Mirta Ojito Papers

Mirta Ojito was born in Havana, Cuba on February 10, 1964 and was raised in the Santos Suárez neighborhood of Havana. Her parents, Orestes, a truck driver, and Mirta, both hailing from Las Villas, met and were married in the 1950’s as the Revolution began to gain ground. They had not been fans of either Batista or Castro and disliked the subsequent state imposition on their daily lives post-1959. Ojito’s father had several siblings in the U.S. and had long since planned to join them but did not get the chance during the first wave of the Cuban exiles. When Ojito’s parents married in October of 1962, they applied for a visa to the U.S. but it never came through due to the event of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ojito notes in her memoir that during her childhood, many friends and neighbors would leave and no one would hear from them again. She also recalls having teachers and administrators at her school keeping a detailed file on her and her family’s views of the Revolution and participation in revolutionary activities. She recalls also as a teenager working in la escuela al campo, which involved manual labor outdoors in lieu of a classroom education, and her boyfriend being conscripted for the war in Angola.

Ojito came to the United States during the Mariel boatlift on May 10th, 1980, leaving her life in Cuba behind. On April 19th, 1980 the Mariel exodus began. Ojito’s uncle, Oswald, traveled to Cuba in his boat “Major Rafael” to take Ojito’s family to Miami, but the boat ended up breaking down. At that time, he had been in Cuba for 17 days. Luckily, he got another captain, Mike Howell, a Vietnam veteran, to take them on his boat, called the “Mañana.” During the trip, Ojito, her sister and mother became separated from her father and uncle, who ended up on the boat the “Valley Chief.” They finally arrived at her uncle’s house in Hialeah on May 12th. Years later, Ojito sought out Howell for her memoirs to thank him for saving her life and to discover his perspective on the Mariel boatlift. They reunited in New Orleans, 22 years after the life-changing trip from Cuba to Key West.

Ojito finished high school in Miami and then attended Miami Dade College. She went on to earn a degree in 1986 from Florida Atlantic University and a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University, where she taught as a journalism professor. In 1987, she began working as a reporter for the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald for 9 years. In 1991, Ojito had a chance to interview Fidel Casto outside his hotel room in Guadalajara, Mexico while she was a reporter for the Miami Herald. In January of 1998, Ojito returned to her childhood home, an apartment in Havana, and found many of her family's old belongings still there. She was in Cuba reporting on Pope John Paul II’s historic visit to the island. A story from that trip was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. She covered issues of immigration for 15 years as a journalist in Miami and New York, and became known for her coverage of Cuban detainees in federal penitentiaries and stories about human rights in Cuba. In 1987, she interviewed Gustavo Pique, one of the detainees involved in the takeover of the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary. In 1996, she started working in the Metro desk of The New York Times, where she covered immigration and other issues.

She has won several major awards for her work, including a 1999 award for best foreign report from the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and she shared a 2001 Pulitzer prize for her reporting on race in America. In 2014, she joined NBC News, as the director of Standards for Telemundo. She was also a member of the Telemundo team that won an Emmy for the coverage of Pope Francis's visit to the Americas. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2005, Ojito published her memoir of exile from Cuba, Finding Mañana. She worked on it from 2002 to 2005. She cites that in her memoir she “wanted to tell the story of the first 20 years of the Cuban Revolution and why a people turn around to leave their country and why the United States receives them.” (2005)

In addition to her memoir, in 2013, she published the critically-acclaimed book Hunting Season: Immigration and Murder in an All-American Town, about the 2008 murder of an immigrant man. It was a 2014 International Latino Awards Finalist. She also appeared in the 2013 documentary Cubamerican, and produced three documentary films about immigration: Batalla en la Frontera (2015), Cosecha de Miseria (2016), and The Source (2017).