Exile and Homecoming

Yale professor Carlos Eire is a fine scholar of late-medieval and Reformation history, and a superb memoirist as well. Born in pre-Castro Cuba and a young refugee to America in the early 1960s, he sat down more than a decade ago to write about his childhood. The result: Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, a dreamlike narrative of his experiences in the lost world of wealthy Cuban society. The book won a National Book Award.

Eire has carried his story forward, and his new book, Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy, recounts more nightmares than dreams. In 1962, he and his brother left Cuba as part of Operation Peter Pan, a program that allowed parents who opposed the Castro government to expatriate their children to Miami in advance of their own departure to America. But the Bay of Pigs intervened.

Thrown into an English-speaking world without parents, Eire and his brother land in warm American foster homes. Soon, however, they are transferred to a desperate group home with other Cuban boys. After a long and hard year, they are suddenly liberated, sent to live with their uncle in Bloomington, Illinois. Somehow their mother manages to leave Cuba”but not their father, who prefers to stay. They move to Chicago, and as a teenager Eire lives with his brother and mother in a hardscrabble basement apartment far from the antique-filled home of his childhood in Havana.

The Spanish-speaking world recedes and an English-speaking world takes its place. Wealth is replaced by poverty. An already mysterious father becomes a disembodied, ghostly memory. Eire experiments with names: Carlos becomes Charles, Charlie, and then Chuck. Each loss is a kind of death: the death of a Cuban, of a son, of a child whose world was once secure. As the trajectory of memory reaches toward the present, we read about his brother spiraling downward in self-destructive decay and his mother’s exile from her retirement home. By the end of the memoir death swallows them both.

Waiting for Snow is a beautiful book, full of magical memories only vaguely overshadowed by the impending catastrophe of Castro, and I remember reading it with great pleasure. Learning to Die is darker. It recounts suffering that cannot be transformed into amusing tales by Eire’s natural gifts as a storyteller, and I found myself disappointed at first. But the life of an adolescent exile, impoverished and abandoned on the streets of Miami and Chicago, provides few memories suited for the magical style of his first volume, and I came to realize that as a writer Eire is more spiritually ambitious in Learning to Die.

We rightly love our homeland, our native language, our dreams of success, and countless other goods of this world, including our families. Indeed, it is the fittingness of these finite loves, so many of which are broken, that makes Learning to Die painful to read. Yet, in the many-layered world of Eire’s memory, The Imitation of Christ, the late-medieval spiritual classic by Thomas Kempis, and the sole book his parents put in his small suitcase when he left Cuba with his brother, comes to the fore. His many exiles and losses are crucifixions of sorts, teaching him to die to himself and making room for the presence of God. Learning to die turns out to be a way, a crucial way, we learn to live.