David Rieff, author of Los Angeles: Capital of the Third World, provides a personal and anecdotal examination of the phenomenon of Cuban exiles in south Florida, and their bittersweet experience of being torn between the imagined Eden of their home and their success in America. Exiled since the rise of Castro in 1959, in a foreign city less than 200 miles from their home, but unable to resist America's still-overwhelming attraction, they have transformed Miami from a tourist town to the paradigm of the 21st-century American metropolis.