Mirta Ojito's Blog
September 17, 2025
Dear Reader
Dear Reader,
The book you hold in your hands is the book I owed my mother. In many ways, this is her novel, as it is fused with the stories that she regaled me with up until the day she died. That day I went to see her to take her grocery shopping as I did every week. When we came back, we had a lunch she assembled from delicious leftovers and then we sat and talked. As always, more so as she aged, her stories meandered to her mother, Catalina Quintana, who died too young; and to her childhood in a remote corner of Cuba living in a dirt-floor house with four younger siblings and a stern, illiterate father.
My mother was a natural storyteller, and, recognizing this, I had been taking notes of our talks. That Sunday, our last together, I pulled out my phone and began recording her. I don’t think she noticed. Or, if she did, it didn’t stop her from unspooling her tale.
At the time I was deep into the writing of a novel about the 1919 shipwreck of the Valbanera, a ship full of Spanish immigrants that left the Canary Islands on its way to the Americas. Half-way through the voyage, after stops in Puerto Rico and Cuba, the ship succumbed to the winds of a killer hurricane and sank deep into the muddy sands off the coast of Key West. Though the ship was found a few days later, the bodies of 488 people were never found, forever lost to their loved ones, but not to history.
And yet, I had never heard about it until 2006, when walking on the streets of Key West I happened to notice a coffee table book for sale in a gift shop. The title of the book immediately grabbed me, as it was in Spanish, El misterio del Valbanera. I bought it for $10 and began reading it soon after I reached the hotel. How did I not know about this sad story of immigrants losing their lives to the sea?
I remember looking out my window to the sea and thinking of all the souls lost in the treacherous ninety miles of water that both separate and unite Key West and Cuba. As a reporter, I’ve covered countless of similar stories: immigrants losing their lives to the sea in pursuit of a dream, the same dream of a better life that fueled my own leaving Cuba at sixteen, also in a boat, though a much smaller one than the Valbanera.
Years went by, but the story of the doomed ship stayed with me until one day, seemingly out of nowhere, the tale of a family from the Canary Islands began to take shape in my mind as easily as if I had always known them. From the beginning, the main character took on my grandmother’s name, Catalina. And, before I knew it, my mother’s stories found their way to my pages. The more I wrote, the more the story became about my mother, though that had never been my original intention.
Some early readers have asked me how much of this book is true and how much it’s a product of my imagination. That’s an almost impossible equation to calculate. It’s as difficult as trying to answer the question of where ideas come from, but I’m certain that this novel was my mother’s last gift.
Months after I had finished the book, and almost twenty years after I first thought about writing it, I got a notification from Ancestry.com with an update about my DNA. For a few years now, Ancestry has told me that fifty one percent of my DNA is from Spain; the rest a combination of places from Europe and Africa. Now, Ancestry said, they could pinpoint the specific region of Spain my genes originated from. Eagerly, I clicked on the link and stared in shock and wonder as a cluster of oddly shaped islands filled the screen, the Canary Islands, a place I only recently went to but feel that I know intimately. There is no doubt that this story has always lived inside me, dear reader, and now it is my pleasure to share it with you.
Mirta Ojito
The book you hold in your hands is the book I owed my mother. In many ways, this is her novel, as it is fused with the stories that she regaled me with up until the day she died. That day I went to see her to take her grocery shopping as I did every week. When we came back, we had a lunch she assembled from delicious leftovers and then we sat and talked. As always, more so as she aged, her stories meandered to her mother, Catalina Quintana, who died too young; and to her childhood in a remote corner of Cuba living in a dirt-floor house with four younger siblings and a stern, illiterate father.
My mother was a natural storyteller, and, recognizing this, I had been taking notes of our talks. That Sunday, our last together, I pulled out my phone and began recording her. I don’t think she noticed. Or, if she did, it didn’t stop her from unspooling her tale.
At the time I was deep into the writing of a novel about the 1919 shipwreck of the Valbanera, a ship full of Spanish immigrants that left the Canary Islands on its way to the Americas. Half-way through the voyage, after stops in Puerto Rico and Cuba, the ship succumbed to the winds of a killer hurricane and sank deep into the muddy sands off the coast of Key West. Though the ship was found a few days later, the bodies of 488 people were never found, forever lost to their loved ones, but not to history.
And yet, I had never heard about it until 2006, when walking on the streets of Key West I happened to notice a coffee table book for sale in a gift shop. The title of the book immediately grabbed me, as it was in Spanish, El misterio del Valbanera. I bought it for $10 and began reading it soon after I reached the hotel. How did I not know about this sad story of immigrants losing their lives to the sea?
I remember looking out my window to the sea and thinking of all the souls lost in the treacherous ninety miles of water that both separate and unite Key West and Cuba. As a reporter, I’ve covered countless of similar stories: immigrants losing their lives to the sea in pursuit of a dream, the same dream of a better life that fueled my own leaving Cuba at sixteen, also in a boat, though a much smaller one than the Valbanera.
Years went by, but the story of the doomed ship stayed with me until one day, seemingly out of nowhere, the tale of a family from the Canary Islands began to take shape in my mind as easily as if I had always known them. From the beginning, the main character took on my grandmother’s name, Catalina. And, before I knew it, my mother’s stories found their way to my pages. The more I wrote, the more the story became about my mother, though that had never been my original intention.
Some early readers have asked me how much of this book is true and how much it’s a product of my imagination. That’s an almost impossible equation to calculate. It’s as difficult as trying to answer the question of where ideas come from, but I’m certain that this novel was my mother’s last gift.
Months after I had finished the book, and almost twenty years after I first thought about writing it, I got a notification from Ancestry.com with an update about my DNA. For a few years now, Ancestry has told me that fifty one percent of my DNA is from Spain; the rest a combination of places from Europe and Africa. Now, Ancestry said, they could pinpoint the specific region of Spain my genes originated from. Eagerly, I clicked on the link and stared in shock and wonder as a cluster of oddly shaped islands filled the screen, the Canary Islands, a place I only recently went to but feel that I know intimately. There is no doubt that this story has always lived inside me, dear reader, and now it is my pleasure to share it with you.
Mirta Ojito
