By Gordon Bonin Of the NEWS Staff

For the first time since her family fled the island of her birth in 1960 when she was just 8 years old, Margarita Marnik returned to Cuba last month.

"I went looking for roots and to honor a yearning I had to make a connection with Cuba," said Marnik, who provides psychological services for special needs students in SAD 34 (Belfast area).

"Returning to Cuba is still something that people don't do lightly," she said. "Many people don't go back because so many emotions are bundled up with it."

Her family was among the quarter-million Cubans who fled the island betweeen 1959 and 1962 after Fidel Castro took control.

After fleeing, Marnik and her family lived in Puerto Rico and Spain before settling in the United States.

Marnik spent two weeks in Cuba, the first with a group of Maine educators visiting schools and the second on her own visiting her relatives.

Marnik went to the island's second- and third-largest cities, Santiago at the eastern end of the island, and Camaguey, an interior city about two-thirds of the way from Havana to Santiago.

In Camaguey, she stayed with her mother's first cousin in a 200-year-old colonial home, sleeping in her great-grandmother's bed. In Santiago, she stayed with one of her father's first cousins and family.

Meeting her relatives had "a feeling of coming home to people who knew my history, who knew who I was," Marnik said. "Those are things you don't get when you're a gypsy."

She saw watercolor paintings done by her mother. "I was crying so much that I couldn't take a photo [of the paintings]. My uncle had to," Marnik said.

On seeing her relatives for the first time in decades, "I was loved and welcomed, despite the fact that they stayed in Cuba, because they believe in the ideas of the revolution, unlike my parents," Marnik said. "There was no resentment, nothing negative. They really welcomed me as someone willing to come back."

Before arriving in Cuba, she was unsure what would trigger memories and emotions. "Taking a shower took me back to my grandmother's house," she said. "The water smelled like it did 40 years ago."

On the second day on the island, the Maine educator went to Cuba's westernmost province. "My family lived in Pinar del Rio," she said. "I burst into tears when I saw the countryside."

 

Margarita Marnik of Mount Desert Island, who works in the Belfast school system, acts as an interpreter for a group of Maine teachers visiting a school in Havana. Cuban-born Marnik fled the country with her family in 1960 and had not returned since then.

 

During the first week she cried often, but the tears subsided and "then I felt freer and lighter," Marnik said. During her second week on the island, she said, she got a chance to see "the unprogrammed Cuba."

She noted that in Santiago and Camaguey the infrastructure was in much better shape than in Havana. But still, in Camaguey no one knows when the water will run so people keep filling buckets when it does to make sure they have a supply, she said. One of the most profound and unexpected dimensions of her return was the spiritual one.

"I didn't go on a pilgrimage to Cuba, but I began to consider it a pilgrimage after a while," Marnik said. In Camaguey she attended the Good Friday procession and Easter Mass, only the second such celebrations permitted by the communist government since 1959, she said. People danced down the aisles to receive Communion.

"I was struck by the spirituality of the people," Marnik said. Even after 40 years of religious suppression and a decade of difficult economic times, the spirituality was still "vibrant." Faith helps Cubans endure their "harsh conditions," she said. Raised a Roman Catholic, Marnik is now a Quaker. She is also deeply involved with reiki, an ancient system of healing from Tibet. She marveled that so many people she met in Cuba were "doing yoga, alternative healing, meditation and qi gong."

She found that alternative medicine and healing were integrated with modern medical practices. This melding is "a gift to rejoice in, [one] that's come to Cubans through necessity because of the lack of medical supplies," she said. Marnik spent a night in El Cobre, the holiest pilgrimage site in Cuba.

The Basilica of Our Lady of Cobre houses a wooden statue of the Virgin Mary that fishermen found floating at sea during a storm in 1606. The image is the patron saint of Cuba. She said, "I sat in the chapel in Cobre for six hours and just felt the energy of the place."