Sun-Sentinel Co. April 11, 2005
Marielito and proud: Journalist offers perspective on boatlift
By Chauncey Mabe
New York Times reporter Mirta Ojito knows a good story when she sees one, and she has the Pulitzer Prize to prove it.
She knows a good story when she's lived one, too. She came to the United States from her native Cuba as a 16-year-old, brought by her parents in the Mariel boatlift of 1980. But as a journalist, she was in no hurry to write the book of her life.
"When it comes to the boatlift," says Ojito, 41, sitting in the used-book room at Books & Books, down the street from her home in Coral Gables, "I can't separate myself from the reporter and I can't separate the reporter from the refugee."
Like the overwhelming majority of the 125,000 Cubans who dropped everything for a chance at freedom and opportunity in the United States, Ojito has made an exemplary life for herself. Yet even today, she says, the first thing most people think about when they hear the word "Marielito" is "criminals."
"I can't tell you how many times someone will say to me, `You don't look like a Marielito,'" says Ojito. "And these are other Cubans. Other Hispanics. Anglos."
But while Mariel may still carry a negative connotation, Ojito has never let it hold her back.
"And now," she says, "it's given me a book."
Released this month to coincide with the 25th anniversary of the Mariel boatlift, Ojito's book, Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus ($24.95), 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.
Mariel should have been a public-relations disaster for Castro, Ojito says, with the sight of tens of thousands dropping everything for a dash across the Florida Straits to freedom and opportunity. But in a brilliant move to deflect attention, he released criminals from prisons and mental patients from hospitals and placed them among the refugees.
"There is definitely a method to Castro's madness," Ojito says. "He is very smart. He tainted the boatlift by making it look like it was full of people no one wants. He termed us escoria, scum.
"In fact, when we left Mariel, the paper permitting the boat to sail from the harbor listed the cargo as lastre. Ballast."
The Brian de Palma remake of Scarface, with Al Pacino as a monstrous Mariel drug kingpin, made public perception much worse, Ojito says.
The actual number of criminals and the insane in the boatlift has been greatly exaggerated, Ojito believes. Indeed, the advocacy and analysis Web site GlobalSecurity.org lists the number of criminals at between 800 and 900.
Gathering memories
It was in 1999, while riding the Grand Central shuttle to work in Times Square, that Ojito got the idea that became Finding Mañana. She was reading a New Yorker magazine article about a woman with an artificial arm, which caused her to remember Mike Howell, captain of the Mañana, the charter boat that brought her family to Key West and freedom.
She decided she needed to thank Howell, who also has a prosthetic arm. She needed to thank her uncle, who brought a boat to Mariel, only to have it break down. She thought she should thank the captain of that boat, too.
"I realized," says Ojito, "that I had a large list of people I had to thank" -- and that as she had to track them down to do so, she might as well interview them while she was at it.
Ojito also realized that, apart from her own narrow experiences, she knew very little about the Mariel boatlift. To tell her own story, she had to uncover the roots of the historic events of which she had been a part.
"I had not been ready, either as a writer or a journalist, to write a book," Ojito says. "For me to have interest enough to write anything I felt I had to report it first. I was not engaged until I started getting things I didn't know. I took one episode of my life and reported the hell out of it."
Ojito reaches beyond her own experience to tell the stories of key figures in the boatlift saga, such as Bernardo Benes, the Cuban-born Miami banker who first cracked open the door to communist Cuba; Hector Sanyustiz, the unemployed bus driver who crashed the gates of the Peruvian embassy in Havana seeking asylum; and Ernesto Pinto, the Peruvian charge d'affaires, who refused Castro's demand to turn Sanyustiz and five companions over to communist officials.
Years of repression
But while Ojito does a thorough job of reporting the story -- not only the five months of the boatlift, but the three years of international politics leading up to it -- she doesn't scrimp on the human-interest angle.
Her parents, especially her father, were determined to leave Cuba almost from the beginning of the revolution. In fact, Ojito says, her mother and father planned to immigrate to the United States after their honeymoon, but the missile crisis intervened. After that, it became virtually impossible to get permission to leave.
"I can't say I had a bad childhood," Ojito says. "But it was different. There was duality. I excelled in school, but I was held back because my family was stigmatized as gusanos, worms, which is what Castro called those who left, or those who wanted to leave."
The thing that hurt most as a child, Ojito says, wasn't the privation that denied her chocolate, or even, in the fifth grade, "being denied God" when Castro outlawed Catholicism. It was, instead, the anguish of her father, whose longing for freedom in the United States was palpable.
He wasn't the only one.
"I go into great detail about what life was like in Cuba in the '60s and '70s," Ojito says of Finding Mañana. "I actually think that is the real contribution of the book. I don't know of another book that looks at daily life in Cuba at a time when it was truly an island, totally isolated."
The '60s and '70s, she says, made up "the worst years of repression in Cuba. Castro was young, a leftist, anti-American. Life in Cuba was very different. He not only wanted your obedience, but also your soul. Unless you fit that mold, and my family didn't, you had few choices."
A rising tide
Ojito says the period illustrates why communism always results in tyranny. In Cuba, there was nearly full employment, yet food and other essentials were forever in short supply.
"Communism doesn't work unless you eliminate capitalism completely," Ojito says. "The way to do that is by eliminating freedom. Capitalism is the freedom, or at least the illusion of the freedom, to do anything you want."
Cubans of all political persuasions knew the economy was in poor shape, but it wasn't until 1979, when, after two decades of isolation, exiles were allowed to visit, that it became apparent just how bad it really was there.
"We saw for the first time the experiences of our relatives in the United States," she said. "They came laden with presents. They had jobs, cars, they lived in the suburbs. We wanted to know why we couldn't also go to America."
Those who were open-minded, Ojito says, who tended to disagree with the regime, saw Cuba's economic woes as a failure of socialism.
"Those who liked Castro, and there were many, put it down to bad luck, or blamed the U.S.," she says. "The U.S. was blamed for everything, including hurricanes."
The Mariel boatlift, Ojito says, arose from a series of personal choices by first a few, then dozens, then hundreds, and finally thousands of people, thereby changing the history of Cuba, the United States and, not least of all, South Florida.
"This was not a decision made in Washington or Havana," she says. "I was struck by how history wells up from below, how it's made by individuals, not all with unselfish motives."
Despite the freedom and opportunity afforded by her adopted land over the past 25 years, Ojito does not hesitate when asked whether she considers herself a Cuban-American, or a Cuban who lives in America.
"I am a Cuban who lives in America," she says. "That is not a rejection of America at all. But it's my reality. I believe your identity is tied to where you spent your childhood.
"I don't mean that in any way as a repudiation of my experience in the U.S. It's not that I feel Cuban, it's that I am Cuban. Just like being tall, or being a woman. It's not something you choose."
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