Customer Reviews

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy

5 star:		(68)
4 star:		(14)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This book may very well be the most moving book that I will end up reading this year. Some of that no doubt has to do with learning a bit about my own Cuban heritage (mi abuela es de Cuba), but it also has to do with reading an author of uncommon grace and depth, who lacks neither humor nor bitterness in remembering and longing for his abruptly ended childhood. You can't help but to get misty eyed in the midst of your laughter; Eire lets the reader feel in ways that most authors can, at their best, only dream of.

It is rare that an author can combine multiple streams of thought into a [raging] river that contains both depth and complexity, but Eire appears to be one such author, combining history, memoir, theology and philosophy into a thick narrative about his childhood exile from Cuba. He is endowed with a tremendous sense of the poetic; he writes sensuously of Cuban nights before the Revolution, the perplexities of childhood (some experience really are universal) and the uneasiness of Cuba after Castro seized power.

Eire is not without bitterness, either, as he reflects upon his exile and the difficulties it caused his family. He never saw his father again after he left Cuba, but his father also chose to not come over to the US with his mother; the mockery and sarcasm that Eire directs towards his father is understandable given the relational distance that his father placed within the relationship.

The real highlight of the book, however, is Eire's ability to evoke emotion from the reader as he recalls his childhood. Reading his memories of Roman Catholic masses and schools is absolutely side splitting; the mixture of memory and imagination is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that brings to light the subjective reality of various events. In reading of the (privileged) state of Eire's life before Castro, the anger that he feels due to Castro makes that much more sense.

This is a book well worth reading. The voice of exile that is Eire's is a beautiful one that runs deeper than the surface: it has its scars and memories, its hopes and prayers. I highly recommend it.

Carlos Eire has created a memorable record of his childhood in Havana writng beautifully of his lovely surroundings populated by colorful characters, many of them related to him. The shadow of impending doom in the shape of Fidel's revolution slowly but relentlessly advances over this idylic scene and ultimately results in his secure world and his family being torn apart.
This book brilliantly combines a distinctly Cuban coming of age tale with a view into Cuba at the time of the revolution as experienced through the eyes of a comfortable middle class child.
Eire's writing is so evocative of the feelings he associates with the various episodes in his early life that the reader is drawn into his experience in a very visceral way.
I thought this book was beautifully written and at times emotionally wrenching. A wonderful eye-opening read . Highest reccomendation.

We hear the figure of six million dead Jews in the Hollocaust and we can't grasp it. We read Ann Frank and we weep. Sometimes tragedies that overwhelm us in macroeconomic terms, become reality when viewed through the eyes of one individual. Carlos Eire has been able to do this.

Like Mr. Eire I grew up in Havana in the 50's. I too was a Pedro Pan in the 60's. I too came without a penny and have been able to make my way in this wonderful new land. Each of his "facts" and memories correspond to my facts and memories of the same period. The book is as true to life as it can be for me and a great refresher for others who may have lived through similar times. For those not familiar with this period, the careful details he enumerates bring to life a society that has been gone for half a century. I commend the author on this great work.

Carlos Eire's ironic yet desperately needful alteration of St. Jerome's prayer:

" Have mercy on me, Lord, I am a Cuban. "

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Hundreds of books have been written about the horrors inflicted on the Cuban people by Castro, or to call him by the official title he bestowed upon himself, in a characteristic moment of humility, " The Maximum Leader. "

Some have been written by survivors of Casro's prison camps, or by other Cubans, who nowdays are as bewildered as they are angered when some Hollywood Celeb--or some other famous twit-- makes a trip to Havana to shoot the breeze with Fidel. (Pol Pot and Nero being unavailable) And come back singing his praises.

For Carlos Eire, his reawakening came in the aftermath of the Elian Gonzales affair. Carlos knew the kid was being sent back to hell by a sleazy administration under the eyes of a largely uncaring American public.

Eire had done well for himself. A happily married family man and a respected professor at Yale, he thought he had put his Cuban past behind him, that it was no longer was capable of hurting him.

He was wrong. As he admitted on T.V., He became wildly frantic and was unable to know a moment's peace until he finished writing his story, the confessions of a boy growing up in Havana at the time of Castro's takeover.

For a hurriedly written memoir, this is a magnificent masterpiece. More poignant than the graphic documentations of tortured prisoners.

Eire is truly an amazing writer. He weaves vivid imagery and dark humor into a fast paced, fascinating tale. As he states in his preamble: " This is not a work of fiction. But the author would like it to be. "

This is a Greek tragedy set in the Caribbean. Fate may not be personified, but it's there, whether one calls it luck or any other name. Moderns who are into positive thinking may not relate to that aspect of it; Sophocles would have no problem.

But for anyone who appreciates great writing, this work leaves one stunned by its brilliance and its honesty.

This is one of the most beautifully written books I have read in a long time. I can't remember the last time I gave 5 stars. Using tales of his childhood in pre-Castro Cuba, full of wonderful characters and magical places, he tells of his awakening to the changes caused by a revolution that he can not control.

What makes this book so amazing is Mr. Eire's use of the English language - both in his descriptions of his beloved country and his use of various writing styles. In one particular chapter, the writing style speaks louder about the emotion of an event than the words themselves. It is brilliant.

Mr. Eire uses childhood events to describe emotion in a way not seen often in today's writing. How he can use a boy's tyrannical (and deadly) pranks with lizards to describe the gut-wrenching anger over losing his parents and his whole world is beyond me - but it works magnificently!

This is a beautiful portrait of a boy's life disrupted and the courage of a man that pieces it back together again. Out of that pain comes an intimate portrait of a man's attempt to make sense of it all.

Read it - then pass it on or buy the book for everyone you know!

At long last, a book that tells the truth about how the Cuban Revolution affected Children whose only crime was being born in Cuba in the 1950's! We meet Carlos and his family on January 1st 1959. Carlos is 8 years old and is world is going to change dramatically and forever. Batista has fled and Castro is marching down the main street in Havana atop a Sherman tank. Within three years, life will totally change for Carlos and his older brother Tony. Eventually they will join the more than 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children leaving for the USA towards and unknown future. The adventures continue...and seen through the eyes of Carlos it takes on an almost magical quality. Wherever Carlos Eire takes us on this Magical Mystery tour there in never a dull moment...whether ducking whizzing bullets or picking flowers for his mother in the park with his friends, or playing in the backyard of a neighbor who has a live chimp as a pet-one is totally enthralled in this rich narrative. For anyone who enjoys seeing the world through the eyes of a child, sprinkled with the insightful and almost transcendent wisdom of someone who has experienced and survived a cataclysmic shift in personal and cultural identity, Waiting for Snow in Havana was well worth the wait!!

Carlos Eire arrives on the literary scene with a tasty eye for the magical, a sense of humor that is ingratiating, an ability to capture the tenor of Cuba at the time of the Revolution, an adult's sense of tragedy as perceived through the trusting eyes of a child. WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA: Confessions of a Cuban Boy is wonderful rollercoaster of a ride that recalls the unimaginable beauty of Cuba before the fall, walks through the tangled streets of a city destroyed by a dictator, and finally looks back (and down) at the Cuba of today from a vantage in the United States.

Eire knows children well, so well that at times his writing is so convincingly that of a wide-eyed child that the reader needs to back up a few pages to realize this is a memoir and not a novel. In the end he has more thoroughly than any other writer given us an insider's view of Cuba in the 50's and 60's that it is possible for us to understand the mountainous changes that Fidel Castro effected on this lovely island. To say more would be to spoil an E-ride in Disneyland. Read this book for the joy of a child's perception, the insight of an expatriate's knowledge, and the philosophy of a man of heart and hope. A fine Debut Novel.

This book ostensibly is a memoir about the author's last few years as a child in Cuba, before being airlifted, without his parents, to the US in 1962 as part of the infamous Operation Pedro (Peter) Pan, and also about his initially very difficult adaptation to life in the US. But as the reader peels back layer after layer of Professor Eire's story, he soon realizes that it is far, far more than a memoir. It is a novel-like tour of both life's mysteries and life's little details as seen through the eyes of a child, in this case made far more poignant because of the author's particular life circumstances. Professor Nieto Eire weaves a special kind of historical/spiritual tapestry, recounting real events through use of natural and religious imagery to give the reader not just a sense for what physically happened to him and his loved ones, but also what happened to him spiritually and intellectually, when Fidel Castro elected in 1959 to imprison the Cuban soul. This book is high (very high) literature indeed, and what I most enjoyed about it is its ability, in the space of any five pages, to evoke from the reader a wide range of emotions; from joy to sadness, from laughter to tears, from dread to relief. Through it all, the reader develops an understanding for the uniquely Cuban experience, and also for how special a person Carlos Eire must be.

Carlos Eire was one of the many people whose lives were irrevocably changed when Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959. His memoir, written 40 years after the fact, is almost 400 pages of amazing detail of his life as a boy in Cuba and then some of what happened to him once he entered the United States. You get the idea that these are just a fraction of the memories he carries around with him. (I don't know whether to feel sorry for him, or to be envious; I too was removed from an island I loved as child, in vastly different - and less violent - circumstances, but I fear my memories would barely fill a teacup, while his are as vast as the ocean.)

The writing is vivid, transporting you to a different world, one that does not exist anymore. You can practically see, hear and smell their home, the sea, the firecrackers they exploded with gleeful abandon. It's all so heartwrenching, so hopeful, so sad, so beautiful.

As stated by another reviewer, the voice does vary - from an exuberant youth when talking about playing as a child, to a rueful adult, ashamed of some of his actions as a child. He is still puzzled over what happened and how he ended up where he is, partially thinking he doesn't deserve his life now, partially thinking he deserves more than he got. There's a lot of unspoken "What If?s". What if his cousin had succeeded in killing Castro? What if the Bay of Pigs invasion had been successful? What if his mother hadn't joined them in the US? What if his father had? What if it had never happened at all?

This is not told in a straight, linear fashion, but closer to stream of consciousness, except each chapter seems to have a theme. One chapter is about his first love; one is about his cousin's revolutionary activities; one about church and religion; one about luck. Of course, some of the ideas show up throughout the book - love and longing, religion and god, family and forgiveness (or lack thereof, in some cases) - universal themes that we can all relate to.

Very beautiful and as lyrical as one can possible get, "Waiting for Snow in Havana" embraces with equal fervor, both the beauty and innocence of childhood with its laughter, pranks and endless fascinations with lizards and the heartbreaking tragedy and the ensuing political upheaval that would eventually destroy it all. I'll admit that Mr. Eire is occasionally prone to fits of self-indulgence, rambling endlessly about trivialities and the collaboration of a sympathetic editor didn't help matters, but this is ultimately a gorgeous and haunting memoir that should be read by anyone interested in the Diaspora, Cuban or otherwise. The humorous segments are laugh out loud funny (especially if you, like me, are Cuban and can relate to the quirkiness that is inherent to the Cuban temperament) and the sorrowful ones were enough to bring tears to my eyes. The pages are seemingly perfumed with a palpable sense of longing yet eternal optimism lends its unmistakable scent to the heady brew. To those directly affected by the Cuban revolution, Operation Pedro Pan and/or endless exile, this beautifully rendered chronicle will bring back many wonderful, if equally painful memories and to those fortunate enough to have been spared those sorrows, it is my fervent hope that it will serve as insight into the beauty and warmth of the Cuban people and our much cherished culture.