52 pages • 1 hour read
Mirta OjitoFinding Mañana
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Historical Context: The Cuban Revolution
Finding Mañana details life in Cuba in the decades following the Cuban Revolution, but the shadow of the revolution looms large over the text. The text focuses more on the impact of the revolution on Cuba and its people than on the conflict itself, but understanding the Cuban Revolution is critical to understanding both the text and the historical period that it details.
Castro successfully took control of Cuba in 1959, but the seeds of the revolution were planted many years prior. Pre-revolutionary Cuba was characterized by inequality and Cuba’s quasi-colonial relationship with the United States. The two countries’ histories were inextricably interwoven, and the United States was heavily involved in Cuba’s economy and political affairs. In 1903, the United States ratified the Platt Amendment, a treaty with Cuba that sought to protect Cuba’s independence and prevent foreign interests from taking hold on the island. The Platt Amendment legalized extensive US involvement in Cuba and it solidified the dominance of US-based companies who owned and operated various firms, businesses, and plantations on Cuban soil. American investment in the island grew exponentially in the years following the Platt Amendment, and although many Americans became wealthy as a result of their Cuban investments, the economy of Cuba remained stagnant.
Alongside the legal American businesses operating in Cuba, an illicit economy sprang up in part as a response to the 18th Amendment, which prohibited the sale and distribution of alcohol in the United States. US-based mafiosos like Lucky Luciano had been operating in Cuba for many years, but when the United States banned alcohol, Americans began to flock to Havana’s many bars and casinos, and business boomed in the city. Much in the same way that legal American businesses failed to guarantee prosperity for Cuba and its people, profits from gambling and alcohol sales mostly made their way out of Cuba and Cuban people saw little benefit. To add insult to injury, the presence of American organized crime was largely tolerated by Cuban state officials because they typically received a cut of the profits.
In 1940, Cuba ratified a new, democratic constitution, but the impact was negligible. Corruption was rampant and was seen as an increasingly unsurmountable impediment to democracy in the country. It was against the backdrop of this endemic corruption, poverty, and social unrest that Fulgencio Batista, a military officer-turned-politician, seized power in 1952. In public, Batista promised to address the corruption, but in private, he was pro-United States and had allied himself with the wealthiest business owners and planters in Cuba. Under his leadership, the situation in the country deteriorated further. In 1953, a young attorney named Fidel Castro began to use both political and military means to overthrow Batista’s government. Initially, his forces were concentrated in Cuba’s mountainous countryside, but the rebels quickly gained widespread popularity and control over the island. After years of fighting, they officially ousted the Batista government on January 1, 1959. Castro, who had promised a free, democratic Cuba for all Cubans, then began to implement a series of socialist reforms. He nationalized private properties and businesses, seized landholdings, and cracked down on dissent. He consolidated his political power and ended freedom of the press. Although wealth had been redistributed and access to education and medicine was now widespread, it was not the free Cuba that Castro had promised. It was this about-face and the privations of the years that followed that prompted Mirta Ojito’s family to become part of the vast and growing Cuban diaspora.
Historical Context: Post-Revolutionary Cuban Immigration to the United States
There have been multiple waves of immigration from Cuba in the years following the Cuban Revolution. The first wave comprised Cuba’s wealthy, elite class and those allied closely with the Batista government. These were individuals and families who, in many cases, had their property seized by the government and knew that they would be perceived as enemies of the revolution. Many of these early exiles from Cuba settled in South Florida, where they already had connections and used their wealth and influence to gain a real foothold in the city. Miami became a vibrant, multicultural space, and although there was pushback from the locals, it was an increasingly diverse city. Numbers vary and are hard to determine, but it is generally believed that 200,000 Cubans settled in South Florida in the years immediately following the revolution.
The Pedro Pan (Peter Pan) flights were another key wave of immigration. As part of a gambit to destabilize Cuba’s communist regime, the CIA and a group of influential Cuban dissidents flew Cuban children to the United States. The official US line was that these flights were being set up to increase opportunity for the children, but it was a soft-power technique to introduce young Cuban children to American values and capitalism. However, for many Cubans dissatisfied with the Castro regime, it was an opportunity to spare their children the kind of communist indoctrination that was taught in Cuban schools. Between 1960 and 1962, around 14,000 children were sent to the United States by their parents and placed in foster homes.
The Camarioca boatlift, which this book references, took place in 1965. Castro himself permitted this operation, and the United States took mostly individuals seeking political asylum and those with families already established in the United States. President Lyndon B. Johnson oversaw the exodus, and about 5,000 Cubans were admitted to the United States. Johnson—and later, Richard Nixon—also oversaw, between 1965 and 1973, a series of “Freedom Flights” on which Cubans with families in the United States flew from Varadero Beach to Miami.
During President Jimmy Carter’s administration, there was a marked effort to improve relations between Cuba and the United States, and in 1978, Castro began to allow Cuban exiles to visit their families on the island. At this time, many Cubans in the United States had not seen their homeland in almost two decades. Although the Cuban exile community regularly sent their families goods and medicines not available in Cuba, the visits unleashed a flow of foreign capital onto the island. Additionally, Cubans in Cuba began to understand just how much better their US-based relatives’ lives were, and dissatisfaction with the Castro regime intensified.
The Mariel boatlift of 1980 became the largest exodus from Cuba in the country’s history. The Mariel refugees were initially welcomed by the staunchly anti-communist American government with open arms. However, as their increasing numbers began to overwhelm South Florida’s immigration system and Castro’s vocal assertions that he was “emptying his prisons” to send “criminals” and “scum” to the United States began to worry Miami residents, the tide of public opinion began to turn. There was friction between earlier waves of Cuban refugees and those coming over as part of the boatlift, and even white and Black populations in Miami felt uneasy about the influx of new Cubans. In Finding Mañana, Ojito describes the stigma of being “Marielito.”
Immigration continued in the years following 1980. During the 1990s, many so-called balseros (rafters) made the dangerous journey across the Florida Straits from Cuba. Although the United States was still accepting political refugees from a communist regime they considered hostile, the flimsy nature of many of these crafts prompted US Attorney General Janet Reno to issue official statements urging Cubans not to make the perilous journey. This was the era of the wet foot, dry foot policy, in which Cubans intercepted at sea were returned to the island, but those who made it to US soil were granted the right to stay. Notable during this period of immigration was the case of young Elián Gonzalez, a boy who journeyed to the United States with his mother in 1999, but arrived alone after she drowned at sea. Cuban exiles in Miami were vehemently opposed to sending the boy back to Cuba, but his father was alive on the island and wanted to retain custody of his son. Cubans in Cuba were just as insistent that he be returned. Ultimately, Elián was sent back to Cuba. President Obama officially ended the wet foot, dry foot policy in 2017.
