Carlos Eire: How He Came to Write a Memoir of His Life in Cuba

After Fidel Castro took control of Cuba, thousands of middle- and upper-class parents in that country sent their children to the United States. The mass migration became known as Operation Pedro Pan, or the Peter Pan Airlift. Carlos Eire was one of the children, arriving in the United States in 1962, at age 11.

He lived in foster homes until his mother managed, against the odds, to get to the United States almost four years later. Eire never saw his father again. (He died in Cuba in 1976.)

Eire grew up to be a distinguished historian, and now is a professor of history and religious studies at Yale University. But in 2000, the international custody dispute over Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez moved Eire to try to write about his own life during and after the Castro-led revolution.

The lyrical and emotionally charged memoir that resulted,"Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy" (Free Press, $14 paperback), won a 2003 National Book Award. The book's success has put Eire on the lecture circuit, and he'll be speaking in Charlotte on Thursday, which is Cuban Independence Day.

He answered questions by phone last week.

Q. "Waiting for Snow in Havana" represents a complete departure from the kind of writing you do as a historian, doesn't it? Tremendous departure. I wrote this book in four months. My prior effort at putting together a book was 10 years. Doing research as a historian takes forever. You have to be so careful how you put things together, how you argue them and analyze the data that you have. This came straight from my memory and straight from my imagination, both at once. As I've been telling people, writing a good history book is like running up Mount Everest with a 50-pound backpack. This was like a walk in a park on a pleasant day without anything on your back.

Q. And the Elian Gonzalez case was the trigger? That was the catalyst. I was totally beside myself. I wanted to do something to wake up the reading public, especially the American reading public, about what life in Cuba was like for children. He symbolized for me the lack of autonomy children in Cuba have.

Plus, I was extremely angry at the hypocrisy of the claims being made by the Cuban government that every child deserves to be with his parents. Between 1960 and October 1962, 14,000 of us (Cuban children) came to the U.S. And then in Oct. '62, that's when everything changed, with the fallout of the (Cuban) missile crisis. Cuba shut the door, and the parents of over 10,000 of the 14,000 kids were left stranded in Cuba. And the 10,000 kids were stranded here. The Cuban government actively stood in the way. I saw my mother 3 1/2 years later. She finally managed to get to the U.S. through Mexico, after many setbacks. My father never left. And Cuba is saying of Elian, the boy needs to be with his father.

Q. You started writing this book as a work of fiction, right? I thought I could reach a wider audience through fiction. I ended up with a memoir that is very different from other memoirs. It reads like a novel, and I constructed it like a novel. I didn't change it, even after the editor decided it should be published as nonfiction. Americans have trouble with the concept of a nonfiction novel. Europeans do not.

Q. The book is factual, though, right? Nothing is invented here. The only embellishment, if you can call it that, is recreating specific dialogue.