December 5, 2025

Say Hello to My Little Friend, by Jennine Capó Crucet

Two very important details about my 2025 are that I developed a baffling obsession with Pitbull (the Miami artrepreneur also known as Mr. 305 AND Mr. Worldwide), a character who continues to delight me in his absurdity and whose collaborator’s contributions are the best part of his tracks, and also I stopped using Google with its built-in AI in favour of Duck Duck Go, an inferior search engine. But maybe Duck Duck is less inferior than I thought, because when I did a search for Pitbull’s recent coffee table-style book (photographs alongside his many aphorisms like, “Life is not a waste of time, and time is not a waste of life”), it delivered me instead the vastly superior literary product, Say Hello to My Little Friend, by award-winning author Jennine Capó Crucet, a novel billed as Moby Dick meets Scarface whose protagonist is a Pitbull impersonator who’s just been served a cease and desist order by the bald man himself.

Having never read Moby Dick or seen Scarface, and merely being obsessed with Pitbull, however, I wasn’t sure how the novel would go over, but wow, it turned out to be the most bananas wonderful book I’ve encountered in a longtime. The story of Cuban-born Miami resident Ismael “Izzy” Rayes who decides to reinvent himself as Tony Montana from Scarface when his Pitbull career comes to an end, the entire premise a statement from the author about the stereotypes and perceptions about her native city, and how these ideas are limits. (Capó Crucet’s Pitbull critique/commentary was one of the most scathing and hilarious parts of the book).

Meanwhile, Izzy develops a curious connection to Lolita, a captive whale in the Miami Seaquarium, who can read his thoughts and who understands him better than anyone, particularly his situation as someone who is far from his native home, separated from his mother, and stuck in his own kind of captivity as to what the possibilities of his life might be.

And together (cerebrally, at least) the two embark on a journey, one that brings Izzy into the orbit of an intense girlfriend who just happens to be his friend’s sister, a whole bunch of iguanas, a criminal mastermind in disguise as a nice and decent guy, and a whole crew who arrived in America on the same raft that delivered Izzy there from Cuba when he was 7 who do not like the questions he’s asking now in an attempt to remember his own past and what happened to his mother.

If it sounds like this novel is a container for everything, I haven’t even told you yet that it’s also a guide to common birds of Miami, and so much more. I read it absolutely dazzled by Capó Crucet’s talent and awed that she’d partly written it out of spite toward the people who thought that Scarface and Pitbull was where ideas about Miami should begin and end, creating a work that’s a thumb on the nose of all that, but also so rich, poignant, and beautiful…

And oh my god, the ending! The ending! (And I’m not even talking about the epilogue that’s in the voice of Pitbull in a pseudo-intellectual vein [“I’ve gotten to see so much of the world because of my music, and yet the more I saw, the more I realized that despite its catchiness, despite the wildly successful branding that calling myself Mr. 305 created for me and my team, it is at its core a falsity. No one person can “be” a place, for one thing.”]

I loved this book so much. Thank you, Duck Duck Go.