Annotation
Finding Manana is a multilayered memoir that documents a pivotal moment in U.S.-Cuban relations while telling the story of an immigrant's private reckoning with the life she abruptly left behind. In May of 1980, sixteen-year-old Mirta Ojito was sitting down to lunch when a knock on the door brought the call that her family had been waiting for since the early 1960s: a chance to leave Castro's Cuba for the United States. Minutes later, she and her family were escorted by two policemen away from their lifelong home, never to return. At Mariel harbor they boarded a boat named Manana and sailed to Key West, joining the more than 125,000 other Cubans who fled to the United States in the five-month-long mass exodus that came to be known as the Mariel boatlift." "Twenty-five years later, Ojito sheds new light on this widely publicized flight that dominated American politics for almost a year and changed the Cuban exile community forever. In Finding Manana, she unearths the secrets behind how Mariel came to be while filling out the shaded contours of her own life. Now a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, Ojito tracks down the individuals in Cuba and in the United States - long forgotten by history - whose singular actions set forth the events that had such a cataclysmic impact on her life and the lives of thousands on both sides of the Florida straits."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author Notes
Mirta Ojito taught journalism at New York University, Columbia, and the University of Miami.
| Genre | NonFiction Coming of age Memoir |
| Topics | Immigrants Refugees Journalists Castro, Fidel Adolescence |
| Setting | Florida |