BY MYRIAM MARQUEZ
MMARQUEZ@MIAMIHERALD.COM
Carmen Pelaez, a playwright and actress who grew up in Miami and made a name for herself nationally with her one-woman show, Rum and Coke, was running around New York, training for a marathon, when she experienced The Moment.
“I looked to the left and the Historical Society Museum that’s going through renovation, and there was a huge poster of Felix Varela,” she tells me by phone from New York, referring to the 19th Century Cuban priest who fled the island after being sentenced to death by the Spanish Crown for publishing essays that sought to end slavery and for calling for independence for Cuba and the rest of Latin America. Varela spent most of his life in exile in the 1800s in New York, where he became a Godsend to the Irish immigrants seeking refuge during the potato famine.
Sometimes the past intersects with the present and spirals one into the future, and on that run Pelaez became one of the conduits.
“You cannot look forward if you are looking back,” she said. “Here I was running, and I wasn’t thinking about the tragedy of what has happened, how my family suffered. I was thinking, one day how to run a marathon in Cuba. All I could think about were ways to create a future, to support the people on the island who want to create a future.”
Then her sister, Ana Sofia, a writer and food blogger, turned The Moment into action, along with other friends like Nathalie Marcos involved in Raices de Esperanza, or Roots of Hope, a group started by Cuban-American college students to connect with young people in Cuba.
The plan: Run in the ING Miami Half Marathon next Sunday to raise donations to buy cell phones and flash drives for young Cubans yearning to get connected to the world closed to them on a communist island where such things are a luxury — unless you have a family member living abroad willing to pay for them.
They put up a Facebook page and signed up on crowdrise.com, which helps groups raise money for good causes.
The inaugural Run for Roots campaign started with just four friends last June in New York’s Central Park: the Pelaez sisters, Natalia Martinez and Elena Castañeda ran in a mini 10k. The small group of Cuban-American women left college more than a decade ago, but they became fans of the Roots group after hearing what these college students and recent graduates — from Los Angeles to Miami — have been doing to energize a disaffected generation surrounded by crumbling buildings and crushed hopes for a better life 53 years after Fidel Castro’s revolution promised a great new world. We all know how that turned out.
Pelaez, the grandniece of Cuban painter Amelia Pelaez, says the Jan. 29 run will be dedicated to Laura Pollan, a school teacher and founder of the dissident group Ladies in White. Pollan, who died in a Havana hospital in October of complications from dengue fever (so much for Cuba’s “model” healthcare), became another symbol — like political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died of dehydration during a hunger strike — of the Castro regime’s cruelty.
Yet despite the constant arrests, the harassments, the spying on people’s every move, young Cubans are speaking up, in their rap and Latin rock songs, in their “illegal” blogs like Yoani Sanchez’s award-winning Generation Y and even on street corners.
There, in the midst of a protest in Santiago or Havana or little Placetas, a young man or woman captures the images on a cell phone: hoards of people telling off the government goons about to arrest them for complaining about food prices or yelling, “ Libertad,” Freedom. And that powerful image reaches the Internet — free from the Castro regime’s censorship — for all the world to see the truth.
So far, the group has 15 runners for the Miami race, including Lolita Sosa, who graduated last May from the University of Miami. She broke her foot last year so this will be a test of both her physical endurance, she told me on Friday, and her faith in the power of one becoming the power of many.
“Running puts your skin in the game,” Pelaez says. “When you’re training in 21 degree weather and you have to run 12 miles. Or you have to run in Miami in the heat, you start to ask, ‘Why am I doing this?’
“No matter what you’re going through, at the end of the day you think, ‘This is not worse than what these people have to endure in Cuba.’ You’re doing it for something greater. I want Cubans to know it’s not just a check I’m sending. Physically, I’m part of this struggle.”
And that run produces a cell phone and another and hundreds of them reach Cuba’s youth. And another young Cuban may get a flash drive and the underground access to the Internet that’s banned by the octogenarians controlling things, and then . . . “If we can increase that flow, then we can increase their choices. I trust them. They have lived something that most of us will never understand,” Pelaez says. “I want to put possibilities in their hands.”
Because this Run for Roots isn’t running away from the past or being dragged back by it. It’s running steady and focused into a new day.
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