This beautiful memoir, has left me with much to think about. It was heartbreaking at times (especially that unnumbered chapter), but it was also filled with lots of fun and precious memories. I loved the richness of the author’s descriptive writing, his use of metaphors, and how each chapter felt like a story, with yet another adventure from his life. It was interesting to read (from the postscript) that he took 4 months to write the book and so lovely that each time he wrote a new chapter, he read it out aloud to his children. This was a Bookclub read and I’m looking forward to discussing it with the others, soon.

Vintage photos 1930-1950 Cuba
Pedro Pan Website
Focus Five Talk Show
Reading Guide (Simon and Schuster) ( )

I sat down to read a few pages and was completely drawn into it. Although it is nominally a memoir, he moves around and remembers the way a child does. His childhood doesn't seem all that different to a child in the 50s in the US until it comes quite vividly different. I loved his writing style and the raw emotion he shared. Wonderfully written and extremely evocative.

Considering that Carlos Eire was only eleven years old when he left Cuba, this book could have gone wrong in a lot of different ways. From a certain perspective, it's nothing but a series of childhood reminiscences, not too different from the kind that any upper-middle class Cuban boy of his generation might have. He talks about Cuba's beautiful skies, its seashore, its daily rituals, and a bit about its fragile social structure. But he mines this material for all that it's worth. And specifically because his life is now a closed book, every one of these forty brief chapters is impregnated with terrible longing and loss. It also helps that the author's got a sharp eye, a good sense of structure -- these little chapters frequently connect to others or circle back on themselves -- and a well-developed sense of irony. Considering that his father -- athough often kind, caring and boyishly playful -- actually seems to have believed himself to be a reincarnation of Louis XIV of France, he probably needed that last quality.

But "Waiting for Snow in Havana" also goes deeper, in some ways, than the average midlife memoir has to. Like Eire, I moved countries at a young age, although, unlike him, I've never been any sort of refugee. Even so, I found parts of this book excruciatingly difficult to read, and the author's description of the profound effect that this event had on not just his life but on his deepest self rings very true. Eire still considers him fundamentally, inalterably Cuban, and the reader can sense how the memories he includes here have sustained him throughout his life. At the same time, the rude shock of being separated from his family and culture and losing his social status also shaped his adulthood. In its last chapters, we can see that "Waiting for Snow in Havana" is much more than an exercise in upper-class nostalgia. Eire fully embraces the fact that he had to face great adversity and grow from it: he's turned his exile and the sometimes fragmentary memories he took from Cuba into a way to discover himself and who he is. This book won't suit anyone, but I suspect that lots of people who's had suffered a serious geographic dislocation at some point during their lives -- who've had to leave everything behind and move on -- will find it to be seriously inspiring testimony. ( )

Confessions of a CUban Boy. Read. Not great. DIdn't seem to be informative

This is the only memoire I've read by someone who lived through Castro's take over of Cuba. The author was 9 or 10-years old when the Revolution took place. By the time he was 11, Fidel was firmly in power, and his parents sent him to the U.S. where he knew no one. It took his mother 3 and a half years to secure an exit permit and join him, and he never saw his father again. It is a compelling portrait of the rich childhood he had, the adaptations he had to make as an exile, and how his Cuban culture influenced his experience of America. He went on to become a professor of History and Religion and did not plan to write a memoire. When the news story of Elian Gonzalez emerged the story more or less demanded to be written. The writing is quirky and interesting. It's not one of my all time favorite books, but I would definitely recommend it. ( )