By MIRTA OJITO
mao35@columbia.edu

My nephew Julian turned 16 this past week. When I called on Wednesday to wish him a happy birthday I told him he was now an adult. This is it, I said, childhood is far behind; adolescence is over. You are now a grown up.

I hung up in tears because I realized I was speaking about my own 16th birthday, when my adolescence ended abruptly, and I made a decision that changed my life and the life of my family forever. The decision, made in the haste of a rainy, miserable day, was to leave Cuba and come to the United States.

I couldn't have known then that my country would soon be convulsed by events never before or since seen on the island. About two months after that decision, Fidel Castro opened the port of Mariel. More than 125,000 Cubans left; many more wanted to. Those who left were, for the most part, victims of acts of repudiation, actos de repudio, by enraged mobs.Cubans turned against Cubans. It was a sad spectacle.

On the wall near my desk I keep a framed yellowing and half-torn piece of paper that has accompanied me for the past five years. When I was writing the last words of my book about the boatlift, Finding Mañana: A Memoir of a Cuban Exodus, a man who had chartered the boat that had brought my family and me from Cuba sent that piece of paper with a note: "Perhaps this will help. I found it in the attic.''

It did help the book. But more importantly, it helped me. The piece of paper is a certificate issued by the Cuban Ministry of the Interior to allow our boat, Mañana, to leave Cuba. In addition to the name of the boat and of the captain, Mike Howell, it describes the type of boat, where it was going (Key West) and what it carried. In my piece of paper, it says "Lastre,'' or ballast, the stuff you throw overboard to save your life at sea if you have to. The extra weight, the stuff nobody wants.

That was 30 years ago. It feels strange to write that I have lived in this country for 30 years, that Marielitos who were around my age then may now well be grandparents. When I called my nephew I told him to pay attention, to enjoy the ride, because in the blink of an eye he would be 46, married, with kids, saddled with responsibilities, too busy to smell the flowers. Too busy to even buy the flowers.

But again, I was talking about me. It's my eyes that have blinked too quickly. My Cuban eyes that had to adapt from communism -- and all that that word entailed in the tropics -- to capitalism, and all that word entailed in the Miami of the 80's, and, later, much later, New York.

That transformation started in the evening of May 10th, in the Florida Straits when I asked my uncle to draw me a map of Hialeah so I could begin memorizing street names. It is still unfolding. I'm still learning new maps, deciphering the rules, and trying hard to follow them.

Upon arrival, that meant understanding concepts like "going out'' and "dating.'' It meant surviving high school with bad acne, flea market Gloria Vanderbilt jeans and hair too-frizzy and unruly to make it look like Farrah Fawcett's. It meant first rooting for Rocky and then deconstructing Rambo in college.

Disco, drugs, Corvettes, SAT's, sex, part-time jobs, paper towels, boyfriends, racial tensions, the mall, learning to drive, pretty shoes, flavored gum, money -- lack of it -- Hialeah and English. English!! It was all too much for a 16 year old. I wonder how I survived it. I wonder how we all survived it.

The Cubans who came before us, for the most part, had context. They had known another Cuba, one in which hard work and a bit of luck got you through life. They had known joy, empty buses, good food and a measure of freedom and order. The Cubans who came after us didn't know any of that first hand but had heard enough stories or maybe even visited the U.S. before deciding to stay so they knew what to expect.

But the Marielitos born after the revolution knew nothing. We were blinded by the light, the choices, the freedom. I have a friend who says we are the ham in the sandwich, squeezed between the exiles of the 60's and the rafters and those who came after, those who are still coming. We are cultural translators, with a foot in Miami and another in Havana, heart torn in two, damaged children of a failed experiment to build a New Man, middle aged U.S. citizens who still think like refugees and pine for home but understand that, as my father used to say, No hay regreso. There's no way back.