography for a few minutes. He said that he had noticed me reading a letter framed on the wall of the reception room. He said that he was the sales manager for WRHC, and had lived in Miami only three years. He said that he had however lived in the United States since 1954, mostly in New York and New Jersey. He was a small sharp-featured man in a white tropical suit, who in fact spoke English with an accent which suggested New Jersey, and he had a way of materializing and dematerializing sideways, of appearing from and then sidling back into an inner office, which was where he retreated after he gave me his business card, the exchange of cards remaining a more or less fixed ritual in Cuban Miami. GUILLERMO NOVO SAMPOL, the card read. Gerente de Ventas, WRHC-Cadena Azul
That it was possible on a Monday morning in Miami to have so desultory an encounter with one of the Novo brothers seemed to me, perhaps because I was not yet accustomed to a rhythm in which dealings with DINA and unsupported allegations about Dallas motel rooms could be incorporated into the American business day, remarkable, and later that week I asked an exile acquaintance who was familiar with WRHC if the Guillermo Novo who was the sales manager there was in fact the Guillermo Novo who had been tried in the Letelier assassination. There had been, my acquaintance demurred, “a final acquittal on the Letelier count.” But it was, I persisted, the same man. My acquaintance had shrugged impatiently, not as if he thought it was best not mentioned, but as if he did not quite see the interest. “Bill Novo has been a man of action,” he said. “Yes. Of course.”
To be a man of action in Miami was to receive encouragement from many quarters. On the wall of the reception room at WRHC-Cadena Azul, Miami, where the sales manager was Guillermo Novo and an occasional commenter was Fidel and Raul Castro’s estranged sister Juanita and the host of the most popular talk show was Felipe Rivero, whose family had from 1832 until 1960 published the powerful Diario de la Marina in Havana and who would in 1986, after a controversy fueled by his insistence that the Holocaust had not occurred but had been fabricated “to defame and divide the German people” moved from WRHC to WOCN, there hung in 1985 a framed letter, the letter Guillermo Novo had mentioned when he first materialized that Monday morning. This letter, which was dated October 1983 and signed by the President of the United States, read:
“I learned from Becky Dunlop [presumably Becky Norton Dunlop, a White House aide who later followed Edwin Meese to the Justice Department] about the outstanding work being done at WRHC. Many of your listeners have also been in touch, praising your news coverage and your editorials. Your talented staff deserves special commendation for keeping your listeners well-informed.
I’ve been particularly pleased, of course, that you have been translating and airing a Spanish version of my weekly talks. This is important because your signal reaches the people of Cuba, whose rigidly controlled government media suppress any news Castro and his communist henchmen do not want them to know. WRHC is performing a great service for all its listeners. Keep up the good work, and God bless you.
Signed Ronald Reagan”
At the time I first noticed it on the WRHC wall, and attracted Guillermo Novo’s attention by reading it, this letter interested me because I had the week before been looking back through the administration’s arguments for Radio Marti [a government-sponsored, Spanish-language propaganda station aimed at Cuba], none of which, built as they were on the figure of beaming light into utter darkness, had alluded to these weekly talks which the people of Cuba appeared to be getting on WRHC-Cadena Azul, Miami. Later the letter interested me because I had begun reading back through the weekly radio talk themselves, and had come across one from 1978 in which Ronald Reagan, not yet president, had expressed his doubt that either the Pinochet government or the indicted “Cuban anti-Castro exiles”, one of whom had been Guillermo Novo, had anything to do with the Letelier assassination.
Ronald Reagan had wondered instead (“I don’t know the answer, but it is a question worth asking.. “) if Orlando Letelier’s “connections with Marxists and far-left causes” might not have set him up for assassination, caused him to be, as the script for this talk put it, “murdered by his own masters.” Here was the scenario: “Alive,” Ronald Reagan had reasoned in 1978, “Orlando Letelier could be compromised; dead he could become a martyr. And the left didn’t lose a minute in making him one.” Actually this version of the Letelier assassination had first been advanced by Senator Jesse Helms (R-N.C.), who had advised his colleagues on the Senate floor that it was not “plausible” to suspect the Pinochet government in the Letelier case, because terrorism was “most often an organized tool of the left,” but the Reagan reworking was interesting on its own, a way of speaking, later to become familiar, in which events could be revised as they happened into illustrations of ideology.
“There was no blacklist of Hollywood,” Ronald Reagan told Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times during the 1980 campaign. ” The blacklist in Hollywood, if there was one, was provided by the communists.” “I’m going to voice a suspicion now that I’ve never said aloud before,” Ronald Reagan told thirty-sex high school students in Washington in 1983 about death squads in El Salvador. ” I wonder if all of this is right wing, or if those guerilla forces have not realized that by infiltrating into the city of San Salvador and places like that, they can get away with these violent acts, helping to try and bring down the government, and the right wing will be blamed for it.” “New intelligence shows,” Ronald Reagan told his Saturday radio listeners in March of 1986, by way of explaining why he was asking Congress to provide “the Nicaraguan freedom fighters” with what he called “the means to fight back,” that Tomas Borge, the communist interior minister, is engaging in a brutal campaign to bring the freedom fighters into discredit. You see, Borge’s communist operatives dress in freedom fighter uniforms, go into the countryside and murder and mutilate ordinary Nicaraguans.”
Such stories were what David Gergen, when he was the White House communications director, had once called “a folk art,” the President’s way of “trying to tell us how society works.” Other members of the White House staff had characterized these stories as the president’s “notions,” casting them in the genial framework of random avuncular musings, but they were something more than that. In the first place they were never random, but systematic, and rather energetically so. The stories were told to a single point. The language in which the stories were told was not that of political argument but of advertising (“New intelligence shows… ” and ” Now it has been learned..” and, a construction that got my attention in a 1984 address to the National Religious Broadcasters, ” Medical Science doctors confirm.. “, of the sales pitch.
This was not just a vulgarity of diction. When someone speaks of Orlando Letelier as “murdered by his own masters,” or of the WRHC signal reaching a people denied information by “Castro and his communist henchmen,” or of the “freedom fighter uniforms” in which the “communist operatives” of the “communist interior minister” disguise themselves, that person is not arguing a case, but counting instead on the willingness of the listener to enter what Hannah Arendt called, in a discussion of propaganda, “the gruesome quiet of an entirely imaginary world.” On the morning I met Guillermo Novo in the reception room at WRHC-Cadena Azul I copied the framed commendation from the White House into my notebook, and later typed it out and pinned it to my own office wall, an aide-memoire to the distance between what is said in the high ether of Washington, which is about the making of those gestures and the sending of those messages and the drafting of those positions which will serve to maintain that imaginary world, about two-track strategies and alternative avenues and Special Groups (Augmented), about “not breaking faith” and “making it clear,” and what is heard on the ground in Miami, which is about consequences
The parallels are so strong, the frustration so great, it’s more enervating than anything. The “notions”, the vulgar diction, the subjugation of facts to barren ideological landscapes. The fleeting glimpses of the characters like Meese and Helms who helped build the foundations for this whole regime. The slow-moving historical forces that would reverse and reverse again, doubling back like a river whose new course eventually cuts back through the old. The emptiness of the rhetoric and its consequences in the real world.
If nothing else, this is a lesson that yearnings for the ‘good old days’ or ‘how it used to be’ are fatuous, and the roots of today’s quandaries are worth searching for in those same times. You cannot go back, but nor should you. Only forward.
smq.world 