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ubtitled “Confessions of a Cuban Boy,” Carlos Eire’s memoir looks back to his boyhood on the eve of Fidel Castro’s takeover from Fulgencio Batista on the first of January 1959. The son of a prominent judge, Eire was born to privilege, but he says his family was not wealthy. In 1962, at the age of eleven, Carlos was flown to the United States, along with his brother Tony, two years older, as part of Operation Pedro Pan, and his mother joined them a few years later, but his father remained in Havana with his prized collection of art and Carlos’s adopted brother, the sinister Ernesto. On the cover the publishers describe the book as “both an exorcism and an ode to a paradise lost.” This often humorous memoir mingles lively accounts of boyish pranks with comments on religion that are more than half serious (Eire presently teaches philosophy and religious studies at Yale University). His sometimes doting father considers himself to be the reincarnated Louis XVI, executed during the Reign of Terror in France (1793) along with his wife, Marie Antoinette (by default, Carlos’ mother). The book offers almost equal parts politics (Eire is no admirer of Castro), dysfunctional family dynamics, and religion: “Jesus H. Bungee-jumping Christ, save me!” nine year-old Carlos declares upon being told that Santa does not exist. Spanish culture, Eire concludes, “is built upon one warning: beware, all is illusion.”
*Cover reprinted with permission from Scribner/FreePress
Author Information
Born Carlos Nieto in Havana in 1950, a little over three-quarters of the way through his memoir, Carlos rejects his father’s surname for his mother’s, Eire, so it was as Carlos Eire that he received his bachelor’s degree from Loyola University in Chicago in 1973. He went on to receive his doctorate from Yale University, where he presently serves as Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies. He is married and the father of two sons and a daughter. His many scholarly essays and three books published prior to Waiting for Snow in Havana would not have predicted that Carlos Eire would author a National Book Award winning memoir. The books, complete with scholarly colons, are titled War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (1986), From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth-Century Spain (1995), and Jews, Christians, and Muslims: A Comparative Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (1997) written with J. Corrigan, M. Jaffee, and M. Denny. Eire has said the memoir was the easiest for him to write and that it was triggered by the Elián González affair in 2000. The seven year-old Gonzalez was rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard after his mother died on a boat smuggling them into Miami, but he was returned to Cuba and the custody of his father, despite vigorous protests from the exiled Cuban community in the United States. In a conversation appended to the memoir, Eire declares that he will not return to Cuba so long as Castro is in power: “As far as I am concerned, Fidel’s Cuba might as well be the deepest circle of hell.”
For more information see
Cuban Dreams by Cathy Shufro, published in Yale Alumni Magazine (2004)
Barnes & Noble Interview (2003)
*Author photo reprinted with permission from Scribner/Free Press
Discussion Questions
1. As a boy Carlos Eire appears to loathe and fear lizards, even common chameleons. Do you find any explanation for his anxiety about them? He and his older brother Tony enjoy torturing lizards (cutting off their tails and blowing them apart with firecrackers), but why? Does this behavior combined with acts that some would see as harmful to others and dangerous to themselves suggest something pathological, or does it come down to boys-will-be-boys?
2. The father in this memoir enjoys playing games with his sons (like car surfing and pea-shooting), but then he refuses to accompany them when they leave for the United States, and he appears to shift his affection from them to the adopted Ernesto, who Eire insists is a “pervert” of some sort. Moreover, early in the memoir Carlos calls out, in phrasing that suggests Jesus on the cross, “Father, Father, why did you abandon me?” (88). How do you account for the father’s behavior? Do you think Carlos understands this himself?
3. Playfully, but probably with some serious intent as well, Eire claims he can outdo Thomas Aquinas in his five proofs of the existence of God, and in the course of his memoir he produces seven such “proofs.” What are some of these, and what do you make of them? How seriously do you take Eire’s statements about philosophy and religion? What do you make of his apparent antipathy toward the philosopher Immanuel Kant?
4. How does American popular culture, mostly in the form of movies, influence young Carlos’ attitudes and behavior? Presumably the Marxist idealism of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara was aimed at the values implicit in such films; moreover, it was aimed at the privileged classes in Cuba, which included the middle class to which Carlos’ family belonged. To what extent, then, is this memoir “political”? Do you agree with Eire’s political views? How well the mass of Cubans have fared under Castro remains a subject of considerable debate, but Eire’s point of view is clear enough. Do you think he’s probably right, or is he simply a victim of his own class bias?
5. Looking back at his preadolescent boyhood, Carlos Eire reveals many fears, not just of lizards, but of certain paintings in his father’s collection (notably of religious figures) and of sexual abuse or molestation by perverts (late in the memoir, in fact, a pervert pulls a knife on him). What is Eire’s point with this sort of thing? Does he see himself as having been particularly vulnerable as a child? What do you make of the unnumbered chapter between 28 and 29, “Que Carajo,” which translates “to hell with” (“carajo” can also translate as “penis”).
6. Throughout most of the memoir Carlos Eire’s mother, whom he describes as beautiful but crippled, appears to be passive, but it is she who takes the most decisive action when Castro takes over. How much does Eire reveal about this “Marie Antoinette”? His tribute to her appears to be the penultimate chapter (39). Does a review of this chapter affect your sense of her in any way?
7. So what does this memoir come to at the end? How much of it is written out of anger and regrets (despite Eire’s apparent success in the United States)? Is the book in some ways a confession? “I loved to steal,” he tells us at one point. Or is Eire boasting about his boyish misbehavior mostly for the fun of it? And what do you make of his reflections on death at the end of the last chapter?
