Finding Mañana: Booksigning & Reading with Mirta Ojito - Wed, April 20 7-8pm

FINDING MAÑANA: Booksigning & Reading with Pulitzer Prize-Winning Journalist Mirta Ojito

Octavia Books - 513 Octavia Street

Please join us for a booksigning and reading with Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Mirta Ojito featuring her just released book, FINDING MAÑANA: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus. Over five months in 1980 some 125,000 Cubans made the trip from Mariel Harbor to South Florida, some transported from the embassy courtyard, some from the jails, and many escorted by police from their homes, none with more than they could carry. Their chaotic and widely publicized exodus dominated American politics for most of the year and forever changed the Cuban émigré community. Today Mariel remains a reference point in immigration policy and a flashpoint for Cuban-Americans, who continue to debate its merits. Now, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Mariel boatlift, Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times reporter Mirta Ojito's new memoir, FINDING MAÑANA: A Memoir of Cuban Exodus (April 2005; The Penguin Press) illuminates this historical event through the story of her own family's life in Cuba and their wrenching departure.

Growing up, Mirta Ojito was eager to excel and fit in, but her parents'-and eventually her own-partial devotion to the revolution held her back. As a schoolgirl, she yearned to join Castro's Young Pioneers, but as a teenager, having understood the darker side of the revolution, she questioned whether she and her family would be happier elsewhere. When Castro announced that he was opening Cuba's borders, she was ready to go; her parents were more than ready: they had been waiting for this opportunity since they were married, having planned leaving shortly after the wedding, only to watch the Cuban Missile Crisis unfold on their honeymoon.

FINDING MAÑANA gives us Ojito's own story, with all of the determination and intelligence that carried her through the boatlift and made her a prizewinning journalist. The recipient of the American Society of Newspaper Editors' award for best foreign reporting and having shared the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for her contribution to the series "How Race is Lived in America," Ojito puts her reporting skills to work on the events closest to her heart, finding the boatlift's key players twenty-five years later-from the exiles who negotiated with Castro to the Vietnam vet on whose boat, Mañana, she finally crossed the treacherous Florida Straits. FINDING MAÑANA is the engrossing and enduring story of a family caught in the midst of the tumultuous politics of the twentieth century.