FOR RAFAEL LIMA, LIFE IS THE GREATEST MUSE

The Storyteller

he words hook you at once: “I am of that generation born in Cuba, left as a child and forced to reinvent himself as an American. Growing up, I lived in between cultures and languages, defined by what I was not.”

With that, Rafael Lima begins Presidio–The Trip Back, a rich, troubling documentary tribute to his father and two uncles, pilots imprisoned by Fidel Castro after Fulgencio Batista’s ouster in 1959. Six-year-old Lima would visit them three times a week at La Cabaña, which, along with El Presidio, was notorious for the execution of countless political prisoners.

The words accompany archival footage that Lima, a lecturer at the School of Communication, wove with images from the now barren complexes. He shot the forbidden footage in Cuba with a home digital camera in 1998, posing as a journalist working on a story about the island’s diving resorts.

“I wanted to revisit with an adult’s ability to comprehend,” Lima says about why he went back after 36 years. He always remembered with chilling exactness the sights, sounds, and smells of those visits, but he couldn’t put the images in words. Following the trip, he was able to give the memory language, give himself closure, and tell the story to others.

The film represents the culmination of nearly a half-century struggle with those terrifying memories. “In any writing,” he says, “you’re trying to tell the truth. If you can give language to that truth, hopefully you’ve done your job as a storyteller.”

As a child, Lima told his tales through drawing, trusting “that part of my brain that functioned without my even disciplining it.” It wasn’t until he came to this country in 1961, to a Miami hostile to foreigners, that his focus changed. Lima “decided to become as American as possible, to disappear into Americana.” As he read Hemingway and Fitzgerald to perfect his English, he fell in love with words and began using them to tell stories.

In high school, he wrote magazine articles about his surfing escapades. At 19 he skydived over Homestead to discover why some people had died doing the sport. The risk landed him a reporting job with the now-defunct Miami News. Then he was off to Papua, New Guinea, producing adventure programs for the Discovery Channel.

He wrote his first play, El Salvador, based on reporting he did there as a CNN correspondent in the early 1980s during that nation’s civil war. The play premiered in 1988 at the famed Circle Repertory Theatre in Greenwich Village. When it moved to Los Angeles, Lima followed and wrote TV scripts for Wise Guys, China Beach, Seinfeld, and Mad About You. In 1995 he moved back to Miami to reconnect with his Cuban identity. He also discovered another calling—teaching others how to tell stories.

For Lima, 50, the challenge now is coaching students on how to identify their struggles and communicate them in story form. His passion is baby daughter Sophia, for whom he plans to write a novel about their Cuban ancestors and heritage.

“I think all of us who are writers recognize it is part of us,” he says. “If we’re lucky, we’re able to develop it as adults.”

— Laurel Kalser