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Boy's view of life
in Cuba reads like Huck Finn in Havana
Carlos Eire's award-winning memoir beautifully
captures the story of children caught up
in political cataclysm.
By Elizabeth Hanly, elizhanly@aol.com.
Posted on Sun, Jan. 25, 2004 in The
Miami Herald.
''I intended my memoir, Waiting for Snow
in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, to
be published as a novel,'' says Carlos Eire,
who won the 2003 National Book Award for
the work. ''I didn't want to reveal that
much rambunctiousness or that much pain.
Not so directly.'' Only after serious urging
from his editor did he relent.
Eire grew up the son of a municipal judge
in Havana, a man sure he was the reincarnation
of Louis XVI. Thus begins a child's kaleidoscopic
view of the mysteries of this household
and 1950s Havana. The memoir is full of
adventures -- at least one reviewer has
compared Eire's work to The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn. He writes of car surfing
with his Dad along Havana's flooded boulevards,
of untiring experiments with lizards and
firecrackers and the possibilities of reptiles
in space.
Even as he writes of his adventures, Eire
recalls images that were too big to understand.
But one thing was clear: the boys of the
town of Regla, across the bay from Havana
-- poor kids who spent their days diving
for the coins those who pass by throw to
them. At the airport, as the revolution's
bureaucrats sneered at the 11-year-old about
to leave Cuba without his parents, Eire
knew that he too had begun diving for coins.
''The story of children caught up in political
cataclysm needs to be told,'' says Florida
International University's Dr. Damian Fernández,
director of The Cuban Research Institute.
"Eire tells that story beautifully.''
It was The Cuban Research Institute in
partnership with The Downtown Book Center
and The Operation Pedro Pan Group that hosted
Eire at a book singing recently at FIU.
''We were proud to welcome back one of our
own,'' says Elly Vilano Chovel, founder
and chairwoman of The Operation Pedro Pan
Group, an association of the alumni of the
effort that brought 14,000 unaccompanied
children to the United States during the
early years of Cuba's revolution.
A large crowd of Pedro Pans attended the
event. 'The miracle is that Carlos' memories
are so fresh,'' Chovel continued. "With
his, we can find again our own.''
DEATH OF FAMILIAR
Waiting for Snow is not about nostalgia
for paradise or innocence lost. Rather,
it is about ''death'' that Eire writes --
that experience where nothing is recognizable
anymore and still one goes on. Pedro Pans
may rightly claim the story. But it is the
authenticity of Eire's voice as he describes
the process that has brought him a circle
of readers far beyond Miami as well as such
a prestigious award.
Eire has other books to his credit. But
the experience of writing ''without footnotes''
is new to Yale University's T. Lawrason
Riggs professor of history and religious
studies. Eire's earlier works, studies on
revolution and religiosity in the 16th century,
have had hundreds of footnotes.
He acknowledges that his preference for
exploring a century nicknamed by scholars
as The Age of Revolution has plenty to do
with his childhood.
''I've needed to study what happens to
people when their lives have been quite
literally turned upside down,'' he says.
"Yet if you had told me five years
ago I would write a memoir, I wouldn't have
believed it.''
Then came the Elián González
debacle. Something of that story awakened
his own. ''Maybe it was listening to Fidel
talk of the sanctity of the family,'' Eire
says. "I was one of the Pedro Pan kids
that managed to leave Cuba early on in the
revolution. Fidel denied visas often for
years and years to our parents.''
Still, pre-Elián, so much of this
had been sleeping. ''I was never consciously
injured by the experience,'' Eire says.
"I dealt with it by ignoring it, until
it all boiled up.''
Eire realizes Elián wasn't the only
catalyst. He began writing when his children
were more or less the same age he was when
he left Cuba. "I was beginning to realize
not only how much I lost, but how much my
parents gave up in letting us go.''
Eire's father never left Cuba. It took
his mother three years to rejoin her children.
''By then,'' Eire says, "we would never
need her the same way again.''
Eire wrote late at night. Although ostensibly
his daytime life went on as before, later
his wife told Eire that he simply hadn't
been there during those months; he had been
very far away.
''This wasn't a book with an outline. There
were very few things I planned as I wrote.
But I do read a lot of history. In my classes
we do look at the universal questions. I
did want to touch on a few of the big themes.''
Eire is shy as he says it.
''After all, there is such a complex relationship
between good and evil,'' he continues. "It's
hard sometimes to tell the difference. In
a certain way it was a very good thing I
lost Cuba. I'm not exactly thankful, but
if I'm honest with myself I have to say
it. If I had remained there in the circumstances
to which I was born, I wouldn't have understood
what I do now of poverty or discrimination.
Exile may have made me a more religious
person. I'm not sure. It's terribly complicated.''
BACK TO MIAMI
As is Eire's relationship with Miami. He
lived here for several years after Pedro
Pan, but his adult life has been spent far
away from el exilio, far from any large
community of Cubans. Thanks to the popularity
of Waiting for Snow, this year he has visited
Miami a number of times.
Eire rejects any suggestion of visiting
Fidel's Cuba. So it is only here that Eire
the adult can revisit his childhood.
Will Eire continue to write without footnotes?
''It was too pleasurable not to,'' he says.
But first he's got to complete a long-overdue
volume on the Protestant Reformation. He
was supposed to write it during the summer
of 2000 before he was taken by other winds.
Elizabeth Hanly is a freelance writer
based in Miami.
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