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?
In America, he told his daughter, a working man could count on being able to buy a ham and cheese sandwich every single day. But more important, a man did not have to fear that anyone would rob him of his soul.
Unlike her father, Ojito found herself somewhat conflicted at the prospect of leaving Cuba. Writing about the huge and chaotic boatlift, she says, "We left the way one leaves a cherished but impossible love: our hearts heavy with regret but beating with great hope."
Despite the complexity of her own feelings about her family's departure, Ojito manages to give a clear and memorable picture of what went on at Mariel: how Uncle Osvaldo, her father's brother, came for the family on a less-than-seaworthy shrimp boat; how Mike Howell, the one-armed "captain" of the Manana, came to their rescue, negotiating the family's passage to Key West even while the Cubans were pointing an AK-47 at his forehead.
It's impossible not to admire the boldness, the candor, the moral toughness of 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.
In Finding Manana, Ojito triggers the memory of a papaya on a hot day in the Cuban countryside: bright color, sweet pulp, bitter seeds.
April 14 to April 20 In March 1947, Sising Katadrepan urged the government to drop the “high mountain people” (高山族) designation for Indigenous Taiwanese and refer to them as “Taiwan people” (台灣族). He considered the term derogatory, arguing that it made them sound like animals. The Taiwan Provincial Government agreed to stop using the term, stating that Indigenous Taiwanese suffered all sorts of discrimination and oppression under the Japanese and were forced to live in the mountains as outsiders to society. Now, under the new regime, they would be seen as equals, thus they should be henceforth
Last week, the the National Immigration Agency (NIA) told the legislature that more than 10,000 naturalized Taiwanese citizens from the People’s Republic of China (PRC) risked having their citizenship revoked if they failed to provide proof that they had renounced their Chinese household registration within the next three months. Renunciation is required under the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), as amended in 2004, though it was only a legal requirement after 2000. Prior to that, it had been only an administrative requirement since the Nationality Act (國籍法) was established in
With over 80 works on display, this is Louise Bourgeois’ first solo show in Taiwan. Visitors are invited to traverse her world of love and hate, vengeance and acceptance, trauma and reconciliation. Dominating the entrance, the nine-foot-tall Crouching Spider (2003) greets visitors. The creature looms behind the glass facade, symbolic protector and gatekeeper to the intimate journey ahead. Bourgeois, best known for her giant spider sculptures, is one of the most influential artist of the twentieth century. Blending vulnerability and defiance through themes of sexuality, trauma and identity, her work reshaped the landscape of contemporary art with fearless honesty. “People are influenced by
Three big changes have transformed the landscape of Taiwan’s local patronage factions: Increasing Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) involvement, rising new factions and the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) significantly weakened control. GREEN FACTIONS It is said that “south of the Zhuoshui River (濁水溪), there is no blue-green divide,” meaning that from Yunlin County south there is no difference between KMT and DPP politicians. This is not always true, but there is more than a grain of truth to it. Traditionally, DPP factions are viewed as national entities, with their primary function to secure plum positions in the party and government. This is not unusual
RSS