Crasstalk Book Club: Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire

Welcome back to Book Club, amigos. Didn’t you guys just love our last book club hosted by boobookitteh?

Well, it looks like I am your hostess this go-around! And you know what? It’s gonna be good because we are reading Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy.

On January 1, 1959, Cuban dictator Fugencio Batista’s government was toppled by Fidel Castro’s movement. 8 year old Carlos Eire’s childhood ended abruptly that day. He was the son of a wealthy judge, just the type of person Castro was out to destroy. Before Castro came into power, Eire lived a charmed life full of firecrackers, torturing lizards, and trips to the beach where his father would drive their family car through the surf. After the revolution, life changed dramatically. Eire eventually became one of the unaccompanied 14,000 children sent to Miami as part of Operación Pedro Pan.

Eire is now a professor at Yale, but I have a hard time imagining him as anything other than the little boy who thought he would be damned to Hell if he happened to accidentally see a nudie mag. His recollection of his childhood is so very vivid, almost implausibly so. It is filled with the perplexities that come along with being a boy (or so I would imagine) and the heartbreak that comes along with having your entire world turned upside down.

You can purchase Waiting for Snow in Havana on Amazon, or you can get it for your Nook or Kindle. To make your reading experience more authentic, you might want to fix yourself a mojito and sip it while you bask in the sun.

Some things to keep in mind while you read:

• The book begins “The world changed while I was slept, and much to my surprise, no one consulted me.” Is it fair to say Eire uses humor to endure hardship and speaking about his past? Can the strategy of using humor be to deflect pain ever become detrimental?
• Eire uses lizards to depict evil and also to depict victims of evil. Are all humans like lizards? Are we all perpetrators of evil and sufferers of it, too?
• Judge Nieto, Eire’s father, strongly believed in reincarnation. Did this help him withstand his beloved country’s demise? Or did it prevent him from living in the real world?
• Castro is described by Eire as having destroyed lives “in the name of fairness, …progress, …the oppressed.” What are other political movements that were perhaps well-intentioned but resulted in suffering? What does this say about human nature?
• Why did Eire wait so long after leaving Cuba to write this book?

We’ll start the discussion on August 28th. Be there or be totally uncool.