Finding Mañana

Finding Mañana: A Memoir of Cuban Exodus (2005) is an account of journalist Mirta Ojito’s emigration from Cuba during the Mariel boatlift in 1980. Ojito, a Miami newspaper columnist, contextualizes her own family’s journey against the socio-political upheaval of both Cuba and South Florida during the 1970s and 1980s. Finding Mañana details the political repression and suppression of dissident voices that characterized the Castro regime; explores the vast, unbroken network of Cuban and Cuban American families that endured decades of exile and diaspora; and delves deeply into the way that exile shaped both individual and cultural identity for Cuban émigrés in Miami. Ojito’s memoir is important as an account of the Mariel boatlift written by an individual who was both part of the emigration and is a trained journalist with expertise in the social, political, and economic world of Cuba and the Cuban diaspora.

This study guide refers to the 2005 hardcover edition of the text by Penguin Press.

Summary

The memoir begins with an account of everyday life in Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the 1970s. Ojito details the climate of political repression and the state surveillance network that watched each citizen’s every move. Ojito’s parents, who could remember how much better life had been before the Cuban Revolution, were not particularly political people, but they were opposed to the Castro regime and their lack of communist fervor was obvious to their friends and neighbors, although they tried to hide it. The family’s initial attempt to leave Cuba was thwarted by the Cuban Missile Crisis, but in the years that followed, political changes both inside and outside Cuba gave the family renewed hope. When Castro began allowing Cuban exiles to return to the island to visit their families, Ojito’s parents prepared to leave.

Interspersed with Ojito’s own family narrative are the stories of several key historical figures who would come to be associated with the Mariel boatlift. First is Bernardo Benes, a Cuban exile who rose to prominence as a politically connected Miami lawyer. Although he had once been part of Castro’s political movement, he had become disillusioned with the Cuban Revolution after Castro abandoned his promises of a democratic Cuba and turned toward authoritarianism. In Florida, Benes continued monitoring the situation in Cuba and hoped to improve life for Cubans still on the island. He also became part of a negotiation team between the Carter administration and the Castro regime. He sought better relations between the two nations and increased freedom of movement for both Cubans and Cuban exiles in the United States.

As Benes and others worked behind the scenes to alter US-Cuban relations, Ojito’s family experienced increasing discrimination because of their political identifications. Ojito was outed as Catholic at school, her parents were shunned by the pro-Castro zealots in their neighborhood, and Ojito watched in horror as more and more Cubans were arrested and imprisoned for low-level offenses and for speaking out against the regime.

The tide began to turn when bus driver Héctor Sanyustiz drove a bus through the gates of the Peruvian embassy. The embassy was filled with Cubans hoping to claim asylum in Peru, and Castro had a mounting crisis on his hands. Castro began to negotiate with Ernesto Pinto, a consular official from Peru, and with representatives from the US government. By the time 10,000 would-be exiles had gathered inside the Peruvian embassy, a frustrated Castro announced that, in a reversal of decades-old policy, he would allow them all to leave.

Although Castro subjected those wishing to emigrate to public disdain and persecution, thousands of Cubans were granted exit paperwork, and Ojito’s family was among them. In what would become known as the Mariel boatlift, Castro granted permission for Cuban exiles in Miami to charter boats to sail from Florida to the port of Mariel in northern Cuba to pick up their family members, with the stipulation that they also bring over those gathered in the Peruvian embassy as well as a growing list of Castro’s “undesirables”—freed prisoners, political and otherwise, whom he sought to expel to the United States. One of the chief architects of this plan was another Cuban exile, Napoleón Vilaboa. Like Benes, Vilaboa had been pro-Castro but had fled Cuba when he realized that Castro’s Cuba would never be democratic.

Ojito’s family left Cuba as part of the Mariel boatlift, which swelled in size to include more than 125,000 Cubans. They were sponsored by Ojito’s uncle Oswaldo and settled with his family in the Miami-adjacent, predominantly Cuban city of Hialeah. Miami at the time was marked by chaos and unrest, caused by the boatlift’s massive influx of refugees, race riots, and the drug trade. Although US public opinion initially supported the boatlift, Castro’s angry statements about sending only the “worst” Cubans to the United States from Mariel successfully shifted Americans’ perception of this new wave of refugees, and Ojito and her family did experience some discrimination in Florida. After years of homesickness and wondering how she fit into the Cuban American exile community in South Florida and the United States as a whole, Ojito found her voice as a journalist. With her insider knowledge and the trained eye of a reporter, she became a well-known expert in Cuban affairs and the Cuban American exile community.