Finding Manana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus

by Mirta Ojito

Overview

A vibrant, moving memoir of prizewinning journalist and New York Times reporter Mirta Ojito and her departure from Cuba in the Mariel boatlift—an enduring story of a family caught up in the tumultuous politics of the twentieth century.

Mirta Ojito was one teenager among more than a hundred thousand fellow refugees who traveled to Miami during the unprecedented events of the Mariel boatlift. Growing up, Ojito was eager to fit in and join Castro’s Young Pioneers, but as she grew older and began to understand the darker side of the Cuban revolution, she and her family began to aspire to a safer, happier life. When Castro opened Cuba’s borders for those who wanted to leave, her family was more than ready to go: they had been waiting for the opportunity for twenty years. 

Now an acclaimed reporter, Ojito tells her story and reckons with her past with all of the determination and intelligence—and the will to confront darkness—that carried her through the boatlift. In this stunning autobiography, she sets out to find the people who set this exodus in motion, including the Vietnam vet on whose boat, Mañana, she finally crossed the treacherous Florida Strait. In Finding Mañana, Ojito and tell the stories of the boatlift’s key players in superb and poignant detail—chronicling both individual lives and a major historical event.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593835265
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	04/04/2006
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	320
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Mirta Ojito was born in Havana, Cuba, and came to the United States in 1980 in the Mariel boatlift. She has received the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Award for best foreign reporting, and she shared the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, for her contribution to the series "How Race Is Lived in America." Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century from The New York Times, edited by Anthony Lewis. Ojito has taught journalism at New York University, Columbia University, and the University of Miami. She writes for The New York Times from Miami.

Read an Excerpt

From Finding Manana by Mirta Ojito

The police came May 7, 1980, when I was about to have lunch: a plain yogurt, sweetened with several spoonfuls of sugar, fried yellow plantains, and an egg and ketchup sandwich on half a loaf of Cuban bread. I was wearing a bata de casa, a housecoat, over my painstakingly ironed school uniform: a blue skirt with two white stripes around the bottom hem, signaling I was in eleventh grade, and a starched white poplin blouse, which I didn’t want to stain with grease.

I was just sitting down when I heard the steps on the stairs. Heavy, loud steps. One, two. One, two. One, one, two. I could tell they belonged to a woman and two men. Years of listening to people climb the twenty polished steps that led to our apartment had trained my ear for the idiosyncrasies of footsteps. By the way she paused after every other step, I knew the woman was our downstairs neighbor and la presidenta del comité, the president of the neighborhood watchdog committee. The men were agile and led the way. They skipped several steps and got to the door before I could alert my mother.

A knock.

On the red plastic clock above the television set it was fifteen minutes past eleven in the morning. I looked at my mother, who was straightening her skirt at the door to the bedroom, where she had been sewing a dress. Her maroon skirt was littered with pieces of yellow thread. I waited for a signal from her. She heard the knock too, but did not move. Then our neighbor spoke.

“Mirta,” she called out to my mother, a little out of breath. “Open up. It’s the police. You are leaving.”

My mother swallowed and opened the door. A burly officer, unshaven and dressed in olive green pants and a white T-shirt with large sweat rings under his arms, walked in. Without introducing himself, he read our names out loud: Orestes Maximino Ojito Denis, Mirta Hilaria Muñoz Quintana, Mirta Arely Ojito Muñoz, and Mabel Ojito Muñoz.

“Are these the names of the people who live here?” he asked. My mother, who had started to tremble, said yes.

“There is a boat waiting for you at the port of Mariel,” he said, pausing a bit to gauge our reaction. He went on, “Are you ready and willing to abandon the country at this time?”

“Yes,” my mother said, her voice merely a whisper.

Table of Contents

	Prologue	1
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
	Epilogue	269
	Acknowledgments	279
	Notes	285
	Index	297

Editorial Reviews

… in Finding Mañana, Mirta Ojito's impressive evocation of growing up in Havana in the 1970's, there is no place for nostalgia. In trenchant, muscular prose suitable for describing Cuba's increasingly grim realities, Ms. Ojito, a reporter for The New York Times, writes about her coming-of-age and her family's rescue in the Mariel boatlift of 1980 … Ms. Ojito triggers the memory of a papaya on a hot day in the Cuban countryside: bright color, sweet pulp, bitter seeds.
— The New York Times

Wendy Gimbel

A thorough and exciting account of the events leading to the daring, massive exodus of more than 125,000 people from Cuba's Mariel harbor in 1980. Cuban-American journalist Ojito's mission here is not only to tell her own family's story-they were finally allowed to join relatives in South Florida after waiting 15 years-but to probe a question: How could Fidel Castro allow the hemorrhaging of the Cuban population? Ojito's parents were apolitical and thus undesirable in the communist country, where they were frequently targeted for ridicule and exiles were called gusanos (worms) for abandoning the revolution. Yet by the late 1970s, during the presidency of Jimmy Carter, a thaw began to develop between Cuba and the US, which had imposed an economic embargo on the nation for two decades but now hoped to negotiate for the release of native and American prisoners from Cuba's prisons. Castro trusted Carter's record on human rights and needed to boost a sagging Cuban economy by courting the exiles in America. A successful Cuban living in Panama, Bernardo Benes, was chosen to mediate the detente, which orchestrated return visits by Cuban-Americans (now called mariposas, butterflies) to spend dollars in Cuba. In the spring of 1980, an unemployed bus driver named Hector Sanyustiz made embarrassingly public the desperation of ordinary citizens seeking a way out of the country when he rammed a bus through the Peruvian embassy in Cuba and 10,000 asylum seekers flooded in. Amid complicated diplomatic wrangling, a plan was devised to bring expatriates in southern Florida on chartered boats to Mariel harbor, from which they would transport thousands of undesirable relatives out of the country. Ojito, areporter for the New York Times tells a suspenseful story, moving back from May 7, 1980, when police arrived at her family's Havana doorstep asking if they were willing to "abandon" their country, through the years preceding their triumphant arrival on American soil. A skillful melding of individual personalities with the grand currents of history.

Kirkus Reviews

It’s impossible not to admire the boldness, the candor, the moral toughness of Ms. Ojito’s writing. In this wonderful memoir, she ransoms herself from the seductions of nostalgia, and reclaims instead the beleaguered Cuba of her childhood—a Cuba that is all the more interesting for not being looked at through the prism of longing and desire.”—The New York Times
 
“In Finding Mañana, Mirta Ojito goes a long way in righting the Mariel story and bestowing some belated dignity on this ragged stepchild of exile history.”—The Los Angeles Times
 
"Ms. Ojito's book is filled with the anguish of separation and the tragedy of living under a merciless regime. But it also celebrates familial bonds and undying love—not to mention freedom itself, a gift too often taken for granted by those of us who have never had to live without it.”—The Wall Street Journal
 
“The insight Ojito brings to bear, coupled with the crispness if her prose…make this memoir required reading for anyone interested in the history of post-Batista Cuba or Cuban-American relations.”—The Washington Post
 
“New York Times reporter Mirta Ojito melds the personal with the political in a moving account of her family's departure from Cuba. She also provides a solid historical context for those five months in 1980 when 125,000 Cubans arrived in Florida, a mass exodus that came to be known as the Mariel boat lift.”—People 
 
“Ojito’s historical reconstruction is fascinating... (She) has created a poignant and poetic memoir of an important moment in Cuban and US history.”—The Washington Times
 
“…this is much more than one Cuban exile’s bittersweet tale; it’s the memoir of an entire era.” —Times-Picayune
 
“Ojito's book…is unlike most entries in the genre of the modern memoir. More than a novelistic exercise in creative recollection, it’s a skillful blend of reportage and family history about a pivotal international event.”—Sun-Sentinel
 
“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.”—St. Petersburg Times
 
“… a political drama … bound to be a page-turner.”—Palm Beach Post 
 
“A thorough and exciting account…a suspenseful story…A skillful melding of individual personalities with the grand currents of history.”—Kirkus Reviews
 
“...fast-paced and riveting…Ojito uses her formidable research, eye for detail and interviewing skills to lay bare the behind-the-scenes machinations…through her writing, she has opened a window for others, and offers a fine introduction to the human face of history.”—Bookpage
 
“…a rich, but nuanced picture of life in Cuba under Castro and the intimately personal nature of politics.”—Library Journal

“Until I read this book, the Mariel refugees were headlines in a newspaper, stereotypes fed by political rhetoric. In Finding Mañana, Mirta Ojito has given me a peek behind the headlines, and a sense of how history affects the individual." —Esmeralda Santiago, author of When I was Puerto Rican
 
“Finding Mañana is a strongly written, straight-shooting and affecting memoir about one family’s experiences leading up to the Mariel boatlift out of Cuba.  Rich in detail and concise in its capturing of that chapter of Cuban history, the book is also a touching tale of a young woman’s coming of age during a time of great political turmoil and personal travails.”—Oscar Hijuelos, author of The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love

From the Publisher

Award-winning journalist Mirta Ojito recounts her family's escape from Cuba via the Mariel Boatlift in 1980. Ojito narrates the chapters that pertain to her personal history. In contrast, Juan Arturo voices the stories of other refugees and the political and social events that led to the 1980 exodus. Ojito recalls her hesitation to leave the only home she'd ever known, but circumstances left her family no choice. She infuses her narration with the conflicted emotions she faced as a teenager. Arturo narrates in a clear, strong voice that is perfect for conveying the more journalistic chapters. However, he recounts the stories of individual refugees with heartfelt emotions, conveying their desperation to escape communism and the fear they faced at pursuing freedom. Ojito writes a moving yet informative narrative. A.M. © AudioFile 2025, Portland, Maine

MAY 2025 - AudioFile