The longing for a romantic, imaginary past suffuses Cuban memoir writing. We are more than familiar with the enchanted island that never was: the blue sea, blue sky and swaying palm trees; lovers walking hand in hand on the wide sea wall they call the Malecon; the socialites in their evening dresses dancing the night away at the Havana Yacht Club; and always, everywhere, the strains of Guantanamera.
But in Finding Manana, Mirta Ojito's impressive evocation of growing up in Havana in the 1970s, there is no place for nostalgia. In trenchant, muscular prose suitable for describing Cuba's increasingly grim realities, 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.
Her postmodern Cuba is an isolated island where fractured images of absurdity abound and fatalism is a hedge against madness: "No one could get in; no one could get out. God and the Beatles were forbidden, men with long hair were arrested, homosexuals and artists were sent to labor camps."
Of course, the US, Fidel Castro's bete noir, was blamed for everything. (If there were no eggs in the market, it could only be that the Americans had poisoned the chickens.)
It's Beckett's Endgame, but with a tropical coda. You're in Cuba; there's no cure for that. Yet, in fact, there was a road that led out of that island hell. On April 1, 1980, when a bus driver intentionally crashed through the gates of Peru's embassy and more than 10,000 Cubans took refuge in the beleaguered compound, Castro opened the port of Mariel and invited any of the Cubans in exile who dared risk a visit to the island to take boatloads of their discontented relatives back to the US. But there was a caveat: They couldn't leave without taking convicts and others Castro called "scum" from his jails. In a five-month period, more than 125,000 Cubans scrambled into boats and headed for Florida.
Ojito's account of her family's dash for freedom acts as a kind of magnet for a bunch of smaller stories that are held together in a kind of force field. In fact, if there is any flaw in this fascinating memoir, it is in the rather arbitrary insertion of these stories into an otherwise flowing text.
Yet while distracting readers from the more important family narrative, these lesser tales do introduce the political brokers who made Mariel possible: Ernesto Pinto, the Peruvian diplomat who successfully negotiated the safety of the Cubans who sought asylum in his embassy; Napoleon Vilaboao, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs, who met with Castro and persuaded him to go along with the boatlift; and Bernardo Benes, a prominent Miami banker who believed that, more than anything, Cubans wanted to be free of Castro.
Perhaps the richest material concerns Benes. While in Havana, negotiating the release of political prisoners, he hears his driver crying after receiving the gift of a radio: "If a man weeps at the sight of a cheap plastic radio, Benes wondered, what would others be willing to do for a late-model car, a carpeted home, a succulent meal? And, he dared ask himself, what would Cubans be willing to do for freedom?"
Ojito's personal drama becomes more intense as the time to leave grows closer. But it is her immensely vigorous father who provides the energy that sends the family hurtling toward Mariel. He grasps, without any study deeper than his own intuition, that he is entitled to freedom and also to the pursuit of happiness. How could he continue to live in Cuba when he had to carry a dead pig hidden in a suitcase across the island to give his family a forbidden treat? How could he deal with having a 16-year-old daughter who had never read a line of Pablo Neruda's poetry but could recite Che Guevara's final letter to Castro?
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