2008 Woodie Awards
So, you say you want a revolution?
Five years after winning the National Book Award, and at a likely watershed in Cuban history, the Cuban-American historian, writer and Loyola alumnus Carlos Eire sits down with the Phoenix to talk about his life, his writing and the media.
Nicholas Gamso
Issue date: 4/9/08 Section: Closer Look
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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.
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