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A childhood in a privileged household in 1950s Havana was joyous and cruel, like any other-but with certain differences. The neighbor's monkey was liable to escape and run across your roof. Surfing was conducted by driving cars across the breakwater. Lizards and firecrackers made frequent contact.Carlos Eire's childhood was a little different from most. His father was convinced he had been Louis XVI in a past life. At school, classmates with fathers in the Batista government were attended by chauffeurs and bodyguards. At a home crammed with artifacts and paintings, portraits of Jesus spoke to him in dreams and nightmares.Then, in January 1959, the world changes: Batista is suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla has taken his place, and Christmas is cancelled. The echo of firing squads is everywhere. And, one by one, the author's schoolmates begin to disappear-spirited away to the United States. Carlos will end up there himself, without his parents, never to see his father again.Narrated with the urgency of a confession, Waiting for Snow in Havana is both an ode to a paradise lost and an exorcism. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times when we are certain we have died-and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.
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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.
Review:
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
'Rich and lyrical' -- Independent on Sunday
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- PublisherTantor Media Inc
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 1452633886
- ISBN 13 9781452633886
- BindingAudio CD
- Rating
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