Waiting for Snow in Havana
captures life in Cuba in late ’50s-early ‘60s
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Carlos Eire |
Carlos
Eire, winner of the 2003 National Book Award for his memoir,
WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (Free
Press/Simon & Schuster),
will be speaking at Florida International University on Friday,
Jan. 9 at 7:30 p.m. in the Graham Center Ballroom at FIU-University,
11200 SW 8th Street, Miami.
A reception and book signing will
follow the lecture. The event is being sponsored by the FIU Cuban
Research Institute and Operation
Pedro Pan Group, and hosted by the Downtown Book Center.
In his book, Eire, one of 14,000
children airlifted out of Cuba without their parents in the early
1960s as part of Operation
Pedro Pan, tells the story of an ordinary boy, caught up in the
events
of an extraordinary time.
In WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA, Eire
brings readers face to face with the sights and sounds of his
childhood in Havana, a world
as joyous and troubled as any other. Then, in January 1959, the
dictator Batista flies away, and a cigar-smoking guerrilla named
Fidel Castro takes his place. The echo of firing squads is everywhere.
Relatives are arrested, tortured, or shot. Christmas is canceled,
and private property abolished. All things American are banished,
intellectual repression becomes the norm and endemic shortages
turn life into an endurance contest. Everything familiar begins
to crumble away. One by one, Eire’s schoolmates begin to
disappear—spirited away to the United States without goodbyes.
It’s where he and his brother end up, alone. Their mother
is able to join them over three years later, but they will never
see their father again.
Narrated with the urgency of a confession
and reading like a novel, Carlos Eire has written a haunting
ode to a vanished world,
to
a past life as mysterious and elusive as a half-remembered dream.
It is also a celebration of childhood and of the deepest longings
shared by human beings—WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA transcends
its setting while thoroughly immersing the reader in it.
Born in Havana, Eire is now the T.
Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at
Yale University. He lives in
Guilford, Connecticut, with his wife, Jane, and their three
children.
For more information, contact the
Cuban Research Institute at 305-348-1991.
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