Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy [Hardcover]

Carlos Eire (Author)

Book Description

Release date: November 2, 2010

In his 2003 National Book Award–winning memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana, Carlos Eire narrated his coming of age in Cuba just before and during the Castro revolution. That book literally ends in midair as eleven-year-old Carlos and his older brother leave Havana on an airplane—along with thousands of other children—to begin their new life in Miami in 1962. It would be years before he would see his mother again. He would never again see his beloved father.

Learning to Die in Miami opens as the plane lands and Carlos faces, with trepidation and excitement, his new life. He quickly realizes that in order for his new American self to emerge, his Cuban self must "die." And so, with great enterprise and purpose, he begins his journey.

We follow Carlos as he adjusts to life in his new home. Faced with learning English, attending American schools, and an uncertain future, young Carlos confronts the age-old immigrant’s plight: being surrounded by American bounty, but not able to partake right away. The abundance America has to offer excites him and, regardless of how grim his living situation becomes, he eagerly forges ahead with his own personal assimilation program, shedding the vestiges of his old life almost immediately, even changing his name to Charles. Cuba becomes a remote and vague idea in the back of his mind, something he used to know well, but now it "had ceased to be part of the world."

But as Carlos comes to grips with his strange surroundings, he must also struggle with everyday issues of growing up. His constant movement between foster homes and the eventual realization that his parents are far away in Cuba bring on an acute awareness that his life has irrevocably changed. Flashing back and forth between past and future, we watch as Carlos balances the divide between his past and present homes and finds his way in this strange new world, one that seems to hold the exhilarating promise of infinite possibilities and one that he will eventually claim as his own.

An exorcism and an ode, Learning to Die in Miami is a celebration of renewal—of those times when we’re certain we have died and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

With the same passionate immediacy as Eire brought to his memoir of a Cuban boyhood, the National Book Award–winning Waiting for Snow in Havana (2002), he writes now about coming to America at age 11. The story takes readers from the journey to American itself—Eire was one of 14,000 unaccompanied refugee children in 1962’s Operation Pedro Pan—through his time in foster homes, both kind and harsh, and eventually to joining his uncle in Chicago, “where everyone came from somewhere else.” Desperate to be American, the teen wants to kill the Cuban in himself, and the personal details are funny, furious, and heartbreaking, as he keeps changing his name (to Charles, Chuck, Charlie, back to Carlos). Now a professor at Yale, he still believes “bilingualism is crap.” He remembers prejudice and ignorance not only from classmates and textbooks but also in himself. He challenges sentimental slogans: absence does not make the heart grow fonder, as his reunion with his mother shows. An essential addition to the Booklist Core Collection feature “The New Immigration Story” (2005), this is about finding home in America by letting go. --Hazel Rochman

Review

"A mix of insightful observation, humor, and heartfelt emotion. . . . Easily one of the more impressive memoirs on the thorny issue of immigration."

—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A very intelligent and sensitive bird's-eye view of a Cuban exile's boyhood experiences in America . . . eloquent and moving."

—Oscar Hijuelos

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 320 pages
• Publisher: Free Press; 1St Edition edition (November 2, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 143918190X
• ISBN-13: 978-1439181904
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #670,818 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Some of my readers tell me that I am two authors: one a historian of late medieval and early modern European religious history, who writes books laden with footnotes, and the other a memoirist who has written about his life in Cuba and in exile.
My dual identity is a result of my life history. I'm a Cuban exile. In 1962, at the age of eleven, my parents sent me to the United States, as part of the so-called Pedro Pan airlift, which offered 14,000 Cuban children a chance to escape the totalitarian soul-crushing regime of Fidel Castro. After three and a half years of bouncing from one foster home to another, my mother was finally allowed to leave Cuba, and I was reunited with her in Chicago. My father remained trapped in Cuba, and I never saw him again.
Scholarship became my intellectual and spiritual refuge from life as an exile, and, at the same time, my means of understanding it. Having lived through a violent revolution, it is no accident that I chose to specialize in the religious, social, and political upheavals of the age of the Reformation (1450-1700). Having perceived at an early age that modern politics is not much different from religion, insofar as political movements are guided by sets of beliefs and established through rituals and symbols, and lists of "correct" beliefs, it is also no accident that I gravitated to religious history.
My two writing styles are different, as one might expect, but I only have one voice, and one goal in mind when I write, which is to make the past come alive, and to help my readers see that there is always more to be perceived than what meets the eye, both in the past and in the present.
Up until the year 2000, my writing was strictly professional, and limited to the demands of my teaching posts: before joining the Yale faculty in 1996, I taught at St. John's University in Minnesota and the University of Virginia, and spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. But in 2000, driven nearly insane by the ignorant and offensive way in which the North American news media dealt with all things related to Cuba, I ended up writing my own eyewitness account of the Cuban Revolution. I meant to publish it as fiction, but thanks to a very wise editor, it ended up on the shelves as what it really was: a memoir, and perhaps the best piece of history I have penned to date.
Much to my surprise, "Waiting for Snow in Havana" (Free Press, 2003) not only became a best-seller, but also won the National Book Award in nonfiction for 2003, and ended up being translated into thirteen languages. It has also brought me the highest honor of all: having all of my work banned by the Castro regime, and being declared an enemy of their state.
The two of me are currently working on three different projects. In 2009 the "professor" published "A Very Brief History of Eternity" with Princeton University Press, a scholarly book that seeks to address a broad audience. The "professor" is also nearly finished with a survey history of the Reformation, to be published by Yale University Press, and researching the history of attitudes towards miracles in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. The "writer" has just published another memoir, "Learning to Die in Miami", which covers his first four years in exile, (Free Press, 2010).

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 55 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Essential reading for all dissociators (DID/MPD) November 22, 2010

By Bette VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

I walked into this book knowing very little about Cuba's history, and knowing nothing about Operation Pedro Pan. Controversy exists around Pedro Pan and its exodus of 14,000 children from Castro's Cuba to the U.S. in 1962. No matter how one wishes to see this operation, positively or negatively, the fact remains that thousands of Cuban children ended up in American foster homes. Every child deals with trauma in his or her own way, and LTDIM is Carlos' story.

The title stems from the author-as-child's need to kill Carlos in order to become the accepted Americanized version of himself. Hence, he becomes Charles, and even Chuck. But it goes deeper than that. As dictated by circumstances, as well as Carlos' dissociative disorder (of course, this is undefinable as a child - no child goes around diagnosing himself as a dissociator - it's just one's nature), Carlos remains relegated to Charles' inner world, of the past. Charles refers to himself in the third person and adds that he'd rather "forget about all of that Cuban stuff." The author's life in Cuba as a child was happy, and normal. Suddenly, his life turned upside down, he is now inside out, learning a new culture, and being shuffled from one foster home to another.

One foster home in particular was quite traumatic for Carlos, a home he called Palace Ricardo, which was run by a Cuban couple who once ran a school in Havana. Wryly nicknamed Lucy and Ricky, they were sociopaths who denied decent food, clothing, shelter and any of life's most basic pleasures to the children in their care. Carlos recounts the shoes that he had to hold together with electrical tape, underwear so worn out that he literally could not wear them anymore, near starvation so bad that, during a school food fight, rather than experiencing the wasteful American joy of throwing food about, he instead felt moved to pick up whatever was thrown his way and swallow it down! On the day that Carlos is subjected to basic slave labor ($3 for a whole day of physical labor), he returns to palace Ricardo only to have Lucy go into a tirade over his having $3 in his pocket! "Who do you think you are," that type of sociopathic thinking. It is later revealed in the book what another foster child did in order to survive Palace Ricardo and be in Lucy's favor; he had to have sex with her!

No wonder Carlos dissociates. And a warning for all with DID - while I feel this is essential reading, it is also very triggering. Reading passages about The Void, and the beginning sentence of many dissociations - "This can't be my life" - brought me back to those times in my life when I was in despair and feeling the same way. It occurred to me that reading accounts of abuse do not trigger me, but how reading the similar, desperate feelings of another helpless, hopeless child transported me back in time. Non-dissociators might be confused by "Fade to black." The author is not passing out or entering a coma! This is the dissociator's way of dealing with impossible situations. The Jesus passages are also not delusional, as spirituality is a huge part of dissociators' lives. (When great suffering is present, we are living out the path that God wants for us.)

Eventually Carlos and his brother Tony are sent to a different foster home (Carlos calls this a beautiful death), but not before Tony is subjected to beatings from Ricky and a near-murder attempt by the Ricardos. On the subject of Tony, who is *not* a dissociator, his life turns out quite differently from that of Carlos. While dissocation has its drawbacks, it also has its advantages, and the proof is in the difference between these brothers' eventual outcomes.

There is so much more I want to say here, and I want to quote about 20 different passages, but I feel that I would be denying the reader their full reading experience by doing so. Carlos' journey is well worth the read.

You do not have to have read Waiting for Snow in Havana in order to read Learning to Die in Miami. But Learning to Die has compelled me to read its predecessor, as well as to research Operation Pedro Pan and the history of the Cuban revolution.

58 of 66 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Death Be Not Proud October 31, 2010

By honey

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Have you read Waiting for Snow in Havana? It is possible to enjoy this book by itself, but your reading of this book will be enriched by reading that one first.
Learning to Die in Miami has an overwhelming story. The book ends and the first thing the reader wants to say to the author is hurry up, write the next one. Don't stop now.
I recommend this book very highly.

So many suffer because of the evil doers of Cuba's current government. This book, by telling the story of one child so beautifully and clearly, gives the reader a tiny sense of the enormity of the crimes of these bastards.

The opening chapter grabs you immediately. Geometry tries to control what is not controllable, the emotions of a bereft child.
On you swim into the book. The writing is spectacular. All of it. I am so angry on one page. Then I am heartbroken. Suddenly, what is this? I am laughing. I am alone with no one to impress and I am laughing out loud. Then, just as suddenly I am swept away by something so endearing and touching, it's almost unbearable.
The author makes real and palpable what the child felt. How does a child, or anyone, make sense out of a world where love can make everything better, where superhuman acts of sacrifice exist, yet where prejudice or lack of caring and worse is just as easily a part of life?

This book is patterned similarly to Waiting for Snow in Havana. Each chapter has a theme and variations, then returns at its close bringing you home. POW!

This is an honest book. Not too many could write with such honesty about themselves.
In this book Carlos describes dying many times. But the implication is that to do so means each time, he came alive again. The suffering he embraces helps him to rise like a phoenix. His faith rescues him. The best revenge they say is living well. The last laugh. Go ahead, google Professor Eire and see his credentials and achievements.

The language is of the man of faith. The knowledge and wit is of the scholar and teacher.
The story is of a stolen childhood. It is about the need for the vault of oblivion. Thinking about your parents must be avoided, the first death. Tamp that memory down so it can't escape.

There is an elephant in the room. The reader can choose to ignore it. But it is there. The relentless evildoing of the bastards of the Cuban government. Useful idiots in Hollywood can visit with the tyrant and brag about how inspiring he is. Movie makers can make movies extolling the mass murderer, Che, or praising the disgustingly decrepit Cuban health care system in movies filled with lies. But the elephant is still in the room, the evil. And the tyrants themselves are laughing riotously at these fools who distort or lie about the evil.

I loved in the book Carlos's astonishment over the miracles of invention he finds in this country, the abundance everywhere, compared to what has been lost in Cuba. Castro is only in power for two years and already he has turned his country into a poverty stricken hellhole. Progress runs apace even in places off the beaten track here; at the same time, Cuba, a modern, advanced country with one of the highest standards of living in the world, is turned into worse than a third world country overnight by the communist tyrants.

The book is about choices. We have free will. Do we choose to do no harm, to try to make the world a better place? Or do we choose, and get glee from, harming others? It is about how we cope with what we are dealt.

This review could go on citing examples from the text to show what a gorgeous piece of writing is here. But I would rather say to you, read it for yourself, discover it all for yourself.

At bottom, for me, Learning to Die in Miami is an anthem for America, this great land of opportunity.
It is a love song to the United States of America, the greatest country on earth.
It oughta' win a Pulitzer.

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Something to live for December 5, 2010

By George Fischer

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I know Florida City and Miami, especially Calle Ocho. Thank you for teaching me to swear in Spanish from the gitgo -- Chapter 1. However, you did something that Alex Haley didn't do 40 years ago. You found the abodes where your family came from and where almost everybody looked like you. Amazing, because I did the same thing in eastern Austria and dined in the house where my grandfather grew up before he came to America (still in the family after 150 years). It was a very fulfilling experience. I really enjoyed your book and the way you approached it. I hope you have a new project in the works as I am looking forward to seeing it.