Paradise lost

Waiting for Snow in Havana

Confessions of a Cuban Boy

Carlos Eire

The Free Press, $25, 388 pp.

A little-known cold-war episode: from 1960 through 1962, some fourteen thousand Cuban children were airlifted--unaccompanied--to the United States by Operation Pedro [Peter] Pan. Once here, they were farmed out to CIA-funded refugee camps, then to foster homes. Many never saw their island parents again. Carlos Eire, now a Yale professor of history and religious studies, was a Peter Pan.

Waiting for Snow in Havana tells mostly of Eire's privileged boyhood during the pre-Castro 1950s. His monarchist father is a prominent judge; his military forebears owned house slaves, and, in the 1890s, proudly fought for imperial Spain against Cuba's patriots. Carlitos grows up frankly as a "spoiled brat" in mama's family manse in upper-class Miramar, among nannies and black maids. There's ancestor worship, visits to the family mausoleum. American artifacts predominate--Hollywood cartoons, gringo comics and TV shows, the English strains of "Happy Birthday" sung with the rich kids next door. In this blissful paradise, Carlitos never cuts his own steaks or butters his own toast, won't even tie his own shoelaces till age ten.

Outside Eden he attends the city's "finest primary school," run by the Christian Brothers. Like any rambunctious kid he plays dangerous games--shoplifting toy soldiers, popping huge Chinese firecrackers, dodging stones in rock fights. He becomes aware of mysterious sex drives, pretty girls. In the background there's Cuba's natural beauty, the "turquoise sea and tangerine light," lovingly recalled as Eire evokes Havana's landmark seawall, the Malecon. Despite Carlitos's sheltered life, he knows vaguely about "slums full of naked, parasite-infested children. Whorehouses ... Corpses. Bribes. Beggars."

Eire's chronological account becomes increasingly punctuated by flash-forwards to tough times--first the revolution, then El Norte. Change and its shocks finally prevail. In the jungle of U.S. high schools he encounters constant prejudice, catcalls of "spik," locker-room bullies. Eventually he'll master unaccented English, learn to write term papers without plagiarizing from encyclopedias. Having been haunted by boyhood visions of Christ and obsessed with arguments for the existence of God, he'll eventually make a profession of this bent as a scholar of late-medieval Christianity. And live happily with his American wife and three children.

Numerous memoirs exist of growing up in Cuba and going north because of you-know-who. Among them is novelist Reinaldo Arenas's small classic, Before Night Falls (highly distorted in the film version by Julian Schnabel). Waiting for Snow, however, isn't in the same league--the author's strong intellect, depth of sentiment, and still-inchoate gifts as prose/poet notwithstanding. At 388 pages and forty chapters, it's too long by half. The purple passages spew forth, uncontrolled, and Eire's rhetorical tics and mannerisms--the prolix meditations, the many puns on "Jesus H. Christ," the weird animus against Kant, the references to Ma and Pa as Bourbon monarchs--become cloying.

Beyond these formal shortcomings are the book's precious tone and the author's personal voice, along with his simplistic "take" on the Communist dictatorship. Carlitos the boy is comical yet seldom endearing, and at times comes off as a bit of a snob. Recalling the 1959 campaign for agrarian reform ("whatever it was"), Eire describes Carlitos scoffing at the program, and never wonders if such measures are called for. (He might have checked out Japan or the "Little Asian Tigers," with their postwar land reforms.) And he gleefully remembers the time when, in the Park of the Revolution, Carlitos, his brother, and three friends stalked a fat black woman and, armed with peashooters, scored a multiple bull's-eye on her big butt. (She raves. Very funny.)

Then there's the narrow, Cyclopean view of the Castro regime. One can despise the revolution for any number of good reasons, but when Eire fumes against "that God-damned place where everything I knew was destroyed," what he knew and lost were in fact wealth and privilege. Readers are made to shed tears for the ex-owners of chain stores, soft-drink factories, nickel mines, and private zoos. By contrast, I think of Vladimir Nabokov in Speak, Memory, where at one point he pauses for a half-page to dismiss "the particular idiot who, because he lost a fortune ... thinks he understands me." The Russian master goes on specifically to note, "My ... quarrel with the Soviet dictatorship is wholly unrelated to any question of property. My contempt for the emigre who 'hates the Reds' because they 'stole' his money and land is complete."

Some Nabokov readers may doubt his sincerity here, but at least he saw fit to make the disclaimer. Eire shows no such wisdom. Conversely, he never once grants that other, nonrich sectors of Cuban society may have experienced palpable gains in the areas of medicine (remember those "parasite-infested children"?), education, and equality for blacks and women. ("Denial has always been one of my greatest talents," he admits.) Everything about the system is reduced to the tyrannical doings of one man--Fidel. As a historian, Eire surely knows that even one-man rule requires a base of support, at least initially, in order to conquer and survive.

Indeed, historian Eire errs on or distorts some key historical facts. He pities "the people who were rounded up and shot to death on [Cuban] television" in 1959, yet neglects to mention that those "people" were mostly members of ex-dictator Batista's security apparatus. (Granted, even murderers and torturers deserve a fair trial. Still, how does Eire feel about the popular reprisals in France, 1944-45? Or the tar-and-feathering of American Tories, 1776?) He confuses Mexico's independence (1820) with its revolution (1910). He gives a sinister spin to the boatlift of Spanish kids to Russia in 1937, rather than seeing it as a simple attempt to get those youngsters away from Franco's fascist war. (Actually, the Russo-Spanish exiles did fairly well for themselves.) And he repeats the tired myth that Castro set up Che Guevara for death in Bolivia in 1967. These aren't lapses one will find in, say, Hugh Thomas's masterful histories of Spain and Cuba.

Some touching lyricism and information aside, Eire's Waiting for Snow is ultimately a smug and self-indulgent work. This isn't the peasant Reinaldo Arenas, victimized by the revolution as writer, personal rebel, and homosexual. The book is rather a Cuban Gone with the Wind, a tale of lost haciendas, suffering tycoons.

Gene H. Bell-Villada teaches Spanish at Williams College. He is the author of books on Borges, Garcia MArquez, and aestheticism, plus two works of fiction, The Carlos Chadwick Mystery and The Pianist Who Liked Ayn Rand: A Novella & 13 Stories (both Amador).

COPYRIGHT 2003 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group