Waiting for Snow in Havana
by Carlos Eire
Summary
Waiting for Snow in Havana is Carlos Eire's memoir of a Havana boyhood ended by revolution, and it reads like nothing else in the literature of exile, furious, funny, sensual, and grieving all at once. Eire was eight when Fidel Castro entered the city in 1959, the son of a municipal judge who believed himself the reincarnation of Louis XVI, and the book's first movement is pure boyhood in a doomed paradise: lizard hunts and firecracker wars, turquoise water and car surfing, Christmases and comic books, an entire privileged world rendered in the hallucinatory brightness of memory, with the revolution gathering at the edges like weather. Then the world closes. The executions begin on television, the schools and the neighbors change, and his parents make the choice that gives the book its ache: in 1962 Carlos and his brother are put alone on a plane to Miami, two of the fourteen thousand children of Operation Pedro Pan, the airlift by which Cuban parents mailed their sons and daughters to freedom. The memoir follows the boy through camps and foster homes and his mother's eventual arrival, his father never following, and it is written in open defiance of nostalgia's consolations, each chapter circling the unanswerable questions of what was lost, what was saved, and whether the father who stayed behind with his art collection chose the objects over the sons. Eire, who became a Yale historian of religion, wrote it in a white heat during the Elián González affair. It won the 2003 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and Cuba banned it, which its author counted as a review.
Historical Context & Significance
The memoir emerged directly from the Elián González custody battle of 2000, which put the Pedro Pan generation back on television explaining why Cuban parents had once sent children away alone; Eire, one of those children, began writing in the middle of it. The 2003 National Book Award brought the airlift, still little known outside Miami, into the national memory. Eire wrote a sequel, Learning to Die in Miami, about the exile's American half, while continuing his scholarly career as a historian of early modern Catholicism at Yale, and the book is now a fixture of the immigrant memoir canon and of the Cuban American argument with its own past, taught wherever the literature of exile is taught, alongside the writers of other lost cities.