The Miami Herald.
September 12, 2001
Freedom Flight
By Christine Dolen. cdolen@herald.com. Published Tuesday,
September 11, 2001
What happens when a childhood is interrupted, stolen, forever altered?
Many of the 14,048 Cuban children who made like Peter Pan, flying from the
island to the United States in an exodus called Operation Pedro Pan, can answer
that question vividly.
They left behind weeping parents in la pecera, the "fishbowl'' of glass
at the Havana airport that separated the young travelers from those who loved
them. They flew to strange places where frozen crystals encased the ground in
mounds of white and where the words floating past them were at first
incomprehensible. The salt air, the warmth, the smell of jasmine, the rhythms of
their music and of el idioma -- all gone, along with the security of home.
Playwright Nilo Cruz understands that loss, one he explores in Hortensia and
the Museum of Dreams, which will have its world premiere at 8 p.m. Saturday at
New Theatre in Coral Gables.
Rafael de Acha, the company's artistic director and director of Hortensia,
was himself a Pedro Pan kid. He remembers, at 16, being "horrified at
first'' and recalls the piercing loneliness of being the only child of parents
he didn't see for a year.
FREEDOM FLIGHT
Cruz's own journey from Cuba was different: It came 10 years later on a
Freedom Flight, and he was accompanied by his parents and two sisters. But in
Miami in 1970, the 10-year-old grew up "very fast.''
"I had to speak for my parents, answer letters for my parents,'' said
Cruz, now 40. "My 'child' was dormant. It was a very hard time for me. But
with time, I've been able to surpass the displacement. I was lucky I was able to
create an internal world for myself.''
Written on a commission from the Latino Theatre Initiative at the Mark Taper
Forum in Los Angeles, Hortensia has multiple roots, not just the obvious ones
stretching from the soil of his homeland. The script mixes spirituality and
sensuality, hopes and dreams, love and loss.
The title character, a Cuban woman who maintains a secret "museum'' of
miracles, represents to Cruz those who have little but give much. And he was
inspired to write about such people after journeying to India two years ago
following the death of his father.
"I visited so many temples in India,'' Cruz recalled in a voice as
melodious as the dialogue in his dramas. "But I thought it was pretentious
to write about India when a month there just wasn't enough. It made me want to
write about the spirituality of Cubans. I thought about the generosity of those
people, and people I met in Mexico, Morocco, Tunisia, Cuba.
"There was something pure about [them]. They had so little and wanted
to give so much.''
PEDRO PAN
And then, of course, there was powerful inspiration of Operation Pedro Pan,
with its images of lost children flying away from home. As strong and successful
as so many of its "saved'' children have become, how could a writer,
particularly a Cuban-American writer, resist that imagery?
"I wanted to write about Pedro Pan for many years but didn't know
how,'' Cruz said. "I find the child in me is very alive, thank God, because
I'm an artist. I thought about what those Pedro Pan children went through.
Children are supposed to be dreaming and playing. A child has such a minuscule
world. Parents are so important.''
His solution in Hortensia, set in Havana and in the small town of Santiago
de las Vegas during the Pope's visit to Cuba in 1998, was to give his focal
characters an "aging disorder.''
Luca (Carlos Orizondo) and his sister Luciana (Tanya Bravo) are adults
returning to the country they left on a Peter Pan flight. Their journey home,
said Orizondo, has "nothing to do with politics. It's about something
missing in their lives, a kind of longing I've seen in my parents' generation.''
Luciana is a journalist coming back to work and comb through memories; Luca
is a salesman hoping to integrate pieces of his past and reconnect with his
long-estranged sister. Though they should be in their 40s, both appear to be a
decade younger, as though a missing childhood has been painfully subtracted.
"Luca and Luciana were sent off, these little kids thrown into the
middle of Ohio in the winter,'' Cruz said. "Their story is very delicate
and lyrical.''
And, to some, troubling. Originally, New Theatre was going to make its final
preview performance on Friday a fundraiser for the Operation Pedro Pan Group, an
organization of adults who came to the United States on Pedro Pan flights. But
when the group's leaders read the script they declined the offer, citing a
fleeting reference to incest. Said banker Jorge Viera, "It's a good play,
but there were topics, including an incestuous relationship, that I felt
wouldn't be appropriate for a not-for-profit group to be associated with.''
SCENES OF SEX
The play also contains a subtly staged masturbatory scene in which
Hortensia's grown sons fantasize about Luciana, a scene in which one of those
sons makes love with Luciana, and Luca's interlude with a prostitute.
"When I first read those things, I said, whoa, OK,'' De Acha said. "That's
a challenge, but I'm very comfortable with the way it will come out. It's about
imagery.''
And that imagery is what made De Acha so passionate about staging a world
premiere from the man who fell in love with theater when he became part of
Teresa María Rojas' Prometeo theater group at Miami-Dade Community
College's Wolfson Campus.
"Nilo has a marvelous flair for evoking the rhythms of Spanish in
English, and for the experience of the Caribbean Spaniard being in contact with
the spiritual world and nature,'' De Acha said. "His language has such
rhythm, imagery and poetry. He has a visual as well as a literary imagination.''
That writing, in such plays as A Bicycle Country (done in 1999 at Florida
Stage, then last season at the Coconut Grove Playhouse), Two Sisters and a Piano
(produced at theaters all over the country, including New York's Public Theater)
and Hortensia, really is extraordinarily evocative of images.
In one of Hortensia's collected miracles, for instance, a man speaks of the
time he took a small statue of the Virgin Mary into the wilderness: "When I
got to the river, and placed the statue in the water, the statue turned into a
gold fish, then it turned into a beautiful woman with long hair who disappeared
swimming in the river. She just vanished like sugar in water.''
Says Cruz: "I'm not interested in illustrating a kind of reality. I
like to detach myself and re-create the essence of Cuba in another way. It's
more about an internal life. About what happens between the cracks.''
Cruz's gifts have made him a popular, admired and honored writer. His plays
have been chosen for AT&T Onstage honors and the Kennedy Center Award for
New American Plays, and he has just learned he is a finalist, via his new script
Lorca in a Green Dress, for this year's prestigious Kesselring Prize in
playwriting from the National Arts Club in New York.
Yet as in demand as his work is, the New York-based Cruz has stayed on at
his mother Tina's home in Miami so that he can be part of the evolutionary
process of Hortensia at New Theatre.
"The cast and Raphael are helping me to find what's there,'' he said. "I've
made cuts and dramatic changes. This is a theater I'd like to have [an ongoing]
relationship with. New Theatre is about the work, the play, the art.''
THRILL FOR ACTORS
The process of working day after day with a major playwright on a new script
has been a thrill for the actors, too.
"It's been a true joy to work with Nilo, to have him with us from the
beginning,'' says former Miamian Orizondo, who lives and works in New York. "You
get to see how a play matures. Nilo is so giving, so careful with his
suggestions, so open to ideas.''
Prometeo's Rojas, whom Cruz had in mind when he wrote the character of
Hortensia (she played the character in a staged reading of it; Marta Velasco
plays it at New Theatre), will be the playwright's "date'' for Saturday's
opening. She is nothing but proud of the artist she had a part in shaping.
"I trust in Nilo's destiny,'' she said. "He is very careful and
sensitive. He dives for the right word. His writing is full of metaphors.
"This Cuban-American boy writes in English, but in his heart he's
haunted by his roots and memories. Sometimes they're part of dreams. Sometimes
they're part of nightmares.''
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic.
Rubin is hired to fight mom's kidnapping case
By Jennifer Babson. jbabson@herald.com. Published Tuesday,
September 11, 2001
KEY WEST -- Attention-grabbing defense attorney Ellis Rubin on Monday
announced that he's now representing Arletis Blanco, the Keys mother who
returned to Florida last month to face multiple state charges and a federal
kidnapping count after spiriting her young son Jonathon to Cuba for nine months.
Blanco, 29, has pleaded not guilty to the federal kidnapping charge.
At the time of the incident, she shared custody of Jonathon -- then a
kindergarten student at Plantation Key School in Tavernier -- with her
ex-husband, Jon Colombini, of Homestead. After she whisked her son by fishing
boat to Pinar del Rio, Cuba, a Monroe County court granted sole temporary
custody to Colombini.
On Friday, a family court judge is scheduled to consider a petition by
Colombini to relocate with his son to Alabama, where he says he has two jobs
lined up and his second wife's family owns 140 acres of land.
Rubin convened a sparsely attended press conference Monday outside the
Monroe County Detention Center in Key West, where Blanco is being held on state
charges that include grand theft -- for allegedly stealing about $150,000 from
her former employer -- interference with custody, and forgery. Rubin said he was
asked by Blanco's family to take her case and will do so for free. Another
attorney is representing her on the state charges, which could carry stiffer
penalties than the federal offense if she is convicted.
After a roughly one-hour meeting with Blanco, Rubin said Blanco doesn't
support her ex-husband's petition to relocate with Jonathon.
"She does not want her son to go to Alabama,'' Rubin said.
Rubin also contradicted accounts that appeared earlier this year in Cuba's
Communist Party daily Granma that quoted Blanco as saying she left the United
States because she wanted a better life for her son, had uncovered an
anti-Castro plot devised by her former boss, and feared for her life.
"That is absolutely untrue,'' Rubin said. "This is a long involved
story about how the Cuban government on three separate occasions prevented her
from leaving. That is not kidnapping.'' Blanco returned to the United States in
August along with Jonathon, her boyfriend and their young daughter.
Rubin brandished a copy of a statement that appeared to be on Cuban Foreign
Ministry letterhead, signed by Blanco, Cuban officials and an attorney for
Colombini who helped negotiate Jonathon's return to the United States.
"They forced her to sign a document before she left the airport,''
Rubin said, refusing to provide a copy of the statement to The Herald or to
allow a reporter to review it.
"I'm going to have to subpoena probably some Cuban officials.''
Rubin also relayed a message he said Blanco asked him to give to the media: "I
made a mistake, and I want to show my children that it's not the mistake that
counts; it's what you do to correct them. That's what makes you a better
person.''
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 
