A victim of Castro's
tyranny tells his story
By Mary Anastasia O'grady.
WSJ The Americax, December 26, 2003
On the first day of January 1959, eight-year-old
Carlos Eire awoke to a tropical sun peering
through the wooden shutters of his Havana
bedroom. There were "galaxies of swirling
dust specks" in the soft light and
he "stared at the dust, as always,
rapt."
The child watching those tiny floating
particles could not have known how much
his own boyhood galaxy had just changed.
Thanks to the power-lust of a young revolutionary,
this innocent would soon lose his safe place
in a simple world of lizards and lightning
bugs, of parents, aunts and uncles, and
be rocketed past childhood into a new realm
of harsh and lonely survival. The State
Department's Operation Peter Pan would take
him to liberty in America but Fidel Castro
would exact a steep toll for his flight
to freedom: He would have to suffer the
trials of a poor, homeless orphan.
Last month, Mr. Eire, who is now the T.
Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and
Religious Studies at Yale University, won
the National Book Award for "Waiting
for Snow in Havana," (Free Press, now
in paperback) his personal story of how
the Cuban Revolution wrecked his family.
In winning the prestigious prize Mr. Eire
joins the ranks of such notable writers
as William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor,
Tom Wolfe, David McCullough and poet Elizabeth
Bishop. Yet, impressive as that may seem,
the author's true joy in the award appears
to be its potential for awakening the world
to the horrors of Fidel's island slave plantation.
Mr. Eire's book has a universal human appeal
as the inspiring story of gut-wrenching
loss, tenacity and struggle and eventual
redemption. Despite enormous tragedy, much
humor and tenderness also make their way
into his recollections.
Yet, the book is also a history lesson
about how the glorious revolution was a
fraud from the start, unable to stand on
its own merits. While truth welcomes scrutiny,
the revolution required the opposite. It
needed suppression, most especially of young
minds, to survive. With the advent of Castroism
the state laid claim to the Cuban child.
Under threat of tanks and firing squads,
those who resisted this Soviet-inspired
indoctrination could take only one path:
shipping the children out of Cuba to freedom.
Mr. Eire sets the record straight about
why so many Cuban parents made that sacrifice,
giving up their children to liberty with
the hope of reuniting later.
In a telephone interview from his Connecticut
home last week, Mr. Eire told me that it
was the tragedy of what happened to Elian
Gonzalez and how the world viewed that event
that pushed him to write the book. On orders
from Attorney General Janet Reno, the six-year-old
Cuban refugee was seized and sent back to
Cuba in 2000. With this sensational case,
Mr. Eire says he had an "awful realization
that no one seems to understand the magnitude
of repression in Cuba."
"The quantity of the killing is not
that of Stalin or the Third Reich but the
quality is," he told me. He says that
he began to think that "narrative might
be the only way to open people's eyes."
Sent out of Cuba on their own in 1962,
11-year-old Carlos and his 14-year-old brother
Tony spent the next three and a half years
in camps and foster homes, often hungry,
persistently homesick and feeling abandoned.
When their mother, crippled from polio,
finally got to the U.S., Carlos was nearly
fifteen and his childhood long past. Ahead
of him were night jobs like washing dishes
so he could help support the family and
a struggle to finish school. He never saw
his father again.
Yet despite the bitter pill, what emerges
from Mr. Eire's story is a beautiful tale
of self-discovery in freedom that contrasts
sharply with what he would have experienced
back in Castrolandia. Moral and intellectual
inquisitiveness such as Mr. Eire pursued
in America is a crime in Cuba.
Which raises the question of how any honest
assessment of Elian Gonzalez's future --
more precisely one by Bill Clinton and Janet
Reno -- could possibly have concluded that
sentencing the child to a life of intellectual,
ethical and spiritual oppression was a good
thing.
The fact that Mr. Eire, a victim of childhood
separation from loving parents still sees
it as the better choice for a young soul
over life in Castro's hands, is a powerful
statement about Cuba's repressive machine.
Mr. Eire made something -- indeed much
-- of his life. Had he been given a chance
in freedom, Elian too could have navigated
his own course of self-knowledge. Now the
best he can hope for is that events that
are out of his control might fall his way.
"What occurred to me," says Mr.
Eire, "was that Elian Gonzalez had
no autonomy, no say in his life and in a
way he was just like Cuba and the Cuban
people. That's how it's been for many years
for Cuba. We've been pawns. For so many
years we were pawns of the Soviets."
In his book-award acceptance speech, Mr.
Eire remembered Cuba's political prisoners.
"Had I written this book in my native
land, I would be in prison. As we sit here
enjoying this dinner, there is one country
on earth, Cuba, which is dead set and has
been dead set since 1959 on repressing thought,
repressing expression. There is no freedom
to write, there is no freedom to read."
The message was not unlike that contained
in a Dec. 10 Human Rights Day letter addressed
to the Cuban people and signed by such diverse
political actors as Madeleine Albright,
Jeanne Kirkpatrick, Vaclav Havel and Mario
Vargas Llosa. "We express solidarity
with all brave men and women of Cuba still
struggling for their inalienable rights
and human dignity under the difficult conditions
of an oppressive, totalitarian regime,"
the letter read.
Mr. Eire's speech drove the point home:
"There are people in Cuba now in prisons
that aren't even fit for animals. Their
crime? Writing. There are actually several
people who are in prison for establishing
libraries. It is to these very, very brave
men and women that I would like to dedicate
this National Book Award, the people in
prison who cannot speak their minds without
paying the heaviest price of all. And may
it not only snow in Havana some time soon,
may they be able to speak freely once and
for all."
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