Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy is a memoir by Carlos Eire about his childhood in Cuba before the revolution. In 1962, when he was eleven, Eire became one of about 14,000 Cuban children flown out of the country in an airlift, leaving his parents behind. The book returns to the years before that departure, in a well-off household in Havana full of sunlight, lizards and colorful neighbors. His father, a judge and passionate collector of art and antiques, believed he had once been Louis XVI, while his mother looked to the United States as the model of a modern life. Eire describes school, brothers, friendships and mischief alongside the growing upheaval of the revolution that ended the world he knew. Funny and sorrowful by turns, the memoir is about memory, faith, loss and exile. It won the 2003 National Book Award for Nonfiction.