Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy » (Bargain)

While esteemed religion scholar Carlos Eire has published many scholarly texts, it is his scorching memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana that brought him to the public's attention and garnered a 2003 National Book Award. As Eire confides in our exclusive interview, "The greatest and sweetest irony of all is this: Readers are thanking me for Waiting for Snow, yet writing that book was the easiest and most pleasurable thing I have ever done."

"Have mercy on me, Lord, I am Cuban." In 1962, Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba -- exiled from his family, his country, and his own childhood by the revolution. The memories of Carlos's life in Havana, cut short when he was just eleven years old, are at the heart of this stunning, evocative, and unforgettable memoir.

Waiting for Snow in Havana is both an exorcism and an ode to a paradise lost. For the Cuba of Carlos's youth -- with its lizards and turquoise seas and sun-drenched siestas -- becomes an island of condemnation once a cigar-smoking guerrilla named Fidel Castro ousts President Batista on January 1, 1959. Suddenly the music in the streets sounds like gunfire. Christmas is made illegal, political dissent leads to imprisonment, and too many of Carlos's friends are leaving Cuba for a place as far away and unthinkable as the United States. Carlos will end up there, too, and fulfill his mother's dreams by becoming a modern American man -- even if his soul remains in the country he left behind.

Narrated with the urgency of a confession, Waiting for Snow in Havana is a eulogy for a native land and a loving testament to the collective spirit of Cubans everywhere.

The Los Angeles Times

What is powerful and lasting about the book is his evocation of childhood, above all of the life he led with his family in Havana before the revolution, and his extraordinary literary ability. For while I am skeptical about Eire's Cuban "essence," I am utterly persuaded, on the basis of this book, that Eire has the makings of a first-rate novelist. He insists that his is a memoir and not a work of fiction, and he is right to do so. And yet, almost wherever one looks in the book, the novelist keeps edging to the fore. — David Rieff