Mystic ― The package Miralys Gonzales received from Mystic Seaport Museum in November contained a testament to her family’s courage and their fulfillment of the American Dream.

All captured in a single photograph chronicling a miraculous series of events.

“In the last almost 30 years since we came from Cuba, I’ve been looking for pictures,” Gonzalez, 48, said from her Homestead, Florida home in December. “I knew as a fact that there was going to be some pictures.”

But she had never found one until one day, while taking a rare break during her shift as a pediatric oncology nurse at Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, she accidentally stumbled upon one during an internet search.

She was searching for an image of a specific boat, the Analuisa, currently owned by Mystic Seaport, to show coworkers, but the results were more than she had imagined.

On her screen, she saw a picture of a banner advertising “Story Boats: The Tales They Tell,” an exhibit which ran earlier this year at the museum.

On the banner was a picture of her, her husband, her parents, a handful of other relatives and friends and one dog aboard the 20-foot Analuisa as they sat adrift with daylight fading, 15 hours into their exodus from Cuba.

“It took me all the way back to 1994,” she said about that day.

Just 19, her days in Mariel, Cuba were bleak. Faced with poverty, food rationing and shortages, supply shortages, a broken education system that did not allow for personal choice, an oppressive regime that punished critics, and no promise of a better life in exchange for hard work, Gonzalez and her family fled.

They told no one they were leaving, including her husband’s parents.

“As soon as we left Mariel Bay, the engine stopped working and it started raining. There was a storm coming through,” she recalled.

Though only 90 miles from Key West, Florida, the voyage from Cuba, begun in the dark of an August night, was fraught with danger. Between the risk of fire when refueling the hot engine, sea sickness, dehydration, a brewing storm and shark infested waters, the risks were plentiful, but the risk of death was worth the chance of escape.

“Sometimes, economic difficulties, lack of hope, lack of everything—freedom-- make you make those decisions. You get to that point, and you don’t think about what could happen,” she said. “I didn’t see any future.”

At around four in the afternoon, after being passed unseen by many other ships, the Carnival Cruise ship Ecstasy turned towards them. Had it been any later, she said the ship would never have seen the Analuisa.

It pulled alongside the Analuisa and lowered a rope ladder as passengers watched intently and took pictures.

Four of those pictures, and the boat itself, eventually made its way into the Seaport’s collection.

Another photo of the Analuisa, floating empty after the refugees had boarded the cruise ship, tells a second story of pure luck.

A small group of Gonzalez’s neighbors in Mariel had left Cuba around the same time but had run out of drinking water and gas for their engine. One of the men, recently recovered from open heart surgery, was having chest pains from the stress of the voyage. They had little hope, until the empty Analuisa came into view.

They were able to board the boat, get the engine working, and make it to Key West just before President Clinton closed the border to Cuban refugees.

Gonzalez and her family and friends were not quite as lucky and, when the cruise ship docked in Miami, they were taken to the Krome Detention Center, where they languished for 3 1/2 months, separated from each other by gender, forced to talk to spouses and parents and children through barbed wire fences.

Upon their release, they began to pursue their own piece of the American dream, but the family has never let their harrowing journey or courage fade into the past, and the photograph is a tangible testament to the terror and hope Gonzalez and her fellow passengers experienced.

After discovering the photo online in November, Gonzalez was able to contact the Seaport which sent her copies of the photo.

“This is my missing link. This is what I was missing all this time. All those pictures, they represent what happened in the moment,” she said, explaining that words cannot capture the reality of the experience—the crowded tiny boat in the enormity of the sea, the hope for the possibility that they could reach America and the terror that they might not.

When asked if the reality of living in America was all she had hoped for when she fled the country of her birth, she did not hesitate.

“It is. Everything and more. I’ve been able to fulfill my dreams. I have a career I wasn’t going to be able to have back in Cuba. I have a beautiful house. I own my life. I have hope and a future, and my kids are going to have a great future.”

She explained, “You have to work. Nothing is free. Here you have to ‘bust your butt,’ like we say, to get something, but it’s there. It’s attainable. You can get it, you know? There, you work, work, work, for nothing. You’re never going to see a good future; you’re not going to have a good career,” she said.

And the future for the family looks equally promising.

Gonzalez looks forward to showing her father the photograph when she sees him for the New Year. She said he will be as overcome by emotion as she was.

Gonzalez also looks forward to finishing graduate school. She is scheduled to earn her nurse practitioner’s license in 2024.

Her daughter Giovanna, 20, will begin college to become a dental hygienist in January, and her husband Julio, who works at her hospital, plans to get his citizenship, the last of the family to do so.

Her son, Julio Jr., 27, is beginning a family of his own, and will make her a first time grandmother in the coming year, and they are working to bring her sister-in-law, nephew and grand nephew to the United States, to be reunited with the family they have not seen in almost a decade and a half.

She also hopes to visit Mystic again in 2023, having last been here in 2000 to show her son the boat that brought them to freedom.

This time she will finally be able to show her daughter, who has only heard the stories of the Analuisa, the boat that gave their family the opportunities they would not have otherwise had.