A Better Homeland
Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy
by Carlos Eire
Free Press, 2010
(320 pages, $26.00, hardcover)
reviewed by Bernardo Aparicio García
Carlos Eire thinks you should learn to die, and die often. Or maybe I mean Carlos Nieto. Or Chuck Neat-o. Or Carlos M. N. Eire, Ph.D. Or just plain Charlie. If one is to judge by the many names he has lived under, all the identities taken up and cast away, it is really no wonder he thinks so, whatever his name. In his most recent memoir, Learning to Die in Miami: Confessions of a Refugee Boy, Eire shares the story of what happened after his first “death,” when he left behind a privileged childhood in Havana to arrive in Miami as an eleven-year-old boy with nothing but two changes of clothes and a book that “scared [him] half to death,” The Imitation of Christ.
Learning to Die continues the story begun in Eire’s previous memoir, Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy, which chronicles his childhood in a dangerous but magical pre-Castro Cuba and won him the 2003 National Book Award. Like the earlier book, Learning to Die ranges from the hilarious to the harrowing, except that whereas the former narrates the last days of an almost prelapsarian world, the latter tells a story of exodus and exile, and an eventual homecoming that is only accessible through the door of death.
A Book of Paradoxes
Not surprisingly, then, Learning to Die is a book of paradoxes and contradictions, especially those inherent in the process of becoming an American. Along with his brother Tony, the young Eire arrives in Miami in 1962 as one of the 14,000 unaccompanied children sent away from Cuba by their desperate parents in an operation that came to be known as the Pedro Pan (Peter Pan) airlift. “A ridiculous name for something so unlike a fairy tale,” Eire says about it in his preamble.
This is not a trivial discrepancy; it speaks directly to the experience that Eire and countless other immigrants have had upon arriving in the United States. On the one hand, though not quite Neverland, America is, in a very real sense, a land of dreams. Eire communicates this brilliantly by describing the everyday things that can fill the mind of an immigrant boy with wonder: things as trivial as simple coins (“It felt great to once again handle these little symbols of everything hated by Che and Fidel”), a corner grocery store (“Why is this store so well stocked, and why is every store in Cuba so empty? What the hell is going on?”), or single-serving cereal boxes (“Truly this is a superior country, I thought”), as well as something as sublime and mysterious as the miracle of snow, which overwhelms him with “the way everything is transformed by it, purified, redeemed.”
Yet, on the other hand, along with these feelings of elation come the loss of family, identity, and comfort. Ninety miles to the south, Eire had been a young white member of the upper class; now, though blond and blue-eyed, he has become a “spic,” the lowest of the low, as some local boys promptly let him know.
The paradoxes only keep piling up from this point forward, a feature of the book in which we see the author’s richly Catholic sensibility at work. Indeed, this is an aspect of the Catholic imagination that often gets lost amid all the talk of “sacramentality” in Catholic art and literature. Eire’s work has that in droves, too, but it is his genius for delving into meaningful contradictions that makes his memoirs so unique—that, and his delightfully perplexing (though some might say maddening) prose style, which ranges from the slangy and conversational to the solemn and lyrical, often within the course of a few lines. In fact, though their writing style and subject matter are for the most part entirely different, I often found myself thinking of Chesterton—who loved to make things balance by standing them on their heads—while reading this book.
This restoration of paradox to a place of honor is one of Eire’s most significant contributions to contemporary Catholic letters, indeed to contemporary literature as a whole. It is not for nothing that, with few exceptions, Eire has achieved more mainstream success and critical acclaim than almost any Catholic author in English since the golden age of twentieth-century Catholic literature, though interestingly enough, the Catholic press has barely noticed.
Becoming American
Bernardo Aparicio García has published short stories and essays in the St. Austin Review and the Catholic literary journal Dappled Things, of which he is founder and publisher. He is also a teacher at the Washington International School in Washington, D.C.
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