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Voices from Exile 65
Confessions of a Cuban Boy
. The
morning
referenced
was
January 1, 1959—the morning
dictator Fulgencio Batista fled
Cuba as Fidel Castro’s rebel
forces advanced on the capital
city.
Carlos Eire, eight years old
when Castro came to power,
had been born into a privileged
family. His father was an influ-
ential and respected judge. Like many other Cubans, his
mother soon became alarmed by the turn toward authoritari-
anism, and then communism, that the Castro government
took. She worried about her children’s future. So, in 1962,
she put Carlos and his older brother, Tony, on a flight to
Miami by themselves, as part of a program known as
Operation Peter Pan.
The brothers expected to be reunited quickly with their
parents. But more than three years would pass before their
mother was able to leave Cuba. They never saw their father
again.
In adulthood, Carlos Eire became a professor of history and
religious studies, ultimately winding up at Yale University. The
books he wrote were all scholarly volumes—until 2003’s
Waiting for Snow in Havana
. The memoir of his childhood in
Cuba won a National Book Award.
“Fidel’s Cuba,” Eire once remarked, “is the deepest circle of
hell.” But, he insists, he didn’t intend for
Waiting for Snow in
Scan here to
see Carlos
Eire read a
passage from
Learning to
Die in
Miami:
Educational
Video