Opinion: Whatâ€™s in Miamiâ€™s Bloodstream?

Casey Kelbaugh for The New York Times

The White Cube party at Soho Beach House last November, during Art Basel Miami Beach.

Miami

TOM WOLFE has often declared that journalistic truth is far stranger — and narratively juicier — than fiction, a refrain he's returned to while promoting his latest sociological novel, the Miami- focused "Back to Blood." With cultural eyes turning to Miami for this week's Art Basel fair, and on the heels of a presidential election in which South Florida was once again in the national spotlight, "Back to Blood" would seem a perfectly timed prism.

Yet Mr. Wolfe would have done well to better heed his own advice. The flesh-and-blood reality not only contradicts much of his fictional take, it flips the enduring conventional wisdom. Miami is no longer simply the northernmost part of Latin America, or, as some have snarked, a place filled with folks who've been out in the sun too long.

For Mr. Wolfe, the city remains defined by bitter ethnic divisions and steered by la lucha: the Cuban-American community's — make that el exilio's — frothing-at-the-mouth fixation on the Castro regime across the Florida Straits. The radio format whose beats Miami moves to isn't Top 40, rap or even salsa, but all Fidel, all the time. It's a crude portrait, established in the '80s, reinforced by the spring 2000 telenovela starring Elián González, hammered home in the media by that fall's Bush v. Gore drama and replayed with the same script every four years since.

Yet the latest data hardly depicts a monolithic Cuban-exile community marching in ideological lock step. Exit polls conducted by Bendixen & Amandi International revealed that 44 percent of Miami's Cuban-Americans voted to re-elect President Obama last month, despite a Mitt Romney TV ad attempting to link the president with Mr. Castro. The result was not only a record high for a Democratic presidential candidate, it was also a 12 percentage-point jump over 2008.

In fact, among younger Cuban-American voters, the split between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney wasn't even close — Mr. Obama won handily. Clearly, the demographic handwriting is on the wall, not only for the brand of hard-line conservative thinking that has often kept a stranglehold on local pols, but also for the 50-year-old United States economic embargo against Cuba, enduring only out of the perceived presidential kingmaker role held by Miami's Cubans.

ON the art front, the gap between outsider perception and Miami reality is just as striking. Until the late '90s, the local art scene was essentially moribund. Artists hoping to make a living from their craft had two choices: land a teaching job or pack their bags. However, thanks to Art Basel's catalytic spotlight, the last decade has seen a vibrant art scene blossom, behind only New York and Los Angeles. Give Mr. Wolfe credit for injecting this phenomenon into the plot of "Back to Blood," which centers on a shady Russian oligarch and his donation of $70 million in renowned modernist paintings to start a Miami art museum. The paintings turn out to be fake, to the mortal chagrin of the local elites who climbed over one another to bask in this act of largess's reflected glory.

Two historical events are fused together here: first is the 1963 founding of Miami Beach's Bass Museum of Art, much of whose donated collection of Old Masters, courtesy of the sugar baron John Bass, turned out to be forgeries. (So much for that "other" Mona Lisa.) Second is today's Miami Art Museum, set to relocate to a lavish new Herzog & de Meuron-designed building in time for Art Basel 2013, albeit as the rechristened Pérez Art Museum Miami in honor of the local condo developer Jorge Pérez and his $35 million donation of art and cash.

However, rather than — as Mr. Wolfe would have it — being wowed by Mr. Pérez's gift, many of Miami's key art collectors (whether they moved to town from Havana or Manhattan's Upper East Side) turned their backs, preferring to invest in their own private museums, many of whose open-to-the-public holdings eclipse those of the Miami Art Museum. Moreover, several of the museum's trustees resigned in protest of the Pérez renaming, calling it an ego-driven insult to Miami, whose taxpayers had already contributed $100 million to the new building. One trustee demanded the return of donated artwork, intending to find it a more deserving home. None of this is the behavior of a money-bedazzled and unsophisticated art crowd — quite the opposite.

The changes in Miami's celebrated night life are no less dramatic. The debauched South Beach whirl that once drew so much attention now exists only on "reality" TV. Both the leggy models and the even leggier drag queens have packed up their high heels and moved on; sidewalk bottlenecks these days are more apt to be caused by oversize strollers than by fashion shoots.