Born in Havana in 1950, Carlos Erie was sent out of Cuba in 1962 after Castro gained control. With a Ph.D. from Yale, he taught in Minnesota for 2 years, Virginia for 15 years, and is now a Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale. This gift book is primarily about his boyhood in Havana.

The back cover summary says: “Have Mercy on me, Lord, for I am Cuban. In 1962, Carlos Erie was one of 14,000 unaccompanied children airlifted out of Cuba – exiled from his family, his country, and his own childhood by the revolution. The memories of Carlos’s life in Havana, cut short when he was just eleven years old, are at the heart of this stunning, evocative, and unforgettable memoir.

“Waiting for Snow in Havana is both an exorcism and an ode to a paradise lost. For the Cuba of Carlos’s youth – with its lizards and turquoise seas and sun-drenched siestas – becomes an island of condemnation once a cigar-smoking guerrilla named Fidel Castro ousts President Batista on January 1, 1959. Suddenly the music in the streets sounds like gunfire. Christmas is made illegal, political dissent leads to imprisonment, and too many of Carlos’s friends are leaving Cuba for a place as far away and unthinkable as the United States. Carlos will end up there, too, and fulfill his mother’s dreams by becoming a modern American man – even if his soul remains in the country he left behind.

“Narrated with the urgency of a confession, Waiting for Snow in Havana is a eulogy for a native land and a loving testament to the collective spirit of Cubans everywhere.”

The above one-sentence paragraph is a good example of publisher’s hype. I found very little of what I would call “the urgency of a confession” in this book. But there was plenty that amounted to “an ode to a paradise lost.” Except for the last hundred or so pages, the memoir described the adventures and exploits of a spoiled boy who lived in a wealthy neighborhood where his father, a judge, and his mother allowed him much freedom with little effort towards character development of Carlos and his brother. The earlier three-quarters of the memoir reminded me of a few wealthy, spoiled brats I knew in my home town. I could not identify with Carlos or feel much sympathy for him in this early and too long part of the book. Often his descriptions of his episodes served as a cure for insomnia.

On page 300, however, Carlos Erie tells it straight. Speaking of the airlifts, he says “It was the only way to get us out quickly. Children didn’t need security clearances to enter the States and were given visa waivers. The parents had to wait many months for their visas, sometimes a year or more.

“Thousands of families were doing this. By the time Fidel and John Kennedy put a stop to it in October 1962, fourteen thousand children had been sent to the States all alone. So it wasn’t too weird, as far as these things go. But, of course, when a world falls apart, everything is so strange that nothing is strange. So two pampered boys who had never spent a night away from home can be sent to live in another country, where they don’t know a soul.

“I was ten years old, but I had just learned how to tie my own shoelaces, and I had never cut my own steak or buttered my own toast. I’d never lifted a finger to do anything around the house. No chores. No responsibilities. No clue about what it took to survive.

“All my friends were in the same fix, and all of them were being shipped off too. Ninos bitonges, Fidel called us. A bunch of pampered boys. He loved to make fun of us in his speeches.”

At this point I felt, at last, sympathy for him and others in his fix. But the last hundred pages are what make this book worthwhile – how he and his brother were taken in as foster children by kind families in Miami. I only learned in the half-page called About the Author that “After living in a series of foster homes in Florida and Illinois, he was reunited with his mother in Chicago in 1965.” All Carlos tells in the memoir is that his mother made it to the US and they ended up in Chicago when he was about fifteen. No work could be found for her, but Carlos, lying about his age, found a job as a dishwasher and that his brother, at seventeen, found a better job. The rest of his story, from dishwasher to a Yale Ph.D., is not in this memoir.

In short, I felt that this latter part of his memoirs were far too brief – too much was skipped, just as the first three-fourths of the book would have been better had it been far shorter – it doesn’t take so much detail as he gave to recognize him and his friends as spoiled, pampered brats. So I was quite disappointed that this book didn’t live up to my expectations – I suggest that a reader ‘skim’ the first three-fourths of this book and ‘read’ only the last hundred or so pages.