Exiled from a dream state

Self-absorption is hard-wired into the culture of exile. It could hardly be otherwise. For unlike immigrants who have chosen to leave their own countries and make their lives over in another, the exile never chooses to leave home. Rather, he or she is condemned by the misfortunes of politics or history never to go home again. Thus the self-absorption, the endless harping over the paradise lost that was home, the endless dissatisfaction with the present and the romanticization of the past, of a golden childhood back in the mother country.

Never mind if, in reality, one was not as comfortable in the old country as in one’s adopted home. Never mind if one’s childhood was anything but an idyll. Never mind if the home one aches for has been transformed out of all recognition. The wounds of exile are such that these facts pale before the emotional absolutes of memory, nostalgia and longing. These wounds can never be healed, their pain can never be assuaged and the gap between the exile’s experience and those who have never undergone such an ordeal, can never be bridged.

So, at least, goes the exile narrative, which has not varied much since the biblical lamentations of the Jewish people over their exile from Jerusalem. In the recent history of the United States, no group has incarnated these feelings as powerfully as the exiles who fled Cuba in wave after wave after the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power. In Cuban Miami, it is commonplace to hear it said of an older person that “his watch stopped in 1959” and even more common to be treated to tales by middle-age people about how beautiful their childhoods were back in Havana or Santiago.

Carlos Eire’s immensely affecting and only slightly less infuriating memoir, “Waiting for Snow in Havana,” is certainly the most accomplished literary expression of these feelings to have appeared to date. It is a curious book -- a memoir that nonetheless borrows heavily from both the techniques and prerogatives of fiction -- and, in the end, a deeply self-indulgent one. But then, that self-indulgence is itself the essence of the exile sensibility.

Eire is an unlikely candidate to have produced such a book, for his experience of the United States has been quite dissimilar to that of the overwhelming majority of Cuban Americans. What he writes about his boyhood in Havana would be endorsed by most members of the Cuban bourgeoisie who departed for Miami and Union City, N.J., after 1959. It was, as Eire and so many others have described it, a world of close-knit families and, above all, of grand, almost supernaturally attractive parents: Eire calls his Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI throughout the book. It was a world of pleasure: the beach, the sun, the food and, above all, radiant Havana itself. And of course, it was a world of servants, maids and chauffeurs whose presence, in Eire’s memoir as in those of the memoirs (and memories) of so many other Cuban exiles, is taken for granted, like the turquoise waves of the Caribbean that so haunted Eire as a boy and still haunt him as a middle-age man.

What is untypical is Eire’s background after he left Cuba. Whereas most Cuban exiles left with their families and had the experience of forging a new life in the United States surrounded by their relatives and former neighbors from the other side of the Florida Strait, Eire departed unwillingly, sent into exile not only by Castro’s dictatorship but by his own parents. Eire is what Cuban Americans call a Pedro Pan, one of 14,000 children who were sent to the United States by their parents from 1960 to 1962 in a gigantic airlift and later, after a period in a camp in South Florida, taken in by families all over the United States. Eire is both grateful and, quite understandably, everlastingly unreconciled to his parents’ decision, which, he writes, was taken only after his mother “eventually prevailed” over his father, who, as he puts it rather delicately, was “unable to resist her persuasive voice.” He is also lucky, for after living in a series of foster homes in Florida and Illinois for almost four years, Eire was reunited with his mother in Chicago in 1965. His father, however, remained in Cuba and died there in 1976 without Eire ever having seen him again.

Such are the real wounds of exile, but they did not prevent Eire from making a new life, indeed, a distinguished new life in the United States. And yet, despite the fact that he grew up in Illinois, far from any Cuban American matrix, taught in Minnesota and at the University of Virginia before becoming T. Lawrason Riggs professor of history and religious studies at Yale, Eire’s nostalgia never wavered. “In the past thirty-eight years,” he writes without the slightest trace of irony, “I’ve seen eight thousand nine hundred and seventeen clouds in the shape of the island of Cuba.” He has, he insists, seen them everywhere, and then adumbrates the sightings, which turn out to range from Reykjavik, Iceland, to Kalamazoo, Mich. It is easy to mock Eire and easier still to regret that, by his own account, he has led such a haunted life. But to do so is too simple. One of the virtues of “Waiting for Snow in Havana” is that, while it is ineffably self-absorbed, it is in no sense self-pitying. “Under these clouds,” Eire writes, “I pursue the life given me.” For him, the clouds are like the Cuba of his imagination, endlessly nourishing and yet utterly out of reach.

It seems safe to assume that in writing his memoir, Eire was trying to at least shorten the distance between himself and those ungraspable clouds. In his acknowledgments, he makes a considerably larger claim, describing himself as a “changed man” for having written the book and thanking three Cuban friends for having “awakened me from my slumbers.” In particular, he expresses a debt of gratitude to one friend for “showing me the way to what is genuinely Cuban with every word and gesture.”

And it is here, in this claim, that Eire’s project becomes, if not offensive, then at least somewhat morally troubling. For the great solecism of exile is its belief in some national “essence.” This, of course, was a standard trope of 19th century European thinking, but it was a standard trope with the most terrible consequences in blood and slaughter, first in the colonial world and then in Europe between 1914 and 1945. Self-evidently, Eire means nothing so malign. But imagine that instead of thanking his friend, Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, for revealing what was really Cuban, he had thanked him for revealing what was really white or black or Mexican or Asian. There would be nothing benign about that as, alas, there is nothing benign about some of the underlying assumptions of “Cuban-ness” that Eire embraces so passionately in his book.

I do not suppose for a moment that he understands the moral hazard he has exposed himself to, although I wonder why, as he sets out in search of his “essential” Cuban-ness, it seems never to occur to him that most people in Havana of his generation and class were at most three generations removed from having been Spaniards. For a scholar, Eire seems almost recklessly indifferent to the notion of contingency. In any case, the more ideological component of “Waiting for Snow in Havana,” like his political account of Castro’s coming to power and the essential nature of the Cuban revolution, is among the least interesting of the many things Eire has to say.

What is powerful and lasting about the book is his evocation of childhood, above all of the life he led with his family in Havana before the revolution, and his extraordinary literary ability. For while I am skeptical about Eire’s Cuban “essence,” I am utterly persuaded, on the basis of this book, that Eire has the makings of a first-rate novelist. He insists that his is a memoir and not a work of fiction, and he is right to do so. And yet, almost wherever one looks in the book, the novelist keeps edging to the fore. Whether it is in the phantasmagoric portrait of his parents (calling them Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette is not simply political symbolism about authority figures doomed by revolutions), the succulent natural descriptions or a complicated and nuanced psychological gift, Eire keeps demonstrating how much he can do as a writer.

And in fairness, most books about childhood are far too self-indulgent. It could scarcely be otherwise. To convey what it was like to have been that child, the adult narrator is forced, at least on some level, to become childlike. Any other stance would be an anatomization, not a memoir. The problem is that for any exile who left his or her homeland as a child, the nostalgia for the beloved lost country will be inseparable from the nostalgia of the careworn adult for the innocence of childhood or, at least, for the innocence of a childhood lived out in prosperity. For, of course, I am not sure the son of a Cuban cane-cutter would write in exactly the same hues that Eire finds are available to him.

Eire comes close to acknowledging this problem when he tells the story of being on a beach in Massachusetts with his sons and hearing one of them ask, “Don’t you wish you were a kid, Dad?” To which Eire replied, “What do you mean? I am a kid!” On one level, an innocent exchange between a father and a son. But for anyone who has spent time among exiles, and not only Cuban exiles, it is also a revealing one.

For what the exile, separated from his country in childhood, yearns for most is the restitution of that childhood. In the Cuban case, that loss is far more bitter than the loss of property or even language. Such a reveling in childhood is a treasure trove for a writer, provided, that is, that one can keep a certain distance from it. But this Eire cannot do, and his book is the less for it. In the end, the losses Eire narrates, particularly given the horrors of the world in 2003 -- this world of sarin gas, collateral damage and the AIDS pandemic -- seem, if not lesser by comparison, at least to require some acknowledgment that the child’s perspective of radical self-absorption is not enough. And it is precisely because Eire is so gifted that this lack is so noticeable.

At the end of the book, Eire begins to approach these themes. He evokes the swimming pools of his childhood and acknowledges that he and his brother were “spoiled brats” who “thought we’d never have to worry about cleaning out pool filters.” In a paroxysm of fury, he writes that it served us right “to be hurled down to the bottom of the heap when we reached the States.” But this adult insight is one that comes too late in “Waiting for Snow in Havana” to be of much use. This is not because Eire should have replaced self-indulgence with self-loathing. Neither is an adult sentiment. Eire no more “deserved” the hard times he lived through in America than the fat times he enjoyed in Cuba. Rather, such a sense of contingency, and of a certain distance from the passions of his own past, would have made Eire’s memoir a far better book and turned what is a promising literary debut into an astonishing one.