Carlos Eire's Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy is the sequel to his National Book Award-winning memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy. In his new book, Eire reflects upon life in the United States, from the years he spent as an adolescent separated from his family in Cuba through his reunion with his mother and into his adulthood.

Eire and his older brother, Tony, were two of the thousands of children who fled Cuba in the wake of Fidel Castro's rise to power through a CIA-sponsored program called the Pedro Pan airlift. The United States granted travel visas to children. The children left Cuba with the expectation that they would return as soon as the Castro regime had fallen. Whether or not Castro fell, parents expected to follow their children to the United States. Due to the Cuban Missile Crisis, however, travel to the United States became severely restricted, and thousands of children were separated from their parents for an indefinite amount of time. In Eire's case, he and his brother were placed with foster parents in Miami, then in a horrific group home. From there, they were sent to Bloomington, Illinois, to live with their uncle. After years of separation, their mother was able to come to the United States, and she moved with her two sons to Chicago.

What prompted you to write Waiting for Snow in Havana, and then what prompted Learning to Die? From what you've said elsewhere, it seems there was a sense that you "had" to write.

There was a sense of urgency with both of them. The first book was prompted by the Elian Gonzalez affair, which was extremely disturbing to me and led me to a completely altered state of mind. I stopped reading newspapers or magazines, listening to the radio or television. I shut myself off from the world completely because I did not want to know what was being said about the controversy, much less what the outcome was going to be. And I went inwards very deeply.

This new book was not set in motion by a traumatic event. It was triggered by a series of epiphanies on a trip I took to the Czech Republic, which led me to realize that the time had come to write a sequel. It was very funny how these little epiphanies fit into each other, like pieces to a puzzle—from the poster I saw in Prague for the Museum of Communism, to visiting the shrine for the Infant of Prague, where there was a kind of miraculous event.

I was looking for the shrine because someone had asked me to go there. It was a Saturday evening, Pentecost Eve. I knew the next day we were taking off, and I wouldn't be able to go to church in the morning, so I was hoping to go to Mass that evening. And I was thinking, If I go to Mass, I won't be able to understand a word, because it's going to be in Czech. Well, lo and behold, I stumbled into the shrine just as Mass was beginning. And it was in Spanish. In Prague. And when I got home, I knew I had to write the second book. Same intensity as before, but without the negative trauma, and I definitely was not disconnected from the rest of the world.

Do you have any sense of how many mothers or fathers, or both, were able eventually to come to the United States?

Most, eventually. The estimate is that when the missile crisis brought the curtain down on everybody, at least 10,000 of us had parents trapped on the other side.

What was the time frame between when you came to Miami and when the missile crisis occurred?

I came in early April, and the missile crisis was in October, Halloween almost.

And at that point your mom had already made plans to reunite with you.

My mom had her exit visa for November 7, so if the curtain had come down two weeks later, she would have been here.

Why did you use the word "confessions" in the subtitles of the two books?

That was a deliberate allusion to Augustine, but it also reflects the fact that I wrote the first book as fiction and pitched it as fiction. Then my editor said the book had to be published as nonfiction, and it really became a public confession. Especially when they told me I couldn't take out embarrassing things I wanted to take out. I figured I might as well fess up. It is a confession.

What made your editor say that?

She kept asking me if this or that event had actually happened. I always said yes. "How much of this is your life?" she asked. "All of it," I said. And then she said it simply wouldn't be right to publish the book as fiction. On so many different levels. It would not be ethical. And it would detract from the literary merit of a work—it's very stupid to pass off a memoir as a novel. And it would lessen the impact the book would have. She also said the more unpleasant you are in the story, the more believable it is. So I said fine. And then of course the second book had to be confessions too.

In tipping your hat to Augustine, were you also suggesting that are points of connection between his Confessions and your confessions?

In his Confessions, he's addressing God, mostly. In mine I'm not. That's an obvious difference. I'm not trying to copy him. I've turned the reader, not into God, but into the person who is judging my life for what it is. And in a way I'm pointing out everything I can point out that I'm conscious of, that I've done. Some things may be judged as good. Some things may be judged as not-so-good, or even as bad.

Augustine is horrified by all his sins. Horrified by them. There are things I'm horrified by, but there are things I think fall in between. He doesn't seem to have very many of those. I had one place in Waiting for Snow in Havana where, even before I was conscious of framing the book as a confession, I asked, "Can one really be forgiven for something one is not really sorry for?" That's a problem.

I was in the audience for the opening night of your book tour last fall, which happened to be on Election Day. You ended by making a distinction, in relation to Election Day, between living in the United States right now and living in Cuba right now. And I learned from hearing you that night why it matters for me as an American that I understand your story. Not why it matters that I enjoy it or that I've picked up a little bit of history, that I've gotten a sense of this very difficult event that happened to a set of people, but that I understand this story in its broader context. I think of the preamble to the book, and the question it implies: Was it worth it to be free? I wonder if you can elaborate on why this matters for Americans and for people in the free world in particular to understand your story.

I think it is necessary for everyone who lives in a free society to understand what a rare gift it is in comparison to the rest of the world. And what a privilege it is, which is often taken for granted and worse than that. Not just taken for granted but mistaken for some sort of oppressive system. And it helps to have a point of comparison. In fact, there have been a few reviews that have come down very hard on me because the reviewers have no clue how fortunate they are to live in the United States.

I read a few reviews where I thought, "Oh, you didn't understand the book." Who am I to say that, but that was my gut reaction.

I just read a review yesterday in the AARP magazine. The reviewer says he got tired of me constantly complaining about the Castro regime. I'm thinking, the way I see it, I should be complimented for my restraint in not bringing it up all that often. But for him, it's an annoyance, because for him that's not part of the story. In plain English, he's an idiot when it comes to understanding what life was like in a place like Cuba.

And what it continues to be like, fifty years later.

There are many Westerners who think that people in the so-called Third World either are incapable of living freely or are in some stage of underdevelopment where right now this is what's best for them. This is why two million European and Canadian tourists went to Cuba last year. They go to all-inclusive resorts where they have access to everything Cubans don't have. And they think it's just perfectly fine. I just read an essay or report from Cuba in a British newspaper last week where the author actually said that Cubans don't need as much as Brits. He said they need very little and are very happy with very little. It's kind of like Rousseau's noble savage. Or Kipling's white man's burden. But I think it's nastier than the older stuff.

I think of having a daughter with a disability. President Bush, in his No Child Left Behind legislative initiative, talked about the "soft bigotry of low expectations." And that's what comes to mind, this sense of, "Oh, that's fine for them." But it is really saying I don't understand our common humanity.

Yes, so you can bypass them for this or that because they aren't seen as at the same full human level as you are.

You write about the role of Providence. There's one passage where you say (I'm paraphrasing), "I don't pretend to understand this, but at the same time I have a sense that these disparate points do somehow connect."

Oh, yes. Definitely. You got it right. I sometimes write about that with a question mark hovering over it. I don't trust anyone who tells me that they are certain about such things. I want to believe in eternity. I want to believe in divine providence. And I do. But I think anyone who says that they believe without any little tiny hint of a doubt—they are fooling themselves and they are trying to fool you, too.

Amy Julia Becker is the author of Penelope Ayres: A Memoir and the forthcoming A Good and Perfect Gift (Bethany House).

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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