Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Cuba, Kerry, and waiting for snow in Havana

Peter Kirsanow points out that Kerry has flip-flopped even on Cuba. He has been in favor of raising sanctions, and now he’s not. A few days ago I started reading Carlos Eire’s Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (published about a year ago). Eire is a professor of history and religious studies at Yale. He left Cuba in 1962, at age twelve, one of 14,000 children airlifted out of Cuba, exiled from country and family. He has written scholarly tomes, but this is his first book without footnotes, as he says. Why did he write it? "The most immediate trigger was the Elian Gonzales affair. It reminded me far too much of my own experience as one of 14,000 children who had come to the U.S. from Cuba alone, and whose parents were intentionally kept in Cuba by the Castro regime. The sheer hypocrisy behind Castro’s claim that every child should be with his or her parent was what angered me the most and brought up many memories. It was like a volcanic eruption. One day I started writing and I couldn’t stop. For four months I wrote every night from 10:00 p.m. to 2:00, 3:00, or 4:00 in the morning." This is a lovely book, suffused with Cuban colors and odors, and life on a razor’s edge, and redemption. He changes Saint Jerome’s prayer slightly,

Miserere mei, Domine, Cubanus sum.
Do yourself a favor, run out and buy it, wrap yourself around it, and enjoy its beauty and grace. And, oh yes, sip on a good American coffee.

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