Finding mañana : a memoir of a Cuban exodus / Mirta Ojito.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Ojito, Mirta A.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Ojito, Mirta A.

Ojito, Mirta A--Childhood and youth.

Cuban American women--Biography.

Cuban American women.

Cuban Americans--Biography.

Cuban Americans.

Immigrants--United States--Biography.

Immigrants.

United States.

Mariel Boatlift, 1980.

Girls--Cuba--Biography.

Girls.

Cuba--Biography.

Cuba.

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

302 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Penguin Press, 2005.

Summary:

Finding Manana is a multilayered memoir that documents a pivotal moment in U.S.-Cuban relations while telling the story of an immigrant's private reckoning with the life she abruptly left behind. In May of 1980, sixteen-year-old Mirta Ojito was sitting down to lunch when a knock on the door brought the call that her family had been waiting for since the early 1960s: a chance to leave Castro's Cuba for the United States. Minutes later, she and her family were escorted by two policemen away from their lifelong home, never to return. At Mariel harbor they boarded a boat named Manana and sailed to Key West, joining the more than 125,000 other Cubans who fled to the United States in the five-month-long mass exodus that came to be known as the Mariel boatlift.

Twenty-five years later, Ojito sheds new light on this widely publicized flight that dominated American politics for almost a year and changed the Cuban exile community forever. In Finding Manana, she unearths the secrets behind how Mariel came to be while filling out the shaded contours of her own life. Now a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Ojito tracks down the individuals in Cuba and in the United States-long forgotten by history-whose singular actions set forth the events that had such a cata-clysmic impact on her life and the lives of thousands on both sides of the Florida straits.

Born in Havana at the height of the Cold War and just two years after the Cuban missile crisis, Ojito grew up torn between the whispered antigovernment criticisms that filled her home and the pull of a revolution that demanded absolute loyalty, even from children. Her experience illustrates a chapter often neglected in more than four decades of antagonism between Washington and Havana: the Cuba of the 1970s, when no one was getting in, few were getting out, and the Caribbean iron curtain was firmly in place. Finding Manana is a peek behind that curtain and into the heart of one courageous teenage refugee. It is a reminder of how truly interwoven our lives are, how much power ordinary people can wield, and how history can indeed well up from below.

Contents:

1 Worms Like Us 11

2 Bernardo Benes: Our Man in Miami 35

3 Butterflies 57

4 Hector Sanyustiz: A Way Out 75

5 Ernesto Pinto: An Embassy Under Siege 95

6 Unwanted 121

7 Napoleon Vilaboa: The Golden Door 135

8 Leaving Cuba 159

9 Captain Mike Howell: Sailing Manana 187

10 Tempest-Tost 215

11 Teeming Shore 233

12 With Open Arms 261.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [285]-296) and index.

ISBN:

1594200416

OCLC:

56367822