cover image FINDING MAANA: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus

FINDING MAANA: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus

Mirta Ojito, . . Penguin Press, $24.95 (302pp) ISBN 978-1-59420-041-0

Twenty-five years ago, between April and September 1980, 125,000 Cuban refugees arrived in Florida. Dubbed Marielitos for the port from which they departed and viewed by the press as the refuse of Castro's prisons and mental institutions, these people found a less warm welcome than earlier Cuban groups had. Pulitzer-winning journalist Ojito, then 16, and her family were among them. Her book is both a history of the exodus (which became known as the Mariel boatlift) and a restoration of the reputations of the thousands who "quietly slipped into the fabric of the city that had reluctantly welcomed them." Journalistic sketches of significant figures (the powerful Miami banker who negotiated the 1979 liberation of Cuban political prisoners; the used-car salesman and Bay of Pigs veteran who helped organize the flotilla; the captain of the boat the Ojito family sailed on; etc.) alternate with personal episodes, yet, strangely, the book lacks color. The action is dramatic, but the detail is deadening. For example, Ojito manages to make reading about her adolescent miseries—which can certainly be affecting—tedious and laden with boring rather than illuminating tidbits. And in telling of the duplicities of life under a repressive regime and the anxieties of escape and exile, she isn't able to weed out the important from the trivial. Agent, Heather Schroder. (On sale Apr. 11)