Waiting for Snow in Havana enters a very crowded arena of excellent memoirs, written in English, about young Cubans growing up both in Cuba and in the United States. In 1990,
Pablo Medina published Exiled Memories: A Cuban Childhood. Virgil Suárez wrote Spared
Angola: Memories from a Cuban-American Childhood in 1997. Flor Fernandez Barrios unveiled Blessed by Thunder: Memoirs of a Cuban Girlhood in 1999; and the most famous and popular memoir to date, the best-seller by Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Next Year in Cuba: A
Cubano’s Coming of Age in America, appeared in 1995. Waiting for Snow in Havana, a remarkable book, has been awarded the National Book
Award for non-fiction. One of the surprising things about this book is that it reads like a novel, a Magical Realist novel
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Carlos Eire is Chair of the Department of
Religion at Yale University and he, somehow, is able to deal with philosophical issues from a child’s perspective, the memories of a child with the knowledge of an adult—like attempting to prove the existence of God, for example. After reading this work a couple of times, it is still unclear how the author maintains the wonderful insights of youth and the knowledge of old age intact and yet mingled. Eire and his brother left Cuba under the Peter Pan program in the early ‘60s, two of
14,000 Cuban children who left Castro’s Cuba without their parents with the help of the United
States government and the Catholic Church. The Eire brothers were separated in exile and sent from one orphanage to another until their mother arrives in Chicago several years later. “The world changed while I slept,” begins the memoir, referring of course, to the change that occurred in Cuba on January 1, 1959, when Fidel Castro took over the government of Cuba after President Batista fled the Caribbean island. Carlos Eire divides the book into forty chapters plus an unnumbered chapter that deals with his nemesis, his adopted brother