Memoirs
A sheaf of tributes to memory's remarkable selectivity.
By Andrew Ervin
Washington Post
Sunday, May 15, 2005

Listening to the Voice of America
In 1980, bowing to intense international pressure, Fidel Castro finally allowed more than 125,000 dissidents and counterrevolutionaries to flee Cuba. The teenage Mirta Ojito was among them, as were any number of other so-called "undesirables" -- homosexuals, convicts, the mentally insane -- whom Castro wanted out of his hair. In Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus (Penguin Press, $24.95), Ojito, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for the New York Times, looks in depth at her experience in the Mariel boatlift and at its lasting political repercussions.

Ojito -- whose earliest memories are "not of making friends but of losing them to the United States" -- spent her childhood torn between her parents' refusal to accept the precepts of Castro's Cuba and the pressure from her teachers and classmates to conform to Communist Party ideology. "Surely none of my friends had fathers who listened to the Voice of America as mine did," she writes, "his ear pressed to the radio so the neighbors wouldn't hear the distinctive, official-sounding announcer." But her family wasn't alone in their desire to emigrate, and Ojito intersperses her own story with novelistic portraits of a few colorful characters responsible for launching the exodus to Florida, including a Miami disc jockey, a man who sought asylum by driving a bus through the gates of the Peruvian embassy, and, most memorable, a one-armed Vietnam vet whose humanitarian impulses sent him to Cuba to pick up refugees.

Those well-researched stories drive home the effects of that era's political climate on individual lives, and even on the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan. The insight Ojito brings to bear, coupled with the crispness of her prose -- especially her detailed descriptions of diplomatic finagling -- make this memoir required reading for everyone interested in the history of post-Batista Cuba or of Cuban-American relations.


Andrew Ervin is a writer and critic in Champaign, Ill. He is a frequent contributor to Book World.