Mirta Ojito, Finding Mañana

SHOW: Weekend Edition Saturday 1:00 AM EST NPR

April 30, 2005 Saturday

Mirta Ojito discusses her memories of the Mariel boatlift
and her reunion with the captain of her boat.

SCOTT SIMON, host:

This is WEEKEND EDITION from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon.

One hundred and twenty-five thousand Cuban refugees came across the Florida Straits to the United States in hundreds of boats 25 years ago. It became known as the Mariel boatlift after the port city in Cuba from which they departed. The vast human flotilla signified how desperate so many were to leave Fidel Castro's revolution. It tested the sincerity of a US government under President Jimmy Carter that wanted to put human rights at the forefront of foreign policy. It also strained the binds of family for those who left and those who stayed behind. And as this new influx of Cuban Americans known as the Marielitos settled in the United States, many became identified in press accounts as criminals and mental patients whom Fidel Castro had simply been eager to send away.
Mirta Ojito and her family were Marielitos. Ms. Ojito, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, has written about that transforming experience. Her book is called "Finding Manana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus." She joins us from New Orleans.
Thanks very much for being with us.

Ms. MIRTA OJITO (Author, "Finding Manana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus"): Thank you so much.

SIMON: And for a lot of people, this story began with a bus crashing into the Peruvian Embassy driven by a man who wanted to get out of the country.

Ms. OJITO: Yes. In April 1st, 1980, a desperate, an unemployed bus driver--his name was and is Hector Sanyustiz--rammed a bus, his bus, against the gate of the Peruvian Embassy in Havana. There were five other people in the bus, including a child, a 10-year-old child, and a teen-ager. The guards opened fire, the Cuban guards guarding the embassy, and in the cross fire, one 27-year-old guard died. Immediately, the Cuban authorities asked the Peruvian government to hand over those six people whom they considered criminals, even though they didn't had a gun but they had somehow provoked the death of this soldier.

And at the time, there was a very young Peruvian diplomat; he did not even have the rank of ambassador yet at the embassy. He had been there for only a few weeks. And he firmly believed in the rule of law--he was a lawyer. He had been born...

SIMON: This is Ernesto Pinto is...

Ms. OJITO: Ernesto Pinto-Bazurco, correctly. He was born in Germany of the Peruvian father. And he simply said, `No, I'm not going to give them to you because you first have to prove that they killed this man. And by the way, there is such a thing as political asylum, and they have asked for asylum. I have to respect that.'

SIMON: The diplomat, Ernesto Pinto, 33 years old, as I recall. What possessed him to take such a bold and independent stance?

Ms. OJITO: I think he's a man who is guided by very strong principles. And he doesn't particularly like men in uniforms. He didn't like being bullied around. He did not like the way the government immediately dispatched one of its top people and who went into the embassy, you know, with this entourage and with guns demanding to get those people back. I mean, that's sort of macho behavior and aggressively military behavior turned him off. And he also was very much an expert on human rights--he still is. And he totally understood that he had an obligation to protect people who had risked their lives to get into his embassy to seek asylum. He also knew that they had not killed the soldier because he noticed that they were not armed. That was very courageous of him. He's now in Lima. And he does have the rank of ambassador.

And what happened then was the Cuban government got very angry and removed all the guards from the embassy and pretty much left it open for anyone who wanted to go in. In less than 36 hours, more than 10,000 Cubans had sought asylum in the embassy, and it became an international crisis.

SIMON: Your father, in particular, never liked the revolution.

Ms. OJITO: Correct. He really didn't have any formal education, but he somehow sensed that he deserved a better life and that his dreams could be validated someplace else. So I frankly don't remember of a time, growing up, when I didn't know that I would some day leave Cuba. My father felt a similar way. She was a lot more attached to Cuba than my father was. So really all of us were pretty much guided by his obsession. Eventually, it became an obsession to leave Cuba.

SIMON: May I ask you about--at least judging from the book, it sounds like just one of the most painful moments for a childhood possible. And I apologize in advance, but you do write about it. And that's when you got a look at your own school report one day because you had to take it home by hand, and you were told, `It's stapled, don't open it.' And, of course, like any good kid, the first thing you did was...

Ms. OJITO: I opened it. Yes.

SIMON: Could you tell us what you found in there.

Ms. OJITO: I found that the government knew a lot more about me than I thought they did. And I felt profoundly violated. They knew who we communicated with in the United States and that we indeed communicated with my uncle and my aunts. They knew, of course, that I went to church, that we believed in God, that I had had my Communion, that my parents wanted to leave Cuba, that they were called gusanos, worms. They were considered gusanos, and gusanos was a term used in the Cuba of the '60s and of the '70s for people who simply wanted to leave Cuba. It wasn't enough not to be against a revolution at that time; you had to be for the revolution. And any indication that you wanted to leave the country was interpreted as treason and as an abandonment, not only of the principles of the revolution but also of the nation, the country itself.

And I think it was very obvious who my parents were. They were not members of the neighborhood watchdog committee, a committee for the defense of the revolution, and they never really hid the fact that they wanted to leave Cuba. They didn't flaunt it either, but they did not hide it. So I think it was obvious they somehow knew that my parents were different.

SIMON: I want to get you to tell the story about the man who was the captain.

Ms. OJITO: He's a wonderful man. His name is Mike Howell. And as I told you earlier, I had decided to find this man in 1999 but really hadn't done much about it because I was working, having children, busy with life. And in January 2002, I decided to find him. And I did find him. And I told him when I met him that I could not have asked for a better hero in my life. He brought us from Cuba not charging a penny. And at the time when we were quite desperate, my Uncle Osvaldo Ojito who lives in Miami had left the Miami River on a boat called the Valley Chief to get us out of Cuba as soon as he knew he could. And when the Cuban government finally gave the Valley Chief the order to leave, the Valley Chief broke down. We thought at that point we would have to stay in Cuba or separate as a family to come here in different boats, and then he happened to go looking for another boat, and he ran into Mike Howell.

SIMON: Yeah.

Ms. OJITO: He was approached by several Cubans here in New Orleans who asked him to go and were willing to pay to go to Cuba to get their relatives, and he said, `I'm not going to take your money. Just pay expenses, and let's go.' And he went. Sadly, those people were not able to get their relatives out of Cuba and the Manana was coming back empty. And that's when my uncle ran into him.

SIMON: What was it like for you to find him?

Ms. OJITO: Oh, my gosh, incredibly emotional. It still is. I can't get enough of him when I'm here in New Orleans. I want to see him all the time. And we've become quite good friends. He's been to my house, met my husband and my children, to my sister. He was there for Christmas Day last year. He--it was very emotional for both of us because he didn't know--when he returned from Cuba, he knew that what he had done had been something quite important. He says--he told me that he remembers crying as we left the boat, but he had never heard about us. He never knew what had happened to us.

SIMON: Yeah.

Ms. OJITO: And then all of a sudden, here's this reporter who goes to his boat and says, `By the way, you brought me from Cuba 22 years ago, and I'm here to thank you.' He was shocked and extremely happy.

SIMON: It must be nice for him, well, to know a little something, you know, 25 years later what happened to the little girl who was on his boat.

Ms. OJITO: Absolutely. You know, there was a lot of stigma associated with the Mariel boatlift. Castro did send some criminals--the numbers have been greatly exaggerated but, nonetheless, absolutely, some criminals and mentally troubled people were sent in the boatlift. So he actually never knew who he brought to the United States. He waited and he saw to a certain degree. He hoped that they had all been good people, that we had all been good people, but he had no way of knowing. So I come back and I tell him not only about my family but about other families who were in that boat that I knew about who had done quite well, and I think it allowed him to breathe a little easier.

SIMON: Can I get you to tell me the story of--you had a book reading there in New Orleans and the captain was there.

Ms. OJITO: Yes. One of the reasons--in fact, the reason why I came to New Orleans for the book reading was because I frankly wanted everyone in New Orleans or as many people as I could, I wanted people to know that this wonderful man lived here. I have told him often that I could not have asked for a better hero in my life. And many of his friends were there, many members of the Cuban community, and many people in New Orleans were there because they had read about him in the local newspaper. And it was just a thrill for me to be able to sort of share the stage with him. And in the end, people wanted not only my signature which is customary when people buy a book, but they wanted his as well.

(Soundbite of laughter)

Ms. OJITO: And there was a long line of people getting my signature and his. And I thought, `This must be unique.' It was quite wonderful. He was just thrilled with it.

SIMON: Ms. Ojito, nice talking to you.

Ms. OJITO: Thank you so much.

SIMON: Mirta Ojito. Her book is "Finding Manana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus."
To hear the extended interview and to read an excerpt from her book, you can come to our Web site, npr.org.