Four decades ago, Operation Pedro Pan rescued this Cuban writer from Castro's regime

TALKING WITH CARLOS EIRE
 
By Daphne Uviller
Daphne Uviller is a writer in New York.

Carlos Eire was one of 14,000 unaccompanied children airlifted out of Cuba between 1960 and 1962. Operation Pedro Pan began as a small, clandestine mission to
protect the children of President Fulgencio Batista's supporters from retribution by Fidel Castro's newly installed socialist regime. With the help of clergy in Miami,
underground operatives in Havana and the CIA, the movement grew to include the children of any parent who was able to get them out of the country.

Forty years later, Eire, 52 years old and a professor of early modern European religious history at Yale, decided to unlock his store of vivid memories to write "Dreaming
of Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy" (Free Press, $25). The memoir is a richly limned portrait of the contrast between Eire's carefree boyhood before
Batista's ousting and its seemingly overnight transformation into a hungry, parentless crucible in exile. Eire has never been back to Cuba, and doesn't care to ever return.
He walked out after the first five minutes of the film "Buena Vista Social Club," so devastating was it for him to see what had become of the country. Sitting in a
Manhattan cafe on a recent afternoon, he reflects that it was precisely because he never looked back; because he rarely tells anyone he is Cuban-born; because he, a
history professor, has never once read a book on Cuban history, that his memories remained so perfectly preserved.

"The most immediate trigger for this book was the Elian Gonzales episode," Eire says. "All of a sudden, there was this situation where - I won't even say the Cuban
government - where Fidel Castro climbed on this high moral platform and said every kid deserves to be with his parents. And I knew damned well that there were
14,000 of us whose parents were prevented from leaving and who were harassed in every conceivable way. The sheer hypocrisy of Fidel claiming it was the family's
right to be with the kid drove me to the edge of insanity."

After Eire arrived in Miami with his brother at the age of 12, it took his mother 3 1/2 years to leave Havana. She made two unsuccessful attempts; both times she was
forced to vacate her seat on the plane for, according to Eire, "more important people." She then had to reapply for an exit permit, a process which, each time, took
another year. As a result, Eire grew used to the idea that he would never see his parents again. Indeed, he was never reunited with his father, a judge who believed he
had been Louis XVI in another life and who chose to remain behind in Cuba looking after his vast collection of ancient art and antiques.

On a single Sunday afternoon a year before Eire left the country, Che Guevara decided to rid all Cubans of their money and dole out equally paltry amounts of a new
currency to everyone. Eire watched his family's entire fortune disappear that day. At about the same time, Eire and his buddies suddenly found themselves banned from
the local movie theater and unable to find a decent Coke: The new government had kicked out the American cola manufacturers and begun making its own seriously
subpar soft drinks. Because of events like these, it is Eire's nature always to expect to lose everything at a moment's notice. This hasn't prevented him from marrying
and raising three children, but it has made him regard saving money as a pointless endeavor. "In this country," he says, "you don't need a savings account to go to
college. You can borrow yourself silly and you might be $80,000 in debt by the time you're done, but so what if you spend the rest of your life paying it off? Everything
could disappear tomorrow and then you'd have gotten a free $80,000 education."

His unique past has made him exceptionally protective of his kids. "It's a common characteristic of Pedro Pan alumni. Each morning when you put your children on the
school bus, even though it's not logical, you worry this could be the last time you see them. Because, for all of us, the separation was not supposed to be long. It caught
everyone off guard." And even though his oldest child is 14, Eire estimates that he and his wife have hired baby-sitters perhaps on only 10 occasions ever. "I know I'm
weird about that, but I don't trust my kids with anyone." In contrast, Eire and his two brothers each had his own nanny; he was 10 years old before he tied his own shoes
or cut his own meat.

Eire originally wrote the book as a novel, hoping even to publish under a pseudonym. But his agent convinced him that it was important for readers to know that his was
a true story. To turn it into a memoir, all Eire did was replace the fictional names with real ones. So what name had the author given his fictional alter ego? It's rather
fitting for a professor of religious history who has been forced to re-create himself innumerable times in order to survive: Jésus.

Copyright © 2003, Newsday, Inc.