 | Carlos Eire |
"Havana at night. Some nightlife, I'm told. I never got to enjoy it, so I can't tell you about it.
Havana by day. Hot, yes, and radiant. The sunlight seemed at once dense and utterly clear. The shadows were crisp, so cool. The clouds in the blue sky, each one a poem: some haiku, some epic. The sunsets, forget it, no competition. Nothing could compare to the sight of that glowing red disk being swallowed by the turquoise sea and the tangerine light bathing everything, making all creation glow as if from within. Even the lizards. The waves, those turquoise waves, splashing against the wall of the Malecón, splashing, leaping over it to flood the road, lapping, lapping, endlessly, eternally. Even in the worst of storms the waves were always a lover's caress, an untiring embrace, an endless shower of kisses.
Of course, I didn't think of it that way back then. Get lost. I was a boy."
-- From "Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy"
For Eire, it was simply the world he knew -- a world bathed in sunlight, filled with lizards, little-boy adventures and pranks, countless mysteries, and various uncertainties. And it was a world he never dreamed would one day be torn away from him.
But on Jan. 1, 1959, that world changed forever, Eire recalls in his memoir, "Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy," published by The Free Press.
That was when Cuban president Fulgencio Batista fled the country, overthrown by Fidel Castro's rebel forces, notes Eire, now the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies.
Three years later, Eire and his older brother, Tony, came to the United States without their parents. They were among the more than 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba and brought to Miami between 1960 and 1962 as part of Operation Pedro Pan, a secret initiative by the U.S. State Department, several agencies in Florida and an underground network of volunteers in Cuba. This migration is reportedly the largest exodus of child refugees in the western hemisphere.
Eire, then 11 years old, was separated from his mother for three-and-a-half years before she was able to reach the United States, and he never saw his father again after leaving Cuba that fateful day.
In "Waiting for Snow in Havana," Eire tells of his early life in Cuba as part of a well-to-do family -- the son of a judge who claimed he was Louis XVI in a past life and a mother "who offered unconditional love." He recalls the sights, smells and sounds of his youth as he describes such experiences as car "surfing" with his father in sea waves that broke on the road, setting off giant firecrackers, flying homemade kites, participating in games involving hot red peppers and fire ants, taunting a chimpanzee in a neighbor's yard and buying hotdogs at a stand run by a Chinese man, among other memories. The book has been hailed by Publishers Weekly for its "magical interpretations of ordinary boyhood events" and "as imaginatively wrought as the finest piece of fiction."
Eire's youthful days were not entirely carefree. Fears and uneasiness were aroused by recurring images and dreams of a beckoning Jesus, chauffeurs, and an underhanded adopted brother. As the political turmoil increased, the sounds of gunfire were increasingly heard, and a family housekeeper warned him, "Pretty soon you're going to lose all of this. Pretty soon you'll be sweeping my floors," the Yale scholar recalls.
Life for Eire's family was irretrievably altered under Castro. Churches were closed down, favorite movies were banned, and private property and personal bank accounts were taken over by the state. Relatives were arrested and tortured, and some of his classmates and teachers began to "vanish," fleeing the island for other countries. Desperate to free her children from Castro's repression, Eire's mother planned their escape. The last time he saw his parents in Cuba -- and his final glimpse of his father -- was through the thick glass of "the fishbowl," an enclosure at the Havana airport's departure gate. For Eire, the separation from his family was the first of what he describes as numerous "deaths" he experienced as he began life anew in exile.
Early in his exile, while living in a series of refugee camps, foster homes and, later, with an uncle, Eire "learned to bury" his love for those left behind "so deeply I barely knew it was there," he says in his memoir. Ultimately reunited with his mother in Chicago, he worked in a series of menial jobs there, eventually pursuing his education at Loyola University in Chicago and earning M.A. (1974), M.Phil. (1976) and Ph.D. (1979) degrees from Yale.
Eire says he was prompted to write his book by the controversy surrounding Elián González, the Cuban boy rescued at sea who became the subject of a legal and political battle in the United States before he was reunited with his father and returned to Cuba.
"Something about the hypocrisy behind the claims being made by the Cuban government -- that this boy needed to be with his father and that's the way it should always be -- pushed me over some line I hadn't crossed before," Eire said in an interview. "In fact, the Cuban government had sometimes gone out of its way to keep children from their parents and parents from their children. It took my mother three-and-a-half years to get out of Cuba. She got to the airport three times, and two of those times her seat was given to someone else 'more important.'"
The Yale professor said he has also been disturbed by those who claim that life in Cuba has improved under Castro. He believes the revolution has been "romanticized" by many who didn't experience it.
"For anyone who values reforms such as universal health care and universal literacy, it looks very good," he said. "Yes, everyone is taught to read, but you can't read anything. I can't send my book to my family there. It would be dangerous to own. I would fear for their safety. [That lack of freedom] is a high price to pay."
Cuba does not recognize Eire's U.S. citizenship, and thus, he says, it would be too "risky" to ever travel back to his childhood home under the current regime. Despite early challenges living in the United States, he says he is happy with life in America. And his book, he makes clear, is as much about new life and redemption as it is about the death of one way of life. "Dying can be beautiful," he writes in his memoir. "And waking up is even more beautiful. Even when the world has changed."
T H I S
Eire recalls boyhood during Cuban turmoil
As a young boy, Carlos Eire listened dubiously as a teacher at the Christian Brothers' School in Havana told his class that Cuba was the loveliest place on earth -- a paradise, maybe even the original Garden of Eden.
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