Award-Winning Memoir of Cuba To Be Read By First-Year Students

Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, by Carlos Eire, will be the summer reading for enrolling first-year students.

The first-year class dean asks all incoming students to read a common text before they arrive for orientation. Dean Esther Levine has selected Eire’s memoir, which received the 2003 National Book Award for nonfiction. The book recounts his idyllic and privileged childhood in Havana in the 1950s, which came to an end in the wake of Castro's revolution. In 1962, Eire's world changed forever when he and his brother were among the 14,000 children airlifted off the island, their parents left behind. In chronicling his life before and after his arrival in America, Eire's personal story is also a meditation on loss and suffering, redemption and rebirth.

The author, who has spoken on campus twice before, will return to Holy Cross to give a talk to first-year students and engage in discussions about the work.

Eire is the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of history and religious studies at Yale University. An expert on religious reformations, faith, and spiritualism in modern Europe, Eire is also the author of From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain (Cambridge University Press, 1995) and War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship From Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge University Press, 1986) and co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: A Comparative Introduction to Monotheistic Religions (Prentice Hall, 1997). He has been a faculty member at Yale since 1996.