Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, by Carlos Eire (Free Press; February 5, 2003) – Carlos Eire was one of fourteen thousand children airlifted out of Cuba without their parents in the early sixties as part of Operation Pedro Pan.

His beautifully crafted memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy (Free Press; February 5, 2003), winner of the 2003 National Book Award, tells the story of an ordinary boy, caught up in the events of an extraordinary time. Eire’s vivid prose brings readers face to face with the sights and sounds of his childhood in Havana, where everything familiar begins to crumble away with the Cuban Revolution. One by one, Eire’s schoolmates disappear—spirited away to the United States without goodbyes.

Narrated with the urgency of a confession and reading like a novel, Eire’s haunting ode to a vanished world is at once specific and universal, capturing the terrible beauty of those times in our lives when we are certain we have died—and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.