Mirta Ojito, Finding Mañana

The New York Times Company
May 15, 2005, Sunday Late Edition

Marielitos' Way By Alexandra Starr

Alexandra Starr, a former political correspondent for Business Week, was an Organization of American States fellow from 1995 to 1997.

FINDING MAÑANA: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus.
By Mirta Ojito.

MANY Cubans who reached Miami as part of the Mariel boatlift took to lying about how they'd arrived. It was embarrassing at first to be associated with the flotilla that ferried more than 125,000 Cubans across the Straits of Florida in the spring of 1980: the vessels on which the exiles traveled were filled with prisoners and mental patients too.

The idea that Fidel Castro had turned the United States into a dumping ground for delinquents helped doom President Jimmy Carter's re-election bid. And as Mirta Ojito points out in ''Finding Mañana,'' the boatlift still shapes American-Cuban relations a quarter-century later: ''U.S. lawmakers talk about never allowing another Mariel . . . while their Cuban counterparts play the Mariel card: the implied threat that Cuba has millions of people who are desperate to leave and a government ready to let them loose whenever it is politically convenient.''

But the story and legacy of Mariel are more complex than the reigning mythology, as Ojito, now a reporter for The New York Times, demonstrates in this engrossing book. The genesis of the boatlift on which she herself arrived in the United States at 16 can be traced to Héctor Sanyustiz, who on April 1, 1980, barreled a bus through the gates of the Peruvian Embassy. After the diplomat in charge refused to hand Sanyustiz over to Cuban authorities, Castro exacted his revenge, ordering the confines of the embassy bulldozed down, and letting it be known that Cubans who wanted to leave the country should gather there. Within days more than 10,000 people swarmed the once immaculate gardens. Napoleón Vilaboa, a Bay of Pigs veteran in Miami, floated an ingenious proposal to Castro: Why not allow Cuban exiles to collect their relatives on the condition they take some of the embassy refugees as well? Mariel was designated as the port of embarkation; and after the Florida boatlift organizers broadcast the slogan ''Let my people come'' on Miami radio -- ''perfectly aligned,'' Ojito notes, ''with Castro's current battle cry: 'Let them go!' '' -Carter was trapped. He seemed to endorse the boatlift implicitly at a May 5 campaign event, when he declared the United States would ''continue to provide an open heart and open arms to refugees seeking freedom from Communist domination.'' That was all some fence-sitting Miamians needed to hear.

While Carter later insisted his remarks had been taken out of context, the number of Cubans arriving on Florida's shores surged - including ''hundreds of men with glazed eyes, shaved heads and what appeared to be prison or hospital garb.'' Indeed, a majority of the immigrants were young men, many of whom had done jail time. That's not to say they were all hardened criminals. As Ojito points out, some had been put away for minor infractions like stealing a bicycle. Still, the enterprise was indelibly tainted in the eyes of the public. Carter announced that Mariel could proceed only if the Cubans were vetted before arriving in the United States. Castro refused to negotiate, and the boatlift was effectively shut down.

''Seventeen years, eight months and 10 days'' after she left Havana, Ojito, who'd been sent to Cuba to cover Pope John Paul II's 1998 visit, went to her old home, and decided to find and thank the captain of the Mañana, the boat that had ferried her to the United States. ''That quest became the impetus that led to these pages,'' she writes, ''the story of my journey -- from red-beret wearing Communist pioneer to a soaking wet, filthy refugee stepping onto the docks of Key West, too young and bewildered to fully comprehend the events that had swept me ashore and given me new life.

'' The book's title is a play on words: Ojito may literally have been finding the Tomorrow, but in the process she was coming to terms with the past. And in his own way, back in 1980, so was Mike Howell, the man who piloted Ojito to the United States. A one-armed Vietnam veteran, he ''had always felt he lived in a hurry, as if someone had pushed the fast-forward button of his life story and walked away, leaving him to the mercy of the rushed, blurred images.'' Collecting the Ojitos and fellow Cuban refugees became a redemptive passage.

The most affecting sections of Ojito's narrative concern her immediate family. Her parents had always longed to relocate to the United States. ''After a while wanting to leave became a way of life,'' she recalls. ''My sister and I rarely got to wear our nicest outfits, because my mother saved them, pressed and covered in plastic,'' for the trip north. If the boatlift had been halted early on, it would have been ruinous for the Ojitos. Crazed crowds were attacking compadres who had publicly declared they wanted to leave. Mirta and her sister would have been barred from school; her father would have lost his state-assigned job as a truck driver.

Once in the United States, the Ojitos soon blended in. Her father works as a chauffeur; her mother recently retired as a factory worker. They are representative of the 97 percent of Marielitos who are taxpaying, law-abiding United States residents. Perhaps one sign of how fully they have integrated is their mixed view on immigration. About half say they wouldn't support another Cuban boatlift. The stigma surrounding Mariel may have dissipated. But even those who benefited enormously from coming to the United States are not eager to provide the opportunity to their former countrymen.