Mirta Ojito, Finding Mañana

REMEMBERING MARIEL
by: DAVID ADAMS

FINDING MANANA: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus
By Mirta Ojito

April 1980 could not have gone worse for President Jimmy Carter. A mission to rescue U.S. hostages in Iran went horribly wrong. Eight American soldiers died.
Meanwhile, hundreds of boats were massing in a Cuban harbor near Havana called Mariel, for a rescue of another kind.

It was a one-two punch that dealt a knockout blow to the already weakening Carter administration. That November, Carter lost re-election, polling only 41 percent of the vote and winning only six states.

Bill Clinton also lost re-election that year as governor of Arkansas, in part because so many Mariel refugees ended up in his state.

To be sure, what Arkansas went through was nothing compared with Miami, which was faced with absorbing more than 125,000 new Cuban exiles. At the height of the exodus came the May 17 Liberty City riots, leaving 14 dead and $100-million in damage.
For years, it seemed Miami would always be marked by the Mariel boatlift. As myth would have it, Fidel Castro emptied his jails and dumped Cuba's "scum" on the United States. As a result, Miami Beach gained a reputation as a den of Cuban criminals, drug dealers and homosexuals from the island. A 1981 Time magazine cover story described South Florida as "Paradise Lost."

The wave of drugs and crime spawned the remake of the movie Scarface in 1983, starring Al Pacino as the vicious Mariel drug dealer Tony Montana. As if that wasn't enough, along came the TV show Miami Vice.

The Mariel boatlift did indeed reshape the demographics of Miami, but nowhere near as negatively as the media projected at the time. In fact, as Mirta Ojito recounts so persuasively in Finding Manana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus, the vast majority of those involved in Mariel endured a wrenching family affair that had nothing to do with their sexual persuasion or criminal tendencies.

For one thing, crime rates in Miami had already been rising well before Mariel, she points out. In fact, only 350 felons and 1,306 accused of lesser crimes were among those who crossed the Straits of Florida - about 1.4 percent of the arrivals. Ojito and her family are shining examples of the quality of Cubans who chose to escape. Her father was a hard-working and law-abiding truck driver, her mother a seamstress. She was only 16 when she landed seasick and bewildered on May 11, 1980, at Key West aboard an old towing boat named Manana.

Already a budding journalist, Ojito made mental notes of everything going on around her. Her keen observations have produced perhaps the most vivid account of Mariel to date. As the title suggests, Finding Manana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus is a personal quest for self-discovery and a historical narrative. Ojito weaves the two together seamlessly.

She arrived in this country speaking no English. Less than 25 years later, she is a distinguished reporter at the New York Times. Until her arrival in the United States, Ojito had known only Cuba's communist education system, where children were taught to be like Che Guevara - "Pioneers for Communism" - and forced to renounce God in fifth grade.

" My earliest memories are not of making friends, but of losing them to the United States," she writes.

Like many Cuban kids, she grew up walking an ideological tightrope, not knowing how to divide her allegiances to the revolution and her family.

School taught her that the revolution existed so that children like her could have a better future. But the very mention of the word "revolution" made her father grimace.
This is history at its best. It's rare that we get to read about political events from those who actually lived them - and are also capable of turning them into good prose. Ojito shares her personal feelings of turmoil and provides a painstakingly researched reconstruction of the events that led to the Mariel boatlift. Rather than give us the official version, or analyze the political decisionmaking process in Washington and Havana, Ojito takes a more colorful route. This includes introducing us to her rescuer, Mike Howell, the Manana's one-armed Louisiana boat captain and Vietnam vet.

Ojito captures the smells and senses, the looks on people's faces, with remarkable clarity. She follows her family's desperate quest to get to Mariel and find the Uncle Oswaldo, who had sailed from Miami to find them.

We are treated to a view of Mariel through the eyes of a young girl torn between her ties to childhood friends and her gradual awareness that she was not cut out for the communist system. She learns to live the "doble cara," literally the "two faces" needed to avoid trouble and pretend to be a loyal revolutionary.

Even so, she still manages to fall afoul of the system. She comes to a realization: "There was nothing I could do for the revolution, and therefore there was nothing the revolution could do for me."

Still, she has moments of revolutionary fervor, such as when terrorists plant a bomb on a Cuban airline flight from Venezuela to Cuba, killing all 73 people on board, including members of Cuba's national youth fencing team. The pilot was the father of one of Ojito's eighth-grade classmates. Ojito sings her heart out after going to hear Castro deliver a eulogy for the victims.

Ojito's research uncovers previously unpublished details about the secret talks between Castro and the Carter administration that, she argues, laid the foundation for Mariel. She also describes how Cuban exile radio stations in Miami promoted the boatlift as part of a battle for ratings.

But this was no conspiracy. Instead, it was a moment in history marked by a series of accidents and miscalculations. No one could have figured how events would play out that summer. Both Castro and Carter got it wrong.

In 1979, Castro opened the door to Cuban exiles by allowing greater contact between separated families in Havana and Miami. He had hoped to show the White House that exiles would support lifting the embargo and gradually normalizing relations.

Little did Castro realize how the visits from Miami would open the eyes of Cubans to the rewards of life on other side. When thousands crammed into the Peruvian Embassy seeking asylum, events got out of control and threatened to embarrass his regime. But Castro was quick to turn the crisis to his advantage, letting the floodgates open.

A Cuban exile, Napoleon Vilaboa, suggested to the Cuban government the idea of a boatlift. But his plan envisaged only 22,000 Cubans who would travel to Miami.

The Carter administration had even less of a clue, offering to welcome the Cubans with "open arms." In Miami and Havana, it was the green light many had been waiting for.
The first boats left Mariel on April 21. Within days, the U.S. Coast Guard reported seeing a thousand vessels of all shapes and sizes heading across the Florida Straits.

By the time the exodus ended in September, 125,266 Cubans had crossed.
" We did not envision that the man who held the keys to the jail in Cuba was going to let the people come out," State Department spokesman Hodding Carter III said.

It was a sobering lesson for Castro and the United States. The next time a similar situation arose, in the 1994 rafter crisis, Castro was better prepared. In what was effectively a mini-Mariel, Castro was in full control, manipulating Washington.

Ojito's account of the events leading up to the 1980 boatlift are gripping, particularly the chapter in which she describes the famous April 1 incident that triggered it all: A group of desperate Cubans rammed a hijacked bus through the gates of the Peruvian Embassy. In the resulting stampede, 10,000 Cubans filled the embassy grounds.

Ojito finds the bus driver, Hector Sanyustiz, now living alone and nearly destitute in Miami. He went unnoticed for years until a nephew called the Miami Herald to reveal his story. Sanyustiz tells Ojito how he dreamt up the plan to crash the embassy gates after getting in trouble at work and being offered the choice of becoming a gravedigger or a crocodile hunter.

All in all, it's a sorry tale. Few, besides Ojito, come out of it very well. The bus driver is a shell of a man, living alone and disabled by heart problems. The Miamians who acted as go-betweens with the Castro government have still not been forgiven by many exiles.
Howell, the amiable boat captain, was less affected but is still dealing with Vietnam. He lives by himself in New Orleans harbor - aboard the Manana, now rusty-looking and its paint peeling.

Like many Cuban exiles, Ojito says she left part of her soul in Cuba. The good news is the rest of it came over with her intact. Plenty of it went into this book.