Finding Maana is a vibrant, moving memoir of one family's life in Cuba and their wrenching departure. Mirta Ojito was born in Havana and raised there until the unprecedented events of the Mariel boatlift brought her to Miami, one teenager among more than a hundred thousand fellow refugees. Now a reporter for The New York Times, Ojito goes back to reckon with her past and to find the people who set this exodus in motion and brought her to her new home. She tells their stories and hers in superb and poignant detail-chronicling both individual lives and a major historical event.

Growing up, Ojito was eager to excel and fit in, but her parents'-and eventually her own-incomplete devotion to the revolution held her back. As a schoolgirl, she yearned to join Castro's Young Pioneers, but as a teenager in the 1970s, when she understood the darker side of the Cuban revolution and learned more about life in el norte from relatives living abroad, she began to wonder if she and her parents would be safer and happier elsewhere. By the time Castro announced that he was opening Cuba's borders for those who wanted to leave, she was ready to go; her parents were more than ready: They had been waiting for this opportunity since they married, twenty years before.

Finding Maana gives us Ojito's own story, with all of the determination and intelligence-and the will to confront darkness-that carried her through the boatlift and made her a prizewinning journalist. Putting her reporting skills to work on the events closest to her heart, she finds the boatlift's key players twenty-five years later, from the exiles who negotiated with Castro to the Vietnam vet on whose boat, Maana, she finally crossed the treacherous Florida Strait. Finding Maana is the engrossing and enduring story of a family caught in the midst of the tumultuous politics of the twentieth century.

On the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Mariel boatlift, a Pulitzer Prize winner's extraordinary memoir of her childhood in Cuba and her historic journey to America

"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)" Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

Born in Havana and raised there until the unprecedented events of the Mariel boatlift brought her to Miami, the author was the one teenager among more than 100,000 fellow refugees. This is her vibrant memoir of life in Cuba and the wrenching departure.

Mirta Ojito was born in Havana, Cuba, and came to the United States in 1980 in the Mariel boatlift. She has received the American Society of Newspaper Editors' Award for best foreign reporting, and she shared the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting, for her contribution to the series "How Race Is Lived in America." Her work has appeared in several anthologies, including Written into History: Pulitzer Prize Reporting of the Twentieth Century from The New York Times, edited by Anthony Lewis. Ojito has taught journalism at New York University, Columbia University, and the University of Miami. She writes for The New York Times from Miami. Lewis. Ojito has taught journalism at New York University, Columbia University, and the University of Miami. She writes for The New York Times from Miami.