"Fidel came down from the mountains ... swept down like an avenging angel burning with white hot envy, frothing at the mouth," writes Carlos Eire, describing a vision of the Cuban revolutionary's 1959 siege of Havana in his award-winning memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana. "He wrecked Bethlehem, leveled it, slaughtered all its children or drove them away. Burned all the Christmas trees in one fell swoop with a whirlwind of flame, a cyclone of hellfire, kindled by his sugar."
Eire is unapologetically anti-Castro. Critics have pegged him for his wealthy upbringing in Fulgencio Batista's pre-revolutionary Cuba and for his book's elaborate criticisms of the revolution. But on the phone from Yale University, Eire is anything but a right-wing ideologue. His voice is weathered by a lifetime of meditation, its tone scarred with remorse and warmed by a joyful infatuation with the everyday; and his comments, like his book, are textured with ambivalence and ambiguity about Cuba and the U.S., about the Church and about spirituality. His criticisms of totalitarian government are distributed equally, left and right.
His book, which details his life in Cuba before, during and shortly after the revolution as well as his move to the U.S. at the age of 11, turned Eire into a prominent literary figure virtually overnight. He's been the subject of countless interviews and has lectured on his book - which, he insists, is not merely a memoir - throughout the U.S. He admits, though, that he's occasionally criticized for his depiction of the revolution. "People sometimes say, 'well, you're defending Batista.' And I point out very clearly [that] if you read my book carefully, you'll see that I'm not defending Batista. I didn't like him. Most Cubans didn't like him. But we had bad luck to get someone who was worse."
Any lingering trace of Eire's accent - a sort of Cubano-Mid-Western pastiche - is almost unnoticeable, but he eases into a contented staccato when he begins talking about writing.
Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy is an intensely personal portrait of Eire's childhood, earning him both the 2003 National Book Award and a seething condemnation from Cuba, where his book has been banned and he's been declared an "enemy of the revolution."
He began writing the book after being inundated with images of Elian Gonzales, the 7 year-old Cuban boy in Miami who was returned to his father after his mother died seeking exile in the U.S. "The way that the case was being handled in the press drove me insane," says Eire, who remains a staunch critic of American media. "And that little boy somehow just touched a raw nerve. The hypocrisy of the Cuban government claiming that every boy needed to be with his father - when, in fact, the Cuban government stood in the way of my being with my parents - just rubbed me the wrong way.
"I exploded," he says, "and this is the way I exploded. I realized I could only do it through something creative and something that was more like fiction than nonfiction. A real story, in other words."
He seems altogether satisfied with the result, however, and with the process of writing it. "I think I dealt with everything I felt I needed to deal with. It's a wonderful opportunity I had to relive my childhood as a middle-aged man."
Eire was one of about 14,000 Cuban children separated from their parents and relocated to Miami during the first few years of Fidel's regime. The operation, known as Pedro Pan, was authorized by the U.S. State Department but was largely organized by the Cuban expatriate community in Florida, which has consistently been one of the most vehemently anti-Castro voices in the U.S. Eire and his brother were shuffled between shelters and foster homes in Miami before moving to Illinois to live with their uncle. After their mother moved to the U.S. a few years later, they settled in Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood, then the nexus of Chicago's Cuban community.
He graduated from Loyola in 1973 and attended graduate school at Yale, where he received his doctorate in 1979. After teaching at several other universities, he returned to Yale in 1996, becoming the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies in 2000.
The Chicago that Eire depicts in his memoir is lonesome and alienating, a gritty substitute for the luxury he had as the son of a wealthy judge in pre-revolutionary Cuba. This was a different world, with only a few reminders of his old life - a statue of Lazarus teetering when the el crashed by, a cloud in the shape of Cuba following him home from work - to distract him. "Well, that first year was horrible, just absolutely horrible," he says of his time in Chicago. "They'd see that we were Hispanic and just slam the door in our face."
The overt prejudices he experienced became more than just frustrating; solidified, purveyed through popular culture, they indicate the sheer ignorance in all kinds of media. Eire has long-standing grievances against Mel Blanc for his creation of Speedy Gonzales and Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather Part II's campy, Third World opulence, but also against a system of education that propels and augments the reductive stereotypes it should be trying to discredit.
"Every book I opened in my American public schools - every geography book and every history book that had anything at all about Latin America, or even more unusual, if it had a little subchapter on Cuba - what would I see and what would I read? Well, I would see a photo of some half-starved peasant behind a team of oxen, living in a grass hut."
Eire observes that discrimination today is more complex, more subtle than any of this. He points to his encounters with news outlets that, he says, manipulate the voices of their commentators and experts to reify common stereotypes. In 2006, Eire was asked to write an op-ed piece for the New York Times about the expatriate community's reaction to Fidel's failing health and to ask, according to Eire, whether celebrations in Miami's Little Havana were "appropriate." He offered to write about the celebrants as estranged children of the revolution, born under Fidel and fleeing Cuba in the '80s and '90s. The Times asked for something else, so, he says, he offered to write about Fidel as a Machiavellian prince and was met with a curt response: "We're afraid this approach is not quite right."
"Why is it, I ask myself, that any editor at the Times should look down her nose at Cuban exiles who rejoice at Fidel's demise and then look for some Cuban who will confirm her bigotry? ... Even worse, why is it that my opinion should have to pass some test before it is expressed?" he asks in a published 2006 letter to the writer Jonathan Kay.
"An insidious kind of prejudice still underlies the thinking of many well educated North Americans when it comes to Cuba, a prejudice that allows otherwise reasonable people to accept or even praise political and social repression of the worst sort from any Third World leader who pays lip service to egalitarian goals ... and the foundation on which this bigotry rests is at bottom a racist one: There are still far too many comfortably affluent First World people who judge all Third World people as inferior beings who must play by different rules."
In February, Fidel, 81, announced that he would not accept another term as president, though he remains head of Cuba's communist party. His 76-year-old brother, Raúl, has been chosen to replace him and, despite his claims of allegiance to Fidel, has ushered in a number of minor reforms. Cubans, under Raúl, may now purchase mobile phones and computers and may stay at hotels formerly reserved for tourists.
Eire, who speaks with skepticism about the reality of such reforms, says that serious, tangible change can't come from within Cuba. "From the outside, the only thing that would help would be if the world wakes up and Cuba begins to be dealt with in the same way South Africa was dealt with back in the '80s. It will require a coordinated effort by all the affluent nations of the world and the ones that have all the power," he says.
But, after a lifetime of resisting revolution and suffering, again and again, under the slow motions of discrimination, he seems to believe that government is inherently imperfect:
"It's tough to encounter ignorance anywhere, but even worse to encounter ignorance in people who have power. That's when it gets really disturbing," he says. "But whether it's a multinational corporation or a country, I get very upset by all this. So maybe there is no way that one could ever have a truly good system; what one has to aim for is the lesser of all evils."
He laughs for a moment, and then there's silence at the other end of the line.
He tells me to look at the 1973 yearbook, where he has long hair and a mustache and a pair of huge brass eyeglasses, and he thanks me for the interview. We talk a little bit more about politics and about Loyola, and he sounds happy enough. But there's something else there: Despite moments of true joy, absolute pleasure, Eire's book is very much a history of pain and suffering.
In that scene with the miniature Bethlehem, Eire depicts his father's clairvoyance and the distorted realities that make up memory. Here, suffering and joy merge into an impenetrable symbol, if not for Cuba, then for the rest of our suffering world, its corrupt leaders and the cold reality of having to support the least of all possible evils: "He wanted to capture the glow of the hearths inside those houses, inns and shops. To re-create it just as he remembered it, this time with the aid of electricity. At night, light poured out of the windows, bathing the landscape in a soft, twilight glow and heightened the shadows on it."
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