Nine years ago Tuesday, 80-year-old Ramiro Boza put a gun to his head and shot himself in his Little Havana apartment while his wife napped in the next room. The Cuban-exile activist had carefully chosen the day of his death, even the hour: another anniversary of the death in battle of Cuban independence war hero Jose Marti.

To make sense of her father's life, Maria del Carmen Boza, his only daughter, spent several years researching the personal and historical circumstances that led to his death. She chose the anniversary of her father's suicide Tuesday to launch her book Scattering the Ashes (Bilingual Press, $15) at Coral Gables' Books & Books.

Her account is an intimate, complex view of Boza's obsession with Cuba and how it impacted his family.

``My father,'' Maria del Carmen writes, ``loved Cuba above all other things.''

Well-known in Miami's militant-exile circles, Boza, a former dean of the Association of Cuban Journalists in Exile, died in 1989 disillusioned over the fate of his beloved island and angry at what he felt was the United States' betrayal of the anti-Castro cause, his daughter said in an interview.

The letdowns started with the Bay of Pigs invasion and continued as one American administration after another, as one exile strategy after another, failed to remove Fidel Castro from power and rid Cuba of communism.

``It all just really embittered his life. He never got over his disappointment and feelings of betrayal and frustration over the way that Cubans were dealt with by the U.S. government during the Bay of Pigs,'' said Maria del Carmen, 46.

In pre-Castro Cuba, Boza was a top editor of the Havana newspaper El Crisol. Like many journalists under the crush of censorship, Boza fled to Miami in 1960 with his wife, Carmen, and his 8-year-old daughter.

At first, Maria del Carmen missed her homeland as much as her parents. She remembers writing a poem in Spanish about her nostalgia for Cuba and drawing a Cuban flag above it. Her father was pleased.

In those early days, at the urging of U.S. officials, her father was busy organizing the Cuban Revolutionary Council, an umbrella group to unite all Miami exile factions. The organization was supposed to be a government-in-exile ready to take over after Castro's ouster. Boza became its spokesman.

Maria del Carmen grew up in the heart of the Cuban community, in a small house on Southwest Fifth Avenue and Fifth Street, but disconnected from most of the political on-goings. She attended Riverside Elementary, then the Catholic schools La Salle and St. Peter & Paul. Her father attended virtually every exile activity, but seldom took his daughter.

``He felt this was his political and professional life,'' Maria del Carmen said.

In 1970, she left Miami to attend Barnard College in New York City, where she earned a bachelor's degree in philosophy. She married and stayed in the northeast, earning a master's of fine arts in creative writing from the University of Maryland. She had written 30 pages of the manuscript that would eventually become Scattering the Ashes when her mother called with the ``horrific'' news about her father.

Maria del Carmen, who lives in Maine, says she wrote about his life ``to explain to myself and to others why he had committed suicide, why so many Cubans obsess about Cuba and take every event so seriously.

``For Cubans,'' Maria del Carmen said, ``history has absolutely determined our private lives. If we are here, it's because of historical events, the situation in Cuba. It's difficult for us to separate the personal from the historical because they are so connected in our daily lives.''

Her 387-page book begins with a detailed account of her father's suicide and ends with a tribute Maria del Carmen and her American husband rendered him on the shores of La Ermita de La Caridad, the shrine built to Cuba's patron saint on a stretch of bay facing Cuba.

His ashes were scattered there, according to his wishes. But he did not die the day he intended.

Boza lived through the night, dying at 3:25 a.m. the next day at Jackson Memorial Hospital. It was a patriotic day, nevertheless -- el 20 de mayo, the day Cubans celebrate independence from Spain and the birth of the republic.