family and childhood

At long last, a book that tells the truth about how the Cuban Revolution affected Children whose only crime was being born in Cuba in the 1950's! We meet Carlos and his family on January 1st 1959. Carlos is 8 years old and is world is going to change dramatically and forever. Batista has fled and Castro is marching down the main street in Havana atop a Sherman tank. Within three years, life will totally change for Carlos and his older brother Tony. Eventually they will join the more than 14,000 unaccompanied Cuban children leaving for the USA towards and unknown future. The adventures continue...and seen through the eyes of Carlos it takes on an almost magical quality. Wherever Carlos Eire takes us on this Magical Mystery tour there in never a dull moment...whether ducking whizzing bullets or picking flowers for his mother in the park with his friends, or playing in the backyard of a neighbor who has a live chimp as a pet-one is totally enthralled in this rich narrative. For anyone who enjoys seeing the world through the eyes of a child, sprinkled with the insightful and almost transcendent wisdom of someone who has experienced and survived a cataclysmic shift in personal and cultural identity, Waiting for Snow in Havana was well worth the wait!!

This is one of the most beautifully written books I have read in a long time. I can't remember the last time I gave 5 stars. Using tales of his childhood in pre-Castro Cuba, full of wonderful characters and magical places, he tells of his awakening to the changes caused by a revolution that he can not control.

What makes this book so amazing is Mr. Eire's use of the English language - both in his descriptions of his beloved country and his use of various writing styles. In one particular chapter, the writing style speaks louder about the emotion of an event than the words themselves. It is brilliant.

Mr. Eire uses childhood events to describe emotion in a way not seen often in today's writing. How he can use a boy's tyrannical (and deadly) pranks with lizards to describe the gut-wrenching anger over losing his parents and his whole world is beyond me - but it works magnificently!

This is a beautiful portrait of a boy's life disrupted and the courage of a man that pieces it back together again. Out of that pain comes an intimate portrait of a man's attempt to make sense of it all.

Read it - then pass it on or buy the book for everyone you know!

This is a misty-eyed memoir of an egoistical man who had a very privileged childhood. Because that idealized world was sundered, he believes he has a deeper take on suffering and displacement and he asks the reader to sympathize with his plight and along the way, to blame it all on Castro. The writing is precious, almost cloyingly so--one would expect a historian to be more careful of his language. If the Cuba he remembers is a paradise lost, then he needs to move on. Cuba has survived well enough without him.