Guest Post: The Idea of Cuba in Heir Apparent by Neil S. Plakcy

Please welcome back author Neil S. Plakcy to the blog today. When he was last here back in late January, he discussed how his story, "Cabbage Key," came to be in the anthology, Cupid Shot Me: Valentine Tales of Love, Mystery & Suspense. Mr. Plakcy is back today to explain the background of his tale in the Groovy Gumshoes: Private Eyes in the Psychedelic Sixties anthology. Edited by Mr. Michael Bracken and published by Down & Out Books, Mr. Plakcy is the sixth author in the read to appear here regarding this book.

 

The Idea of Cuba in Heir Apparent

 

When I moved to Miami in 1986, Miami Vice was in the middle of its run. I was working on the construction of a new festival marketplace in downtown Miami, and nearly every day I saw something that reminded me of the show—whether it was a taping going on as I drove past, or the iconic Brickell Avenue building with the hole carved out, or an evening out on the decaying deco streets of the beach.

I quickly learned about the Cuban flavor of Miami. Our receptionist had been born on the island and raised in Miami, and she kept us up to date on all the current telenovelas (whether we wanted to know or not.) One of our construction managers was a Juban. His grandparents were Ashkenazi Jews who hadn’t been able to emigrate to the US, so had settled for Cuba instead. He’d been born there, but his family left the island soon after Castro’s rise.

We ate lunch at a Cuban café we nicknamed “Carbon monoxide and flies,” because it was open to the street. Sometimes we got dinner at Versailles, pronounced ver-SIGH-ez, a Cuban icon in Little Havana with crystal chandeliers and a diner menu. When we were off site, we stopped at ventanas, walk-up windows serving tiny cups of strong Cuban coffee.

I learned about the Cubans who had left the island as soon as Batista fell, to preserve their wealth. Much of what we call South Beach, south of Fifth Street, consisted of decaying buildings holding those who fled the island through the port of Mariel in 1980. Then there were regular reports of rafts washing up on the shores of Miami Beach, islanders so desperate to escape that they trusted their lives to flimsy boats and homemade constructions of used automobile tires and a sheet for a sail.

So when Michael Bracken asked if I’d be interested in contributing to an anthology of stories about private eyes in the swinging sixties, I immediately thought of the Cubans I’d met and how varied their stories were.

My friend Elisa’s doctor father was an early anti-Castro activist, and he barely escaped by traveling to a medical conference in Florida in 1960. When his pregnant nineteen-year-old wife returned to their apartment after seeing him off, carrying my one-year-old friend in her arms, she discovered the apartment had been sealed off by the Cuban police. Her mother’s escape was an amazing story involving the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and a stopover in the Bahamas.

My grad school classmate Richard Blanco, the inaugural poet, says that he was conceived in Spain, born in Cuba, and raised in the US. I met people who had lost great wealth to Castro, and those who had sold everything to pay smugglers for a way out of the country.

Lincoln Road Mall (1960)

There were so many stories—which one resonated with me? I had spent time on the streets of South Beach while they were still locked in the sixties, so I felt that I knew the area. But which one could I tell? Who would my private eye be?

I wanted to understand what it was like to be gay in the middle of the 1960s counterculture. 1968 was a year of great sexual freedom and national change, from the Tet Offensive in Vietnam to the landmark Civil Rights act.

I’d heard so many stories about Miami Beach that I had to put George Clay there, in an office with a malfunctioning air conditioner, over a Chinese restaurant. I knew that as a straight-appearing Navy veteran, he’d be disdainful of an over-the-top client who looked and dressed like Liberace. But he was starved for clients, so he overcame that feeling to determine if the older man’s boyfriend was cheating on him.

That led me into the city’s Cuban connections, and a noirish plot involving wealthy emigres and a nascent plot to overthrow Castro. If you’re interested to see how it all works out, I hope you’ll read “Heir Apparent” in Groovy Gumshoes.

(And yes, the title of this essay is a nod to Wallace Stevens and “The Idea of Order at Key West.”)

 

 

Neil S. Plakcy ©2022

Neil S. Plakcy is the author of over fifty mystery and romance novels, including the best-selling golden retriever mysteries and the highly acclaimed Mahu series, a four-time finalist for the Lambda Literary Awards. A Lefty winner, his stories have been featured in the Bouchercon anthology Florida Happens, Malice Domestic’s Murder Most Conventional and the 2022 MWA anthology Crime Hits Home and others.He is a professor of English at Broward College in South Florida, where he lives with his husband and their rambunctious golden retrievers. His website is www.mahubooks.com.