It may be the longest transoceanic passage to the New World spanning 16 years, across the Pacific to Mexico’s Yucatan Province, then across the Gulf of Mexico to the remotest corner of the Island of Cuba.

In the scorching early Yucatan summer of 1921, a ragtag band of Korean henequen plantation slaves — freed from four years’ bondage, but stranded, jobless and hungry — set sail for a new promised land. They were blissfully unaware of another harrowing serfdom that awaited their arrival on the port of Manati.

It’s their palja (fate): the orphans of history betrayed by the slave traders and plantation owners, abandoned by their own home government, humiliated and mistreated by the hosting governments, and finally forgotten and invisible to the indifferent world.

More than eight decades later, a pair of New York-based overseas Koreans were on the road to Matanzas, home to some 700 descendents of the lost tribe, in quest of an elusive thing called Korean roots.

The globetrotting filmmakers were drawn to the mystic figure of Martha Lim Kim, then 68, a child of the Cuban Revolution and a retired professor of Marxist philosophy. A third-generation Korean Cuban, she is the youngest of nine siblings born to the pioneer family of Ernesto Lim and Gudelia Kim.

Veteran filmmaker Dai Sil Kim-Gibson, born in what is now North Korea, fled the communist north at age 8. After teaching philosophy in her adopted country, she turned to producing films on the lost century covering the forced Korean laborers on Sakhalin Island, victims of World War II and the Cold War; Korean comfort women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during WWII; the fiery siege of Korean storekeepers in the 1992 Los Angeles riots; and her latest, the forgotten Koreans in Cuba.

Gibson’s teammate and interpreter/translator, Aiyoung Choi, was born to a patriotic family under Japanese occupation and grew up in Shanghai, Taiwan and Japan. During the Korean War, her maternal grandfather, an early Christian pastor, was executed by the North Korean invaders.

It is no accident that these three daughters of the Korean Diaspora, despite their disparate upbringings and ideologies, would hold a karmic rendezvous in 2004, of all places on earth, in Castro’s Stalinist bastion to share common ties to their ancestral motherland.

Out of the trio’s historical encounter comes the English summary and translation of Martha and her late husband Raul Ruiz’s joint work on the book Coreanos en Cuba, dedicated to the memory of her pioneer parents.

Throughout their heartbreak journey, countless untold stories remained buried, aching for sunlight and exposure to the outside world.

During the darkest hours of these Koreans’ isolation and slave-like existence as a people, Ernesto Lim emerged as a latter-day Dosan Ahn Chang Ho. He trained future leaders, organizing community, youth and women’s organizations, founding the Korean language school, and forming their own close enclave called El Bolo. Toiling under the scorching tropical sun, these henequen and sugarcane cutters also squeezed pennies out of their meager pay, sending money to the Korean exile government in Shanghai. At one time, every family set aside a spoonful of rice as their means to contribute to the independence cause.