Can only a Cuban write about Cuba?

How does one begin to respond to Carlos Eire’s review of my book “Cuba Confidential: Love and Vengeance in Miami and Havana,” a misinformed polemic that seamlessly demonstrates the central argument of my book? Eire’s contention that Cuban loss and suffering is so unique, so special, that only Cubans should write about the subject is, well, preposterous -- and unacceptable.

Eire’s blindness leads him to a willful misreading of my book. He posits several arguments based on statements that he claims to have read in my book, but these statements or sentiments are not to be found in my book. For example, Eire states that the premise of my book is that “the Cuban Revolution should be seen as a family feud,” when what I wrote was that the subsequent 43-year-old standoff “has proven so intractable, so immune to resolution” because “in part, with no diminishment intended, it is a huge family feud filled with the corresponding heartbreak, rancor and bitterness.”

Indeed, it was my hope that the metaphor of the shattered family would humanize the exile struggle during the post-Elian period when exiles have been, at times, demonized. Nevertheless, only the first two chapters specifically reference the broken Cuban family; the next 10 chapters deal with the political and ideological factions of the Cuban Revolution and those that exist today within the diaspora, in Cuba and in Washington.

Eire also mistakenly claims that I wrote that “being subjected to the Pedro Pan exodus counts as a privilege.” This is a fabrication. The book variously described the Pedro Pan airlift as a “painful experience” and “a wrenching estrangement” for the children it sought “to save from being raised in a communist country.” My book quotes Nelson Valdes, an exile historian, who like Eire endured the Pedro Pan airlift, as enumerating some of the benefits particular to Cuban exiles. However, Valdes does not suggest that being uprooted from one’s family was one of them. Curiously, Eire entirely ignores the comments of Valdes and other Pedro Pans quoted in my book -- perhaps because their belief that Elian Gonzalez should have been reunited with his father is inconveniently at odds with his strongly felt views.

While my book goes to pains to document the repressive and suffocating nature of Cuban life under Fidel Castro, along with the stunning achievements of Cuban Americans (“and the breadth of their successes”), it also points out that Cuban exiles are the most privileged immigrants ever to come to the U.S. Indeed, exiles have even successfully crafted an immigration policy that favors them over all other immigrants. Eire views these facts as prejudicial but offers nothing to dispute them.

A more grievous error is Eire’s claim that my book contends that repression and fear in Miami were “perhaps more profound” than that in Cuba when in fact, I have gone to considerable lengths to distinguish between state-sponsored repression and that generated by a community. My point, which Eire contorts himself to duck at all times, is that the erosion of free expression and democratic ideals in exile Miami has been considerable and worthy of our attention.

While Eire asks that attention be paid to his own traumatic story, he is keen to dismiss the sufferings of Cubans who disagree with his convictions. Focusing his criticism on me as an uncomprehending “outsider,” he simply ignores the fact that my book is entirely sourced by Cubans -- an estimated 300 interviews from both sides of the Florida Straits. And while his narrative oozes with postured condescension and sarcasm, he produces no documentation to dispute anything in my book.

What informs every line of Eire’s writing is his disappointment in reading a book that does not address his personal saga as a Pedro Pan refugee. Certainly, this is worthy material, but it is not the basis of this book. Woefully, Eire’s review informs the reader about his own story but very little about my book.

Eire struggles to make the case that I am an insensitive clinician probing at the wound of the Cuban soul. But never could I have endured these 10 years in the war zone of the Cuban debate without a nagging, ceaseless empathy for the tragedy of the Cuban people.

Ann Louise Bardach

Santa Barbara

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I am appalled that the reviewer chosen to comment on “Cuba Confidential” by Ann Louise Bardach is himself a Cuban emigre and one whose life was shattered, by his own admission, when his parents sent him off to the United States alone and unprotected in the early ‘60s. How anyone could expect an unbiased view from a person with such a history is beyond me.

Phyllis Spiva

Pacific Palisades

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Carlos Eire’s review of Ann Louise Bardach’s “Cuba Confidential” is really a polemic dressed up as a book review. As a Cuban American whose parents left with me in 1961, and who was raised in Miami, I read Bardach’s book as a needed exploration of the conflict that plagues Cuba. Eire casts himself as speaking for Cuban exiles, but his observations on Cuba and the diaspora do not speak to me. His criticism of Bardach as an “outsider” ineligible to write about us because she is not Cuban herself is patently preposterous. In fact, what makes the Cuban situation so intractable is that both camps of Cubans have cast each other as the “outsider.”

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Rosa Lowinger

Los Angeles

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If, as Carlos Eire argues in his review of Ann Louise Bardach’s “Cuba Confidential,” only a Cuban can understand another Cuban, why then have they been so incapable of reaching an understanding? Or could it be that an outsider’s perspective, such as the one Bardach brings to the subject, is what exiles and Fidelistas so sorely need?

Rex Weiner

Los Angeles

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As a Cuban-American, born in Cuba and raised in Miami, I feel compelled to say that Eire does not speak for all Cubans. There are those of us that are trying to dig through the emotional soap opera of half-truths and hyperbole that reverberate from both of the Havanas, in an attempt to understand the realities of the situation. Bardach’s book is a resource (written as only an “outsider” can) that has helped me to do just that.

Juan Francisco Padilla III

Buellton, Calif.

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I commend The Times for publishing Carlos Eire’s review. Finally someone speaks for me when it comes to an apologist of a dictator that has been in power for 43 years. Being a Pedro Pan myself, I left Cuba at 13 and did not see my mother for a year and a half and my father for four and a half years. My parents had a bigger love to have their children grow and live in freedom than any love they had for themselves.

Camilo Vila

Los Angeles

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For a reader who has grown accustomed for more than 40 years to hearing only one side of the story of the ongoing Cuban crisis, Carlos Eire’s response to Ann Louise Bardach’s “Cuba Confidential” was a puff of fresh air. Eire writes as a Cuban-American who has endured the suffering not only of the Pedro Pan saga but the very strange spins that outside parties have put on the matter since then. Reasonable people can and should have different opinions on the so-called Cuban feud. So what’s wrong with hearing, if only once in a while, the other side of the story, that is, the way that Cubans themselves perceive their own suffering, or a critique of the paternalistic takes that Anglos place upon our history?

The problem with Bardach’s superimposition of a soap opera script upon the entire Cuban debate is that it obscures attention on legitimate civic issues concerning historical accuracy and human rights and displaces it toward the petty incidents of human foibles, which are not, let’s remind ourselves, the exclusive province of Cubans or Cuban-Americans.

Enrico Mario Santi

Lexington, Ky.

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Ann Louise Bardach has a farfetched theme: that Fidel Castro’s Cuba is a soap opera. I don’t know Carlos Eire, but his review is a serious rebuttal of the kind of political tourists who have made a profession out of Cuba and her suffering under a totalitarian regime. Their plight is not a soap but a tragedy.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante

London

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Carlos Eire replies:

Odd that I am accused of intolerance or ill-will simply because I raised questions about spin and reductionism and criticized the author’s approach. I did not dispute the facts of Bardach’s book. Nor did I disparage her research. I praised her for being thorough and meticulous. I lauded her professionalism and her ability to make contacts on opposite sides of the fray. Nowhere did I suggest that only Cubans should write about Cuba or, even less, that I spoke for all Cubans. I raised the question of the insider-outsider dialectic because I am sensitive to it as a historian of late medieval and early modern Europe. In my own work, I am always an outsider.

What I wrote was a spirited appraisal of an engaging book that is, sadly, blinkered by its methodology and the coarse reductive approach of its author. That approach favors the personal and psychological over the political and ideological. At times, it also blurs the line between fact and opinion. It’s helpful, but only up to a point. That Bardach feels the pain of the Cuban predicament is inarguable, perhaps even admirable. I only wonder if she doesn’t feel it too intensely.