Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy - Hardcover

Eire, Carlos M. N.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0743219651 ISBN 13: 9780743219655

Publisher: Free Pr, 2003

Synopsis

In 1962, at the age of eleven, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba, his parents left behind. His life until then is the subject of "Waiting for Snow in Havana," a wry, heartbreaking, intoxicatingly beautiful memoir of growing up in a privileged Havana household -- and of being exiled from his own childhood by the Cuban revolution. That childhood, until his world changes, is as joyous and troubled as any other -- but with exotic differences. Lizards roam the house and grounds. Fights aren't waged with snowballs but with breadfruit. The rich are outlandishly rich, like the eight-year-old son of a sugar baron who has a real miniature race car, or the neighbor with a private animal garden, complete with tiger. All this is bathed in sunlight and shades of turquoise and tangerine: the island of Cuba, says one of the stern monks at Carlos's school, might have been the original Paradise -- and it is tempting to believe. His father is a municipal judge and an obsessive collector of art and antiques, convinced that in a past life he was Louis XVI and that his wife was Marie Antoinette. His mother looks to the future; conceived on a transatlantic liner bound for Cuba from Spain, she wants her children to be modern, which means embracing all things American. His older brother electrocutes lizards. Surrounded by eccentrics, in a home crammed with portraits of Jesus that speak to him in dreams and nightmares, Carlos searches for secret proofs of the existence of God. Then, in January 1959, President Batista is suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla named Castro has taken his place, and Christmas is canceled. The echo of firing squads is everywhere. At the Aquariumof the Revolution, sharks multiply in a swimming pool. And one by one, the author's schoolmates begin to disappear -- spirited away to the United States. Carlos will end up there himself, alone, never to see his father again. Narrated with the urgency of a confession, "Waiting for Snow in Havana" is both an exorcism and an ode to a paradise lost. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times in our lives when we are certain we have died -- and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.

About this title

Review:

Carlos Eire's memoir of his childhood in Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy explodes off the page with the smells, sights, and sounds of the tropics. But the most interesting aspect of his story is the story of the Revolution from a boy too young to know exactly what's happening.

Just nine-years-old when Castro and his fellow revolutionaries overthrew Batista, Eire watched as relatives were arrested, property confiscated, and rights lost. Naturally, it was a confusing time for the boy, as his whole world was turned upside-down by factors both visible, such as militiamen, and invisible. "I woke up to the fact that something had gone awfully wrong with the world that day," writes Eire. "We stood there for a while, all of us, asking questions, complaining... it was the sheer shock of encountering a stupid rule that kept us there, loitering under the marquee." The rule? The movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was suddenly off-limits to minors.

There is no love lost between the author--today a history and religious studies professor at Yale--and the man he calls a "ruthless dictator masquerading as a humanitarian."

Waiting for Snow in Havana is a cry from the heart of a boy torn from family, country, and way of life. Eire was 11 at the time he was shipped off to the US to live with strangers, and the fire still burns in him at the injustice of it. This fury propels his memoir, which is by turns cloying, sentimental, repetitious, and meandering. (Eire can, and does, go on for paragraphs about the shape of clouds. Federico Lorca he is not.) But readers looking for insight into one of the century's most "successful" revolutions will come away from Waiting for Snow with a fresh perspective on a crucial period of Cuban, and world, history. --Shawn Conner, Amazon.ca

Review:

'Rich and lyrical' -- Independent on Sunday

About this edition

• Publisher: Free Pr
• Publication date: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0743219651
• ISBN 13: 9780743219655
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400