A wave of fear swept over the small crowded boat as the ominous steel outline of a Coast Guard cutter approached. The 14 Cubans had been afloat for a full day and night in a desperate run for the Florida coastline. Their hearts sank one by one as they were hoisted from their wooden boat to the Coast Guard vessel. They couldn’t understand the language. No one understood what was happening. Odelys Martinez looked to her parents for comfort, but could tell they were scared. Suddenly, the uniformed men appeared with large guns and didn’t hesitate before riddling their now-emptied boat with bullets. It was swallowed by the water before their eyes.
“They just sunk it in the middle of the ocean,” Martinez says. “We were terrified.”
The families were then told to lay down in a row on the deck. A tarp was pulled over them as the engines roared, carrying them through the night to an unknown destination.
Life in Cuba
Martinez doesn’t have many bad memories of Cuba. While she’d been aware her parents were under a considerable amount of duress, she mainly recalls a fun childhood with friends, which included games like breaking into abandoned homes to play house and pulling pranks in the small town where she lived.
“In general, it was a really happy and adventurous childhood,” she says. “Life for my parents was definitely a lot harder for them than for me. I was just a kid. I don’t think I was aware of all the dangers that they went through just to try to feed us.”
Martinez remembers her mother working as a banker for an illegal gambling ring, which many Cubans used as a psychological escape and chance for extra money. Her mother would often be counting large stacks of money late into the night, and police searched the house on more than one occasion, searching for illegal funds.
Her father, who worked for a government food distribution agency, would sometimes bring home leftover cookies and treats for Martinez and her younger sister.
“It’s not like kids in Cuba just eat cookies,” she explains. “Every once in a while, there’s a cookie.”
Martinez also remembers being fed lies about America in school. She says teachers would make up stories about why America was interfering in Cuba to keep kids from asking too many questions.
“I want to think the majority of the people over there have realized that the government has failed,” she says. “And I know for a fact there are people there who still believe in the revolution, that still believe in Castro, and their opinion that America is the enemy, the big imperialistic nation.”
“But, the majority of the people are suffering and think of America as a place where they could have a life – the life they don’t have in Cuba.”
The Escape
In the midst of the Mariel Boatlift, Martinez’s mother had relatives in the United States who were constantly urging her to flee Cuba. It was a time when, as the American Immigration Policy Center estimates, 125,000 Cubans arrived in Miami during the seven-month period in 1980. The Cuban government would allow Cubans wishing to leave the country to go as long as they arranged their own transportation.
“They would just let you out if you had family,” Martinez says. “They would come to your door – the cops – put you in their car, and haul you down to the pier so you could leave, ‘cause you were considered an anti-revolutionary and a traitor.”
Martinez says many families were forced to transport prisoners to Florida as part of their deal with the government to retrieve their loved ones. The Immigration Policy Center estimates that 7 percent of the Cubans who arrived in Miami during the Mariel Boatlift had criminal or mental illness histories.
Martinez’s parents met in the heat of the boatlift. Her mother had made arrangements to leave, but when the time came she ran away, refusing to leave the man who would later be Martinez’s father behind.
“My dad insisted. He said ‘Leave and I will follow,’ but she didn’t want to leave him, so she stayed.”
For several more years Martinez’s parents stayed in Cuba, establishing a family, but always wanting to escape. Eventually, her mother traveled to Florida and visited Martinez’s grandmother and came back more determined than ever to face the risks involved in reaching America. She possessed the necessary papers for herself and both her children, but still refused to leave without her husband.
“She wanted to leave altogether. Because my dad worked for the government, the decision they came down to was that we had to leave illegally. We had to sneak out. My mom didn’t think my dad would ever be able to get out if we left him behind.”
While Martinez continued to enjoy her friends and the seventh grade, her parents began formulating a secret plan. They decided it would be best to travel across the country to Martinez’s grandparents’ house on the northeast side of the island. There they would leave under the cover of night in a wooden 18-foot boat owned by a distant relative.
Eventually the day came, and they piled into her father’s pickup and drove until Havana was a day behind them. It was the first leg of a journey that would change their lives. Martinez sat in the open bed of the truck with her aunt, trying to grasp everything that was happening.
“We left everything we had. And my great grandmother, she stayed. She didn’t want to come. She was old,” Martinez says. “I knew we were leaving because I’d overheard my mom, so I knew. I knew that was going to be the last time I saw her, so I was crying a lot when we left.”
After spending a few days with her grandparents while her parents finalized details for the trip, Martinez boarded the small boat with two uncles, a half a dozen cousins, their families and her family. She traveled with 14 people and a dog. They silently pushed of in the middle of the night and waited to start the engine until they felt far enough from shore.
“We basically all just had whatever we were wearing. We couldn’t have much weight in the boat.”
“I think during that time I started realizing Cuba wasn’t the only country that was poor,” she says reflecting on the children she met who ran the streets barefoot. “I think my family realized that too.”
Eventually, her parents decided it was time to continue toward their destination. They hired a smuggler to arrange an escape from the island and added two additional members to their group.
The smuggler showed up in an old van and took them to his house to spend the night. Just before dawn, they met at a small pier to pile into another 18-foot boat. Their relief, however, was short lived.
“Within 30 minutes our boat broke down,” she says. “We were there for another hour and the sun came out. We were so afraid we were going to get caught but finally it started.”
The group traveled all day until stopping on a small island for the afternoon. They were approached by a kind Dominican man who worked for the owner of a large estate. He begged them not to leave, warning of a large hurricane approaching. He asked his boss if the group could weather the storm on the island.
Martinez affectionately refers to the owner of the estate as a Texan guy with gray hair and a happy face.
“He totally opened the doors of his house; this big wooden house that was like four stories, I’d never seen anything like that in my life. [He had] commercial refrigerators. It was amazing.”
While Martinez’s family cooked for the man and cleared storm debris to earn their keep, Martinez spent her days pretending she was a princess in a foreign castle.
Martinez says her mother became close friends with the man, and he agreed to drive her into the nearest town to check in with her mother in Florida. Eventually, the man offered to fly 13 of them to Bimini in his personal jet. The three other men would bring the boat to meet them on the island.
The group spent their night in the home of yet another stranger. They were preparing to sleep on the beach when a local man found them and insisted they stay at his Jamaican aunt’s apartment down the road. Martinez remembers an amazing feast and the palpable kindness of the woman who had offered her humble dwelling to 13 people.
Coming to America
The next morning, the group met their boat and embarked on the final stretch of the journey. One of the men brought Martinez something she’d imagined all the years she spent pulling mangos off the tree in her Cuban backyard, an apple.
“That was the first apple I ever held. I didn’t even want to bite into it, and my dad was like, ‘Eat it. You’re going to have plenty of apples.’ I was like, ‘I just can’t believe it, this is like Snow White’s apple and Adam and Eve’s apple.’ I’d never seen an apple and here I am holding this apple.”
After what seemed like an eternity, Martinez remembers finally seeing a skyline slowly growing larger with every hour.
“Everyone was crying, ‘It’s Miami! It’s Miami!’” even though we weren’t sure what we were looking at.”
As their boat finally landed in the midst of South Beach, Martinez jumped into the water overwhelmed with joy. It was her 12 th birthday and she’d been given a new home and life as a present.
Television crews and immigration officers quickly greeted the weary group. After a few questions, they were given permission to contact their family members and told to pick up their papers in a week.
“We were lucky. It was that easy for us.”
Her first night in the United States, Martinez hesitantly stepped into the shower of her newly met grandmother’s house. The smell of Pantene and Finesse hair products, the kind her grandmother kept in the shower, would be ingrained in her mind forever.
“It’s funny because I just remember smells. Sometimes I’m just walking through the grocery store and I smell something and it brings me back to that first week that I was in the United States.”
Adjusting
For the majority of the time, Martinez’s memories of her plight and former life sit in the back of her mind like a familiar dream. The reality almost seems impossible now that she is fully acclimated to life as an American.
“It’s been a really amazing journey coming to this country, and I have my parents to thank. I think it took a lot of courage for them to put us on that little boat, not knowing what might happen.”
Martinez ’s parents spent their first year in America working 60 hours a week while Martinez cared for her younger sister. They worked in maintenance and housekeeping at a Naples hotel by day and spent nights washing dishes. Eventually her mother found a job working as a custodian at a high school and her father began installing shutters for a Russian immigrant’s company. After a few years he opened his own shutter business.
Martinez says she deeply respects the sacrifices her parents have made for her. Her mother has yet to grasp English, and her father often relied on her to translate at his earlier job interviews. She faced many of the same struggles.
“When we arrived I was in seventh grade and that’s when you get tortured the most,” she says. “I didn’t know any English.”
Martinez started school in January in a special program for non-native English speakers, but starting in the fall, she was forced into English-speaking classes. Her language barriers slowly diminished, but she still didn’t make any American friends until high school.
“I couldn’t understand half the things being said around me, but I was just pushed to do it, so I managed. But it was really hard.”
Martinez admits she’s been faced with a lot of pressure to succeed and make the most of the opportunities her parents worked so hard to give her. But, in general, they’ve been supportive of any pursuit she chose to follow. She’s currently finishing a master’s program for guidance counseling at the University of Florida.
“Any life and any career where I’m happy and I’m safe is good enough for them. They say, ‘We brought you here so you could have a good life, and you can choose what good is to you.”
Martinez decided to apply for citizenship this year, which is something she’d delayed for five years. She says she’d had trouble accepting that she could maintain her Cuban identity and culture and still embrace becoming a full American citizen.
“The past few years I’ve really been able to integrate my Cuban self with my American self – just really come to terms with the fact I have a little bit of both. And I have a lot of both. That’s just part of who I am.”