Covert City
The Cold War and the Making of Miami
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- 14,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
Secret operations, corruption, crime, and a city teeming with spies: why Miami was as crucial to winning the Cold War as Washington DC or Moscow.
The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous period of the Cold War. What's less well known is that the city of Miami, mere miles away, was a pivotal, though less well known, part of Cold War history. With its population of Communist exiles from Cuba, its strategic value for military operations, and its lax business laws, Miami was an ideal environment for espionage.
Covert City tells the history of how the entire city of Miami was constructed in the image of the US-Cuba rivalry. From the Bay of Pigs invasion to the death of Fidel Castro, the book shows how Miami is a hub for money and cocaine but also secrets and ideologies. Cuban exiles built criminal and political organizations in the city, leading Washington to set up a CIA station there, codenamed JMWAVE. It monitored gang activities, plotted secret operations against Castro, and became a base for surveilling Latin American neighbors. The money and infrastructure built for the CIA was integral to the development of Miami.
Covert City is a sweeping and entertaining history, full of stunning experimental operations and colorful characters--a story of a place like no other.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this vigorous chronicle, historian Houghton (Nuking the Moon) and Driggs, a former Cuba analyst at the University of Miami, recap the duel between communist Cuba and the anticommunist Cuban exiles who fled to Miami following the country's 1959 revolution. The exiles played a key part in the U.S. government's efforts to oust Castro—furnishing the doomed foot soldiers of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, conducting raids against Cuban infrastructure, and staging provocations like taking a shot at the UN headquarters in Manhattan with a bazooka while Che Guevara was speaking there in 1964. Meanwhile Castro used the diaspora as cover for spies—by some measures, according to the authors, the Cuban intelligence service is now the world's most formidable, having infiltrated the U.S. government to an extreme degree; Cuba makes use of the intelligence gathered as a tradeable commodity. Later chapters explore Miami's role as a hothouse of misadventure, including a bumbling 2020 coup attempt that tried to overthrow the Venezuelan government with 58 men and 10 rifles. The authors maintain a sympathetic attitude toward Cuban exile militants, treating them more as genuine pro-democracy patriots than pawns of American imperialism. Miami itself features mainly as a backdrop to their exploits, which unfold in colorful scenes of paramilitary operations. Lucid and entertaining, this adventuresome account covers well-trod ground with panache.
