The thinker: Why alumna Juana Lang risked it all

Growing up in a communist country where not only certain words but even certain thoughts were discouraged has shaped Lang into a voracious reader, thinker and researcher. It informs her work as a research fellow with University of Phoenix’s Center for Leadership Studies and Organizational Research as well as her research for the Center for Educational and Instructional Technology Research. It inspires her as a K–12 educator. It defines who she is as a person. 

Fleeing communism

None of Lang’s achievements were handed to her. Not her education, not her research, not even her U.S. citizenship.

Lang was part of the 1994 Cuban raft crisis known as the balseros, or rafters. The official narrative goes something like this: Then-leader Fidel Castro capitulated to riots and the repeated theft of government boats and temporarily allowed the exit of Cubans who wanted to leave.

This hadn’t been the case previously: In fact, it was illegal until 2013 for Cubans to leave or help others trying to leave their country.

Lang’s own story carries some of these undertones. “I didn’t have a lot of information,” she says, “so I had a lot of questions.”

As a child, she thought the icon of Christ she found in her mother’s closet was a picture of a relative. (“I always say I’m going to write a story about ‘The Man Behind the Clothes in the Closet,’” Lang jokes.) In college, she wondered why they only studied Lenin and Marx and never Socrates or Plato.

“I was so angry in my teens and early 20s,” Lang recalls. “I thought, ‘Why can’t I do that? What can’t I say this? Why can’t I go here? Why can’t I travel? Why do I work and earn $4 a month?’”

Lang channeled that fury into her studies. She became a teacher, something she’d always wanted to be, and she got married. But things were growing increasingly dangerous for Lang, who was vocal about her curiosity and her insatiable desire to learn.

“I said, ‘There is something else out there. It’s not possible that I can only read this book and I can only swear allegiance to this [political] party or organization,’” Lang recalls.

Lang, for the record, refused to join those organizations, a fact that made it increasingly difficult for her to attend conferences, travel or work. “I was viewed as somebody who was not loyal to the system,” Lang reflects. “That’s one of the reasons why my mother wanted me to leave.”

Danger at sea

Lang and her husband at that time decided to go. Lang didn’t realize she would become part of an exodus that would include upward of 32,000 Cubans. “I didn’t know so many people were leaving when I left,” she says. “I thought it was just me and a few other neighbors.”

Lang’s vessel for escape was a raft fashioned out of tractor-tire inner tubes and plastic foam. They had an old compass to guide them, but no engine to power their journey, no actual boat to protect them. And Lang was 6 weeks pregnant at the time.

Lang’s father bemoaned her certain death at sea. Lang’s mother said she’d rather her daughter die on the ocean than in a Cuban jail.

None of this deterred her.

Lang, her then-husband and five others launched in the direction of Florida and spent the first day paddling. The second day, a storm came.

“You would see a wall of water coming toward you,” Lang recalls. “I’d close my eyes, and I hung on to the other man on the raft as we went up, like a roller coaster. All of a sudden, we went down, and it just went on for hours and hours and hours and hours.”

They could hear screams but didn’t know where they were coming from. Lang developed sores on her back from the seawater. Finally, morning dawned, and the storm subsided. On the third night, the U.S. Coast Guard rescued Lang and her companions and sent them to Guantánamo Bay as part of Operation Sea Signal.