Mirta Ojito, Finding Mañana

Rite of Passage
Cuba-born journalist Mirta Ojita turns the term Marielitos into a badge of honor

By Cynthia Joyce, Contributing writer

FINDING MANANA: A MEMOIR OF A CUBAN EXODUS
By Mirta Ojito
The Penguin Press, $24.95
" I don't remember a time when I didn't know that my family's most cherished aspiration was to someday, somehow, leave Cuba," writes award-winning journalist Mirta Ojito in her compelling new memoir, "Finding Manana." "After a while, wanting to leave became a way of life."

Her words will no doubt resonate with thousands of Cuban exiles who, like Ojito's family, immigrated to the United States after years spent wishing they didn't have to but praying that they could.

In 1980, Ojito's family finally left Cuba -- along with 125,000 other people in what became known as the Mariel boatlift. In a high-stakes political game of Red Rover, Fidel Castro let out "unwanted" Cubans; President Jimmy Carter let them in. For five months, that unlikely confluence created one of the largest mass migrations of Cubans to this country. In "Finding Manana," Ojito investigates the precarious circumstances, both personal and political, which led to that pivotal moment.

Focusing her well-trained reporter's eye on several of the boatlift's unwitting architects, Ojito traces the trajectory of each to the point of intersection: There's Hector Sanyustiz, the bus driver who plowed through the guarded gates of the Peruvian Embassy and paved the way for 10,000 Cubans to seek political asylum on its grounds; Bernardo Benes, the prominent Miami banker whose dialogue with Castro in the late '70s opened doors between Cuba and the influential Cuban-American exile community in Miami; Napoleon Vilaboa, who'd fought against Castro in the Bay of Pigs invasion and became one of the first to leave in the boatlift; and Capt. Mike Howell, a New Orleans native and Vietnam veteran who sailed his boat, the Manana, from Lake Pontchartrain to Cuba on a purely humanitarian mission -- to pick up 75 Cubans who were fleeing communism, among them Ojito, her mother and her sister, and carry them to Key West, Fla. (In one of the book's many poignant moments, Ojito finds Howell still living on the Manana on Lake Pontchartrain, and, in the perfect English that was not at her disposal 20-some years earlier, thanks him.)

As meticulously researched as their stories are, it's Ojito's accounts of her own coming of age in Cuba which are by far the most interesting, as she deftly describes the ways in which Castro's regime reached into the fabric of daily life in the 1960s and '70s, when "God and the Beatles were forbidden."

" How can such an intelligent girl believe in God?" her third grade teacher mockingly asked when she admitted to attending Mass with her mother. "Does God put food on your table? Nooooo, Fidel does." Several such incidences made their way into the official school record, and ultimately kept Ojito from attending the school of her choice. "I had been marked," Ojito remembers bitterly. The child's most egregious offense?

Writing letters to her uncle in America.

Castro may have been right to fear the anti-revolutionary activities of 8-year-olds, for when Ojito's relatives returned to Cuba for a rare visit a few years later, they brought with them stories that even the communist party's powerful propaganda machine couldn't compete with. Whereas Ojito's parents risked jail and worse to buy a ham on the black market, her aunt and uncle told stories of humane work conditions, well-paying jobs and nice new cars. "The English words they used with each other -- like 'party' and 'part-time' and 'weekend' . . . sounded festive and light," she recalls.

The luxury of taking anything lightly was one denied Ojito in her childhood, and the weight of her initial ambivalence about leaving Cuba lingers throughout "Finding Manana." As a result, this is much more than one Cuban exile's bittersweet tale; it's the memoir of an entire era.

Today what is remembered about Mariel is how many of the mostly American vessels that arrived in Cuba with the intention of picking up political refugees were forced by Castro to take hundreds of the criminals he'd flushed from his prisons -- in addition to, or, in some cases instead of, the friends and relatives for whom they'd come. While truly deviant criminals represented a small number of the Mariel refugees, they had the highest profile, not just in the American press, but also in the eyes of their fellow passengers. "Either we took those people, whoever they were, or no one left Mariel," Ojito writes. "So we spent that night the same way we'd endured the day: shoulder to shoulder with the kinds of people we'd tried to avoid all our lives."

Knowing what an immense act of courage it took to leave friends, family and country behind, Ojito refused to accept the term "Marielitos" as pejorative; "Finding Manana" goes a long way toward reclaiming it as the badge of honor she, and they, are entitled to.
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Cynthia Joyce is a New Orleans writer.