By Gordon Bonin Of the NEWS Staff

Margarita Marnik’s family fled Cuba in November 1960 when she was 8 years old. They flew to Miami 23 months after Fidel Castro and his guerrillas took control of the island.
‘‘My parents were afraid,’’ said Marnik, who has lived in Maine since 1978. Her father was a chemical engineer with the Owens-Illinois Inc., which made glass bottles in Cuba. ‘‘And they didn’t want to raise us in a communist country,’’ she said.

Marnik has not been back to her homeland since.
Now a special education consultant in SAD 34 (Belfast area), Marnik will be returning to Cuba for the first time this week. She is traveling with a group of roughly three dozen Maine educators on a trip organized by Let Cuba Live, a group based in Brunswick that seeks to end the U.S. embargo against Cuba and normalize relations.
Right before leaving Cuba, Marnik, whose maiden name was Navarrete, and her family were living in San Jose de las Lajas, a small town outside Havana.

Just a few months after reaching the U.S., Owens-Illinois moved the family to Puerto Rico for three years. Then the company transferred her father to Spain. After three years there, the family returned to the U.S. permanently, settling in New Jersey.

She and her husband, George, moved to the coast of Maine looking for a better quality of life in 1978.

As an educator she said she wants to meet Cuban teachers to develop connections and professional relationships.

She also wants to see if Cuban schools have experienced the same sharp rise in ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder), autism, and other behavioral disorders that the U.S. has seen in recent years.‘‘I want to see what techniques they have to deal with these children because Cuba is very child-oriented,’’ Marnik said.

Though traveling to Cuba with fellow educators, Marnik said, ‘‘I’m going primarily for personal reasons.’’ ‘‘The main reason I want to go is because the information that we get about Cuba is highly politicized — from both the far left and the far right,’’ Marnik said. ‘‘The truth lies somewhere in between. Because it is so politicized it makes it difficult to find out what’s really going on there.’’

She said she expects to see ‘‘people in a difficult situation showing a lot of strength who have a lot to teach us about survival.’’

She also expects to find people who haven’t lost their joy of life despite the difficulties. She still has relatives on the island. Marnik said that when she first contacted them by telephone to say she was coming, they apologized in advance for the conditions she would see when she arrived. But, ‘‘they were thankful that I’m going to visit in their homes ‘away from Havana’ and get a clearer picture of what things are really like,’’ Marnik said. Her relatives told her that Havana is very geared toward tourists.

What she remembers about Cuba are the things that any 8-year-old child would remember, Marnik said. Her family life, her home.

‘‘I remember the mango trees in my yard,’’ she said. ‘‘I would eat the mangos when they were ripe, the juice dripping on my fingers.’’

She also recalls other fruit, like papaya, and ‘‘mame’’ with its dark black skin and sweet pulpy red-red flesh, as well as ‘‘anoncillo,’’ with its big seed and tart somewhat slimy flesh.
Marnik said, ‘‘I remember making milkshakes out of all the fruits.’’

‘‘I want to reconnect with the land and my family,’’ she said. ‘‘When you’re an immigrant hopping around from country to country you don’t have that connection.’’

• Next page: Maine teachers head for Cuba