Finding Manana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus » (Reprint)

Mirta Ojito was born in Cuba and came to the United States in 1980 in the Mariel boatlift. As Miami correspondent for the New York Times, she shared the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting for a series on race.

“New York Times reporter Mirta Ojito melds the personal with the political in a moving account of her family's departure from Cuba.” —People

In this unforgettable memoir, Pulitzer Prize—winning journalist Mirta Ojito travels back twenty-five years to the event that brought her and 125,000 of her fellow Cubans to America: the 1980 mass exodus known as the Mariel boatlift. As she tracks down the long-forgotten individuals whose singular actions that year profoundly affected thousands on both sides of the Florida straits, she offers a mesmerizing glimpse behind Cuba's iron curtain—and recalls the reality of being a sixteen-year-old torn between her family's thirst for freedom and a revolution that demanded absolute loyalty. Recounting an immensely important chapter in the ever-evolving relationship between America and its neighbor to the south, Finding Mañana is a major triumph by one of our finest journalists.

“In this wonderful memoir, Ojito ransoms herself from the seductions of nostalgia and reclaims instead the beleageured Cuba of her childhood.”
—The New York Times

The New York Times - Wendy Gimbel

… in Finding Mañana, Mirta Ojito's impressive evocation of growing up in Havana in the 1970's, there is no place for nostalgia. In trenchant, muscular prose suitable for describing Cuba's increasingly grim realities, Ms. 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 … Ms. Ojito triggers the memory of a papaya on a hot day in the Cuban countryside: bright color, sweet pulp, bitter seeds.