By Rich Tenorio | Edited by Patricia Guadalupe
Award-winning Cuban-American journalist Mirta Ojito still remembers coming across a chapter of forgotten history in a bookstore in Key West, Florida, nearly 20 years ago. It was there that she found a coffee table book detailing real life Valbanerapassengers in Spanish ownership a ship that sank during the 1919 Key West hurricane that claimed all 488 lives on board.
“Oh my god, that’s it. Titanic a story no one had ever heard of,” Ojito recalled thinking. “I was surprised I never learned about it in school.
Ojito seeks to rectify this through his debut novel, Deeper than the ocean – a mixture of past and present, with a plot that depends on Valbanera. While the characters are fictional, the historical background is largely drawn from real life.
“The story deserves to be told,” said Fr Valbanera. “I didn’t want to write non-fiction. I thought I’d try fiction.”
Ojito is a respected reporter who has covered topics such as race in America New York Times a story on the subject that won her a shared Pulitzer Prize in 2000. She also won an Emmy for Things of Miseryand Telemundo a documentary about the abuse of child migrant labor in the coffee industry in Chiapas, Mexico. He currently works for NBC news as Senior Director of the News Standards Team NBC and Telemundo.
“I have full-time journalism,” he says palabra. “It was very difficult to write fiction. I had to do a lot of research.”
It helped that two non-fiction books were written about him Valbanera – inclusive The Mystery of the Valbaner (Disappearance and Shipwreck)coffee table volume in Spanish by Fernando José García Echegoyen. That was the title that caught Ojit’s eye in a Key West bookstore in 2006.
“It got lost on the way to Havana,” she explained. “Decades later, off the coast of Key West, they were unable to recover any bodies. The divers were surprised to find no one.”
Ojito weaves a complex plot around this historical event – in her words, “a double story that connects a family of silkworms in the Canary Islands with the present.”
The chapters alternate between these narratives—the story of Catalina Quintana, the daughter of a silkworm farmer in the early 1900s, and Mary Denis, a 21st-century Cuban-American freelance journalist trying to uncover some family history.
Based in the Canary Islands, Mara is reporting on African immigrants to the islands when she receives one of her daily calls from her mother.
This particular call, Ojito said, contained a request: “When you go to the Canary Islands, can you please get my grandmother’s birth certificate?” As Ojito explained, Mara’s mother “wants to become a Spanish citizen. She needs her Spanish grandmother’s birth certificate.”
That ancestor’s name? Catalina Quintana. And Mara compares the unpleasant development. He learns that Catalina was listed among the dead on Valbanerawhich would make it impossible for her to continue the family line. Mara must use all her journalistic stamina to bring this story to its conclusion.
“There are elements of my life. [Mara]”I gave her my profession – journalism… It seemed to me that this would be the best profession to explore, to find the story of her ancestors’ history.”
She added: “I think it was better to make her a journalist than a detective. I don’t know anything about being a detective. I know about being a journalist.”
As the twin narratives of Catalina and Mary move from the Canary Islands to Cuba, the author includes plenty of detail from class-restricted interiors Valbanera to the poverty of the Cuban countryside, then and now.
“I didn’t make that up,” she said of the social restrictions on board Valbanera. “It was like everything. [else] – to be first class on the plane, business class, economy class. There will always be people who have the means to pay more for their dreams. The Valbanera was no exception.”
Alluding to the far more famous shipwreck that became an Oscar blockbuster, Ojito said the Valbanera was a “tragedy of titanic proportions”. And she said, “the real tragedy is that we don’t know about it. I think we don’t know because a lot of the people who died were poor immigrants who couldn’t read and write,” she said. [who were] in search of a better life.”
At the time she said Valbanera was front page news in major US newspapers, from New York Times to Miami Heraldwith coverage in Associated Press also before gradually disappearing from the headlines.
“We are not aware of that,” Ojito said. “It’s not part of our collective memory. I think it’s tragic.”
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