2506 flag presented to John F. Kennedy at the Orange Bowl,

tended to suggest a city under systematic siege.

twenty months after the Bay of Pigs, when he promised to return the flag to the brigade “in a free Havana” and took it back to Washington, later expanding its symbolic content geometrically by consigning it to storage in what explicators of this parable usually refer to as a dusty basement.

In many ways the Bay of Pigs continued to offer Maimi an ideal narrative, one in which the men of the 2506 were forever the valiant and betrayed and the United States was forever the seducer and betrayer and the blood of los mártires remained forever fresh.

the local code, that access was controlled, in this case by one of the “double security” systems favored in new Miami buildings, requiring that the permit acquired at the gate, or “perimeter,” be surrendered at the second line of defense, the entrance to the building itself. A

The feel was that of a Latin capital, a year or two away from a new government.

Do not fear a glorious death: To die for patria is to live.

could be drawn up, or blocked, during times of unrest. For a city even then being presented, in news reports and in magazine pieces and even in advertising and fashion promotions which had adopted their style from the television show “Miami Vice,” as a rich and wicked pastel boomtown, Miami seemed, at the time I began spending time there, rather sp

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