“From Cuba, we went to Panama and then Mexico where we finally crossed the river to the United States,” she said of the trip that eventually got them to Miami, Fla.
Seven years later, the sister’s dad, Abiu Gonzalez, fled Cojimar, just outside Havana, on a rickety raft, only to be caught by the authorities and sent to Guantanamo.
He soon constructed another homemade raft, this one using 55-gallon drums to serve as pontoons, and with his brother, who struggled with asthma, he escaped Cuba again.
They braved high seas, the stiff sideways pull of the Gulfstream, unrelenting sun, and a scarcity of water until they finally reached the shores of Florida.
Abiu was just 17, his daughters said, and to him, like with Lola and many Cubans who fled the political oppression and economic hardships of their homeland, Miami was a place where he felt he could have a better life, a place where dreams could come true,
And now, all those years later, that’s exactly what’s happening in Miami — but not the one with palm trees, ocean breeze and the Latin music that provides the back-beat of the city.
For Enjulina and Ziul, it’s the Miami known for its red bricks, its Uptown socializing and the RedHawks’ athletic teams.
This season, the Gonzalez sisters joined Miami’s women’s basketball team, which has had a wonderful resurgence after a five-year slide that saw them win just 44 of 144 games.
The RedHawks are 19-10 and a No. 5 seed going into their Mid-American Conference tournament opener, a quarterfinal matchup with No. 4 Kent State, Wednesday, in Cleveland.
Enjulina, a 5-foot-9 sophomore guard who transferred from Mercer University, leads the team in scoring (17 points per game) and is second in rebounds, assists and steals.
“More than anything, the biggest thing she does is give us an edge, a personality, a nasty personality and I mean that in a really positive way,” said Miami coach Glenn Box.
He said that edge, that competitive drive, elevates the whole team.
And when Ziul, who at 19 is two years younger than her sister, is fully healthy, she’ll give the RedHawks a sharpshooter from three-point range.
This has been a medical redshirt season for Ziul, who’s been recovering from major knee surgery.
She suffered the injury before her senior season at Miami Christian High School, where earlier in her career she teamed with Enjulina to help lead the school to back-to-back state championships.
Although she and Abiu whom she met in Miami now are divorced, Lola said they remain friends and have taken turns coming to Oxford this season.
She was there Saturday for the RedHawks’ regular-season finale, an 89-79 victory over Northern Illinois, where Enjulina scored 22 points and had six steals.
“I’m dying to see my daughters play here on the court together,” she said after the game. “That’s my dream now.”
‘My sister is my best friend’
Lola’s oldest daughter, Sabrina, is a City of Miami firefighter, and she has an 10-year-old son Jayden, who came with her to Oxford.
Lola did some modeling in the past and she said she wanted Enjulina to follow suit, but her daughter had a surprise for her.
When she was about 9, Enjulina started playing flag football on an all-boys team.
“She hid that from me for about a month and a half,” her mom said. “When I found out I told her, ‘This is not a sport for girls!’
“But then they had a competition and her coach, who was her godfather, said, ‘Ey, Lola, I need to talk to you. We need your daughter because she’s really fast.’
“I said, ‘Listen, she has personal (female) stuff and the boys …'
“And he said, ‘No, no Lola. Nobody is going to catch her.’
“And he was right! She is really fast.”
Credit: Jeff Sabo
Credit: Jeff Sabo
Enjulina said she and her younger sister didn’t start playing basketball until she was in ninth grade and Ziul was in seventh.
“We couldn’t afford it at first,” Ziul admitted
At Miami Christian, which had a hoops reputation with its boys teams — five state titles and grads like former NBA guard J.J. Barea, who won an NBA title with the Dallas, and Guillermo Diaz, a Miami Hurricanes’ All-American who has played 20 years overseas — the Gonzalez sisters helped put the girls’ teams on the map.
After two state titles, Enjulina went on to Mercer University in Georgia and starred as a freshman. She started 15 games, played in 28, averaged 10.1 ppg and scored 34 against Chattanooga.
Early in her sophomore season, she tripped over a Georgia player and said she dislocated her arm and had a subluxation of the elbow:
“I couldn’t open a water bottle or comb my hair or do anything. I’d strained five or six ligaments. My fingers didn’t work.
“I had to start from the bottom and get my strength again. It was a tough time.”
In a cruel twist of sisterly fate, just over five weeks earlier Ziul had torn her ACL, meniscus and MCL.
She said it had started when a teammate crashed into her on a layup in practice:
“I dislocated my knee and popped it back in place. They told me it was just my patella and I could rehab it for a couple of weeks and it’d be fine.
“I didn’t get an MRI, so I didn’t know my ACL was torn. And the first game I finally tried to play, my knee totally gave out.”
She missed the entire season and finished her rehab this season. Enjulina didn’t play the rest of last season at Mercer either and with a change in head coaches, she decided to start anew and entered the transfer portal.
Ben Wierzba, who was beginning his second season as the associate head coach on Box’s staff at Miami, had been Enjulina’s position coach at Mercer that first season and he remembers seeing her name pop up in the portal:
“I was out on the court here with Coach Box and he called her right then and there. We happened to be the first call she received.”
Miami offered her a scholarship and when one was made to Ziul, as well – the RedHawks were the only school to make an offer to both of them — Enjulina said: It was a no-brainer. My sister is my best friend.”
Dramatic turnaround
Box said when Enjulina taps into that aggressive, give-no-quarter competitiveness on the court, she is all the better for it as are her teammates.
You saw what he was talking about during a 2 ½-minute spurt in the fourth quarter Saturday when she scored five points, stole the ball twice and forced another turnover when she took a charge.
“She gives us an edge and just elevates that kind of play from everyone,” Box said.
After taking over the team just a few months before the start of last season — with a roster decimated by transfers — Box had to build a squad quickly.
A few players with limited experience remained and some new players — especially 6-foot-1 forward Amber Tretter from Ferdinand, Indiana, — gave the RedHawks a starting point for a rebirth, although the team went 9-20.
This year two talented freshmen — point guard Tamar Singer from Israel and 6-foot-3 center Ilse de Vries from Netherlands — moved into the starting lineup, as did another veteran, sharpshooting guard Maya Chandler, a grad student from SMU and Loyola.
The turnaround has been dramatic.
When Box tried to sell her on this Miami, he told Enjulina, as he’s told other players, that during her time in Oxford she could become the player that she ultimately wanted to be:
“I felt she could find her joy here.”
After Saturday’s game — as you watched Enjulina and Ziul talk and laugh with teammates and an NIU player who’d also been at Mercer last season, while their mom sat on the sideline talking to a another parent and Jayden intently dribbled a ball nearby — you sensed the Gonzalez sisters had found some of that joy.
Long ago, when both of their parents made their perilous journeys to freedom, Miami was the place where they thought dreams could happen.
And that’s the case now, although the Miami where the sun shines brightest for them on the court happens to be in Oxford.
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