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Summary: Memories, memories!
Review: 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.
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Summary: No Luck in Being Born in Cuba
Review: At its best, childhood is a short-lived, fragile transition into adolescence and beyond. This is a story of a childhood interrupted by revolution. One day, the author was the privileged son of a respected, albeit eccentric judge, and the next day he was one more "spic" washing dishes at the Chicago Hilton. A Spanish philosopher wrote, "I am me and my circumstances". This book, with humor and pathos, illustrates the meaning of that. We are judged as much for where we are as for what we are.
I agree with the author; it was no great stroke of luck to be born in 20th century Cuba. That is one thing that all Cubans--save Castro's elite, perhaps--have in common. The island was their ship and it might as well have been named "Titanic".
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Summary: A Privileged Childhood at Odds with Castro's Cuba
Review: Author Carlos Eire led a fairly charmed life as a child in pre-Revolution Cuba. In this intriguing memoir, he writes of his idyllic life in the suburbs of Havana just before Castro evicted Batista. As the son of a prominent judge who believed he was the reincarnated King Louis XVI, Eire experienced privilege, Catholic guilt and voodoo curses inflicted by the family maid. But his childhood slowly disintegrated after the Batista government fell, while rumors circulated that Castro would separate children from families. Eire's mother insisted on getting the boys out, but his already estranged father did not, an act that continued to haunt the author through his adulthood. Eire and his older brother then became two of the 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba in Operation Pedro Pan in 1962. They eventually reunited with their mother and settled in Chicago.
The author writes with exacting detail, which for the most part, serves him well in describing a life torn asunder and ultimately put back together through persistence and faith. At the same time, I get the feeling he misses the privileged life he had in Havana almost too much, and the book becomes exasperating in what comes across sometimes as an obsession with his past. And in certain ways, the author still seems angry about the loss of his pre-Castro existence of swimming pools and extravagant birthday parties, not an appealing trait for a man now in his fifties. Perhaps this tone was intentional since the effect of the airlift left him that much more unprepared for life in the United States. But he gets a bit too much mileage out of relatively trivial things like his phobia with lizards. Every page seems crammed full of incidental information, yet somehow Eire succeeds in keeping me compelled by how he copes. I also give the author credit for not turning this book into a diatribe against Castro as that would have been too easy a route to take. He seems genuinely conflicted about the current state of his native country, and that seems like the most honest aspect of the book. Eire has said he was inspired to write his story by the Elian Gonzales case, but Eire's story seems more singular, more idiosyncratic than even little Elian's story. An unexpectedly effective memoir even with all its flaws, highly recommended for those interested in Cuba during that volatile period.
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Summary: Magical evocation of innocence lost
Review: 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.
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Summary: Crocodile Tears in Havana
Review: Having left Cuba as a young girl of 10, I lived through what he shares in the book. His story is told with sentiment and true emotion, as only one can tell it having lived through it. I hope Mr. Eire keeps on writing books such as this.
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Summary: Lizards in Havana
Review: Long fascinated with Cuba, I really enjoyed reading this book. It was a good account of what Cuba was like before and during the revolution, as well as being a very interesting personal story.
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Summary: Lurking Lizards: Good vs. Evil
Review: On January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro ousted Batista from Cuba and wrested eight-year-old Carlos Eire from his life of privileged ease. As a son of the upper class, Carlos had attended the best private schools and frolicked with his brother on clear Cuban beaches under a lemon sky. Three years later, countless public executions and social anarchy convinced his parents to send the boys to the United States. Carlos was one of the 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba to an uncertain future in America.Despite the poverty and loneliness that awaited him in Florida, Carlos went on to achieve success as a professor at Yale University. Waiting for Snow in Havana is his cathartic tale of Cuban life before and after its Glorious Revolution. The book's blatant honesty is sometimes painful to read, but its prosaic beauty left me breathless. There is a disjointed quality to the writing that is somehow appropriate here: a hilarious tale of neighborhood boys trying to send a lizard into outer space strapped to a bottle rocket might introduce a tirade against the author's perverted adopted brother, who tormented the young boy for years with sexual advances. He tells of his cousin's death before a firing squad and his uncle's retreat into madness after languishing in one of Fidel's many prisons, then goes on to paint exquisite pictures of tangerine sunsets and selfless love. Lizards. They crop up again and again, personifying evil. The book is a lyric commentary on the struggle of evil against God's creation. Lush Cuba is ravaged by a cruel overlord. The same ocean that teems with heart-stoppingly beautiful parrot fish houses sharks as well. Carlos' loving father is marred by the delusion, the certainty, that he is the reincarnation of King Louis XVI. He chooses his wife because he is convinced she was once Marie Antoinette. So great is his fantasy that he brings home a street urchin, whom he recognizes as the reincarnation of the French dauphin, and adopts him, thus innocently introducing a cruel pervert into his happy family. That he became a Christian believer despite the ugliness of his life is a triumph of God's grace. But believe he does, although his writing sometimes shocks my sensibilities. (The frequent use of Christ's name as a literary device, for example, offended me.) God works in mysterious ways, and His method of reaching a Cuban Catholic must surely be unlike His wooing of a Bible-Belt Protestant. It follows, then, that Dr. Eire's portrayal of God's love would necessarily be different from mine. Who am I to say that mine is better, despite his profanity? Apparently others in the Christian community agree with me; I actually read this book at the recommendation of a writer in Christianity Today, who named it among his top ten favorites of 2003. It is now a favorite of mine.
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Summary: A Burned, Thick Beauty
Review: 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 aubela 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.
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Summary: A Cuban Pentimento
Review: 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.
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Summary: Brilliant, moving, important
Review: This is a book for any time of day or night, any season, any person, anyone who loves writing, thinking, memory, culture, movies, faith, history and anyone who was ever a child.
it is a perfect gift book as well as one to keep for your own library.
Images abound and hang in the mind after the book is put down--to be re-read.
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