When the World Changed

Waiting for Snow in Havana opens at the pivotal moment in history when Fulgencio Batista flies out of Cuba to exile and Fidel Castro and his rebels take over. Says the author Carlos Eire of that moment, "The world changed while I slept, and much to my surprise, no one had consulted me" (1).

Eire was one of over 14,000 children who were flown to Miami from Cuba following the Cuban revolution, an event that was called Operation Pedro Pan. Because their parents could not get visas right away, the children had to emigrate alone, whether or not they had relatives or friends waiting for them.

Eire begins his memoir with the success of the Cuban revolution because it is the point around which everything else in the story revolves. From there, the narrative dips into the past, showing the reader what life was like for him before everything changed.  He was an upper-middle-class child of a judge and a stay-at-home mom.  Because of their privileged status, the family escaped most of the brutality of the Batista regime and lived quite comfortable lives.  Eire went to private Catholic schools with other children of his social class, and had a pretty much carefree childhood.  He describes his childhood before the revolution in some detail in the early chapters, presumably so we can see all he lost when Castro took over and he was sent to the United States.

The author was eight years old when the world changed and we see events through his eyes, although he occasionally gives us information from the perspective of the older Eire.  The narrative travels back and forth in time, always returning to the revolution, its aftermath, and his escape to Miami at the end.  But Eire also often flashes forward, describing in brief vignettes how he fared in Miami and then Chicago, and how the trauma of his childhood affects him still, though he is now a distinguished university history professor.

The spiral movement of the memoir--from past to future to present to past again--is what keeps us reading.  Because he starts with the Cuban revolution, we know he will return to it, and that is what we most want to hear about.  Yes, the description of what Cuba was like in the before time is interesting.  I learned a lot about middle-class Cuban culture and I marvelled at some of the differences in how children were raised there and here.  But I felt myself wanting him to skip that part and get to the action of the memoir--what happens after, when the bad stuff starts.

He doesn't disappoint; over the course of the memoir, the author returns--over and over again, more and more frequently--to the after time of Castro's Cuba, and each time he does, it gets a little worse for Carlos.  And that build up of his (and our) anxiety increases the momentum toward the final scenes when he leaves Cuba.  (Since he has written a sequel to this memoir, that seems an appropriate place for Waiting for Snow to stop.)

The effect is to make us remember the past the way Carlos remembers--in bits and pieces, snatches of scenes that repeat in our minds and accumulate meaning over time. One motif that repeats is lizards--they show up in all phases of the memoir, and each time, the writer finds them significant.  They become a kind of touchstone: though things in Carlos' life change drastically, the lizards remain the same, and they help Carlos (and us) put his experiences into perspective.

Waiting for Snow in Havana is a compelling story and a worthwhile read, I think. It taught me a lot about Cuba and made me want to read more, especially about some of the events--such as the Bay of Pigs Invasion--that I was taught only briefly in school. I would definitely recommend it.