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Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy A Memoir by Carlos Eire, 2003
The task of reviewing a book is more than usually a difficult one when the book has stolen your heart as well as buried itself deep within your mind. Waiting for Snow in Havana, for me, is that sort of book. This amazing memoir of lost childhood stolen from young Carlos, and the paradise he believed existed pre-Fidel Castro, was an eye opener, as it well may be to other readers. A know-nothing about Cuba under Batista, I remember only the Che Guevera posters on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I was intensely concerned with my own life and my own revolutions. I had little consciousness left to focus on what was going on over 4000 miles away. But I had heard accounts of repression under Batista, death squads in the streets, disappearances, brutal imprisonment, and torture. In my circles of friends, I heard nothing but the sordid truth about this ruthless man, and thought with considerable romanticism about the obsessed, cigar-smoking adventurer hiding in the hills preparing to strike at any time, probably at night. Rebellions against the status-quo were popular in those days in many places. Yet I had no images to go along with the facts about this one. Carlos Eire has given me these in Waiting for Snow in Havana. He gives us the soul of Havana served up on paper. First, who is Carlos Eire? He was fifty-five, an outstanding professor of history and religious studies at Yale University where he received his PhD. When he wrote this, it was his first book without footnotes, as he said of it himself. He tells of saying goodbye to his homeland and his mother and father in 1962, one of fourteen thousand children airlifted out of Cuba after the revolution.. “Even danger has its beauty,” Eire says. Most of these children stayed in Florida expecting soon to be back home. Castro’s tenuous hold on things was not expected to last very long. Eire’s mother, within six months or so, joined her son to face—after a wealthy lifestyle as the wife of Louis IV, as her husband called himself—a time of grinding poverty. There was no work to be found and from the U.S. only one welfare check ever found them. A flight to freedom translated into a nightmare of deprivation. Thus the plot enacted by history. Eire broke all the rules of composition we learn in college. He worked night and day non-stop for four months with no outline, no notes, not knowing where he was going artistically. Despite the heartbreak of reliving these memories, Eire writes with humor and delight of all things moving—the sea, the green lizards he and his brother pulled the tails off of, fireworks in the park, always in the midst of family, three or four generations bound together by personal relationships, and relationships with Jesus who appeared from time to time in various guises which some refused to believe in or refuted. But they were convinced finally, one day, when Jesus stopped at their dining room window, and said to Carlos, “Behold—your mother.” Only reading the book will do.
Agnes McDonald is a Wilmington poet, a teacher of writing and a staff member of Carolina Civic Voice.
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Carolina Civic Voice Spring 2006 Vol. 6, No 1 |
