Kissing Fidel - Magda Montiel Davis

Magda Montiel Davis made a terrible mistake in 1994 when she exchanged a formal kiss on the cheek with Fidel Castro during the reception at a Havana conference attended by hundreds of Cuban émigrés. Before the kiss, Montiel Davis was a respected member of her Miami community as founder of one of the largest immigration law firms in Florida. She and her staff provided an important service to immigrants from all over the world who needed entrance visas into the U.S. and/or exit visas from their home countries. After the kiss, she was a woman with a price on her head.

 

Anti-Castro Cubans in Miami would never forgive Montiel Davis for showing that level of respect for the one man in the entire world they most despised, and they were determined to ruin her business and the lives of her entire family in order to make her pay for her sin. Some, however, would be satisfied with nothing less than her death – and they were prepared to make it happen.

 

Kissing Fidel, subtitled “A Memoir of Cuban American Terrorism in the United States,” is Montiel Davis’s account of what happened to her and her family during the several months following the infamous kiss she exchanged with Castro. Montiel Davis shares with readers what it was like to receive thousands of threatening phone calls and notes, how it felt to hear herself denounced on local radio and television stations, how terrifying it could be to read newspaper editorials ranting about her, and how frustrating it was to be abandoned by the bulk of her legal staff when she needed them most.

 

Magda Montiel Davis

Magda Montiel Davis was a victim of “cancel culture” before there was such a term. What happened to her was terrifying and effective, but one can only imagine how much more effective the campaign to ruin her life would be today with all the social media weapons that can be used against anyone making a similar “mistake.” Montiel Davis is a brave woman, especially, it seems, when she is angry, and she got very, very angry about the treatment she and her family were receiving. She fought back; she persevered; and, in the long run, she won. But it was not easy, and it left scars.

 

“Whoever fights monsters, said Nietzsche, ”should see to it that in the process he himself does not become a monster.”  As quoted at the beginning of Part Three of Kissing Fidel)

 

The anger that helped so much to get Montiel Davis through her ordeal, she admits, came dangerously close to turning her into the kind of person she does not want to be. Yet, there were several occasions on which she seems to have let her desire for personal revenge override her better self. To the author’s credit she shares that side of the story as well.

 

Bottom Line: Kissing Fidel is an interesting memoir, one set inside a large community of Castro-regime survivors with which most people outside of South Florida are not particularly familiar. What happened to Montiel Davis and her family is heartbreaking and wrong. Sadly, the same thing is all too common today, and getting worse.

Review Copy provided by Publisher for Review Purposes