Dear precious Afghan girl,
I see you.
I see you in the belly of a packed U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster III, a telling round face among the 640 Afghans being airlifted from Hamid Karzai International Airport on Aug. 15 amid chaos.
Your black hair pulled back, your dark eyes questioning, your shirt the color of the desert earth you’re leaving behind, and your lips mum, hands clasped.
Those little hands tell me everything.
You’re losing your childhood innocence in this act of desperate flight, in this crossing to an uncertain life in exile and the loss of homeland.
I zoom in and zoom in some more. I want to reach out and hug you, tell you that everything will turn out all right, that I hope you make it to America.
The heart and soul of the immigrant woman you will become are beginning to take shape at this very moment.
I know this.
I was once that little girl on a Freedom Flight to the United States.
Young men, too, tried to cling to my airplane the day my family left Cuba. We also were detained on the runway for a long time, our fates suspended, the adults filled with dread, a feeling we, the children, made ours.
I didn’t have to guess what was going on. I might have been 10 years old, but I had already seen so much.
Like perhaps you did in Kabul with those searching eyes, I witnessed the young men coming out of the bushes and running to hop onto the landing gear of the morning’s previous flight from Varadero Airport. They tried again during our flight’s turn on the tarmac. Those Oct. 7, 1969, flights, part of an exodus that brought more than 250,000 of us to American soil, made the front page of The Miami Herald, the newspaper where I have worked as a journalist the past 41 years.
Straddling two worlds
On the day the world’s eyes were fixed on the dramatic images of swarms of men clinging to your plane in Afghanistan as it tried to take off, two men plunging to the ground as it climbed, I was immersed in dual language duties in Miami.
