by Carlos Eire
Learning to Die in Miami
Confessions of a Refugee Boy
Carlos Eire
Reading Group Guide
Author Q&A
ABOUT THIS GUIDE
The following reading group guide and author interview are intended to help you find interesting and rewarding approaches to your reading of Learning to Die in Miami. We hope this enhances your enjoyment and appreciation of the book. For a complete listing of reading group guides from Simon & Schuster, visit http://community.simonandschuster.com.
INTRODUCTION
In Learning to Die in Miami, Carlos Eire explores the consequences associated with the emergence of a new American identity at the expense of the “death” of his old Cuban self after he emigrates to the United States during the Cuban Revolution. Along the way, Carlos must learn to navigate the differences between his past and present lives—redefining his relationship with his distant parents, mastering a new language, and adopting foreign customs and traditions. As Carlos is plagued by intense bouts of loneliness and abandonment while struggling to find his footing in his new homeland, readers cannot help but be moved by Eire’s compelling first-person account of immigration in America. Learning to Die in Miami is a universal story of not only the pain of letting go, but also the rewards it ultimately brings.
TOPICS AND QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. Reread the poem by Emily Dickinson at the beginning of the book: “Death is a dialogue between/The spirit and the dust.... An overcoat of clay.” Why do you think Carlos Eire chose this poem to open his memoir?
2. Describing his experience of arriving in Miami as finally crossing over into “the real world” (p. 9), Eire then perceives Cuba as part of “some other dimension” (p. 9). What first impressions of the United States may have inspired this perspective?
3. Throughout the memoir, Carlos Eire refers constantly to the father and mother he left behind as Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. Why did he choose these nicknames? Do you find them apt?
4. Eire describes a popular Cuban comic radio show called La Tre-menda Corte (p. 36), which became unavailable under the Castroregime. How did the plot of this show compare and contrast with the events that were occurring in Havana during the time that Eire was growing up? Why do you think it was removed from the air despite its tremendous popularity?
5. One of the themes Learning to Die in Miami explores is the relationship between parents and children. After separating from his parents, Carlos writes poignantly, “We had letters, yes, but letters are a very poor substitute for parents when you’re eleven . . . children need to press the flesh and to have Mom and Dad there. . . . Without that sort of contact, Mom and Dad become ciphers, mere concepts” (p. 44). How did his time with his various foster families shape his experience? Were any of them real substitutes for his parents?
6. One the main goals Eire had when he arrived in America was to master the English language. Why was this so important to him? How do you interpret Eire’s emotion as he demands, “Don’t ask me what I think about my fellow Hispanics who insist on bilingual everything, or about how I feel every time I see a public sign in Spanish or am asked to choose between English or Spanish on the telephone” (pp. 54-55).
7. Eire experiences an intense conflict of personal identity during his first three years in America. How does Eire progress from identifying himself as Carlos, Charles, Charlie, Chuck, and then, finally, Carlos once again? What events in his life were pivotal in shaping his method of self-expression?
8. Among the many emotions that Eire struggles with as he adapts to his new homeland is “the feeling of being utterly alone and abandoned forever, of being stuck with no one but [himself] for eternity. The Void” (p. 91). When does the Void first enter Carlos’s life? What does the Void represent to him, and how does he handle it? Does he ever ultimately overcome the Void?
9. Why do you think Eire describes Christmas as “the darkest day of the year?” (p. 118). What was Eire’s relationship with this holiday that usually embodies tradition and joy?
10. One of the terms Eire comes up with to describe his “death” in Miami is “self-squashing” (p. 163). How does this term describes his situation?
11. Adding to the richness of this memoir is how Eire plays with time throughout the book, layering his adolescent experience through both young and more mature eyes. How different would Learning to Die in Miami have been if he had not used this storytelling technique?
12. How does Eire’s experience of leaving Cuba behind mold his opinion of President John F. Kennedy as a “knucklehead”? (p. 191). Do you feel that his attitude of bitterness toward the president is justified?
13. What do you think Eire is referring to specifically when he proclaims, “Letting go is the ultimate happiness, and the ultimate pain”? (p. 248).
14. In what way does religion play a role in the narrative?
ENHANCE YOUR BOOK CLUB
1. Learning to Die to Miami is a brilliant follow-up to Carlos Eire’s first memoir, the National Book Award-winner Waiting for Snow in Havana. Read Eire’s first book and discuss how the two narratives ultimately come together to form his story.
2. Eire makes references to Plato’s cave during his first few years in America. As a group, read Plato’s Allegory of the Cave in The Republic and discuss how the various stages of the allegory correlate with the stages of Eire’s journey.
3. One of the most important influences of Eire’s coming-of-age is Thomas a Kempis’s The Imitation of Christ. Select passages from this classic and discuss how they relate to or have influenced your own lives.
4. Television shows such as The Twilight Zone, The Andy Griffith Show, and The Beverly Hillbillies were an important part of Eire’s childhood identity and his experience of America. What television shows had a direct effect on who you are today?
A CONVERSATION WITH CARLOS EIRE
Where did you encounter Emily Dickinson’s poem included at the beginning of your memoir? Why did you choose to open your memoir with it?
I discovered Emily Dickinson in high school, about forty-four years ago. Although I had a tin ear for poetry back then, I knew instinctively that her poems had something that was lacking in most of the other poetry that was assigned to us: an intuitive grasp of paradox and of our deep-seated longing for transcendence. Over time, as I matured, her poetry stayed with me, and especially this poem, since I have always been drawn to the conundrum of our mortality. As I was writing my Very Brief History of Eternity two years ago, the poem surfaced many times, both in my mind and in my reading. So, when I began writing Learning to Die, I didn’t have to search for the perfect opening epigraph. It had been there all along, guiding my thinking. It seems perfect, not just because it influenced me, but because it sums up the central theme of this book: that of the immortality of the soul.
In this memoir we see your struggles defining yourself as a Cuban living in America. Today, do you consider yourself Cuban American, Cuban, or American? Why so? Do you still consider yourself a refugee?
I’m always amazed when anyone asks me this question, for the chief assumption behind it is that one’s identity can be neatly packaged and one can simply be either this or that. I realize that for someone who has spent his or her entire life living in a single culture, it must be hard to imagine what it feels like to be an immigrant, and to absorb cultures other than the one you were born into, but in many ways, asking this question is a lot like asking whether the tongue is for speaking or for tasting. Many things in life and in nature—like the tongue—cannot be explained in terms of either/or. Being an immigrant in the United States is not an either/or proposition, but rather a both/and. No one ever ceases to be part of the culture from which they came, save for infants who are adopted and taken to another country shortly after birth. Immigrants add other layers to their identity, other “selves,” and depending on age, personality, and circumstances, these layers or “selves” assume all sorts of different configurations in each individual. I
n this memoir, I try to deal with this complexity, and with the fact that one’s identity is always fluid in exile, and that there are times when the different selves converge or collide. Immigrants know firsthand that the “I” or “me” is not simple or uniform: it’s a riotous mess.
So, to finally answer the question point-blank: I have a complex identity. Of course I’m American. Of course I’m Cuban. Of course I’m Cuban-American. I’m also Spanish and European, for my grandparents were immigrants from Spain, and they and my parents and relatives always reminded me of the fact that I was not really Cuban, but a displaced European with various identities: Gallego, Catalan, Basque, French, and Irish, with the constant hint of some distant Jewish converso ancestry. And to top it off, as a historian, my professional self is wholly enmeshed in European history and culture: my research takes me to Europe constantly, which oddly feels like home and, at the very same time, like a double exile.
I am still a refugee, too, and will continue to be one until Castrolandia ceases to exist. I came to the United States to escape from a nightmarish existence. As long as my place of birth remains enslaved by an oppressive totalitarian regime and the nightmare continues, I cannot return, and therefore remain a refugee. Throw into this bargain the fact that the Cuban authorities have pronounced me an “enemy” of their so-called Revolution, and that my books are banned in my homeland, and my refugee status is doubly confirmed.
What was the process behind writing this memoir? Did you rely solely on your recollections, or did you have some kind of journal you kept during the time? Were there any people you interviewed to enhance your storytelling?
I followed the same process as in Waiting for Snow: I wrote straight from memory, late at night, over the space of three months, during my summer break from teaching. No journals. No notes. No research. No interviews. I did share a few stories with my brother Tony as I was writing, and sometimes he had some details to contribute. But even this doesn’t count as research, for we talk on the phone every night and often reminisce about the past. It’s an ongoing thing, our connection with a common past.
Norma and Lou were the first foster parents who truly made you feel welcome in America. How did their Jewish influence and traditions help you to integrate with the American culture? How did their love and nurturing, despite coming from a different religious background, influence your beliefs?
Even though I lived with them for only nine months, Norma and Louis Chait had a profound influence on me, so profound, in fact, that it is difficult to measure it. This question is related to the second question above, the question of identities. I knew they were Jewish and American. Their parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe. And they were New Yorkers, too. This mixture of identities became the norm for me: this is what it means to be an American, to be many things at once. The fact that they not only respected my faith, but forced me to observe it may be the most significant thing of all. It put religion in another dimension for me, at that early age. Their love and nurturing proved to me, in the most practical way possible, that real goodness transcends religious beliefs, and that differences in religion do not necessarily cancel out faith, but can actually enhance it. Above all, they taught me to respect other faiths, and they did so by example rather than by lecturing me about it. They also showed me that love and self-sacrifice and concern for others matter more than doctrines or rituals; yet, at the same time, they exposed me to the significance of doctrines and rituals by sending me to church and taking me to Bar Mitzvahs. In the Gospel of John, Jesus says that God is love. The other gospels also affirm that the highest commandment is love of neighbor. These Christian values are derived directly from Judaism, one of the most philanthropically inclined religions on earth. In Waiting for Snow in Havana I refer to Norma and Lou as a proof for the existence of God. I still think of them this way. My professional interest in religion, especially my interest in the religious differences that emerged in the sixteenth century, derives from my experiences in the Chait household.
Besides your struggle to get rid of your accent, were there any other remarkable difficulties that you recall which perhaps you didn’t express in your memoir?
Yes. In this book I provide only brief glimpses of another great difficulty that I and every Cuban exile face: our constant encounter with ignorance about Cuba and all of the monumentally stupid stereotypes that dominate American thinking about Cuba, pre- and post-Castro. Having to contend with people who see you as some sort of backward primitive from an inferior culture is just the tip of the iceberg. As I point out in this book, I encountered the very source of this ignorance in my school textbooks, all of which were filled with incorrect and very negatively biased information about Cuba and Latin America in general. So, it is not really a question of ignorance that stems from lack of information, but rather of ignorance derived from false information that keeps being drummed into young minds.
Many Americans still harbor all sorts of prejudices toward “Hispanics” because their exposure to the full complexity of the Hispanic world is limited and misinformed, and most Americans aren’t really aware of the fact that their culture has constructed an artificial category— “Hispanic”—which is extremely broad and a gross distortion of reality. Chief among the errors committed by Americans is that of conceiving of “Hispanic” as a race, or of all “Hispanics” as the same, more or less, despite the fact that there are eighteen different Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America, each with their own particular ethnic mixture and culture, not to mention one European country in which Spanish is the official language but other languages are also spoken. Whenever I am confronted with any document or news piece in which “Hispanic” is conceived of as a “race,” my head feels as if it’s going to explode, for that is so totally wrong. Whenever this happens, I am also reminded of the one time that the mother of one of my high school friends expressed her prejudices openly, saying, with a sigh of relief, “Oh, but you look just like all the other boys,” when she first met me. And that is just one such incident, though specially poignant; I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve been told that I don’t look like a Cuban. And it’s not just Americans who harbor these prejudices. Several of the European publishers of Waiting for Snow refused to include any of my childhood photographs in their translated editions because, as one of them put it, I don’t look Cuban enough.
But all of this is a minor irritation when compared with the real torture that comes when Cuban exiles meet Americans, Canadians, Australians, Europeans, and others who admire the Castro brothers and their so-called Revolution, and lecture us about the wonderful achievements of that murderous, soul-crushing regime from which we’ve fled. Again, I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve had to confront this ignorance, which always includes hostility toward me personally, for those who praise the Revolution tend to see me and all other exiles as “oppressors” who were justly driven out, selfish bastards who simply didn’t want to share their possessions with the poor. The guiding principle undergird-ing such prejudice is usually called “social justice,” a very loose concept that refers to the redistribution of wealth in Third World countries, which are all imagined as equally corrupt and poor and as peopled by nonwhites. This hideously misguided conception of “justice” is itself derived from a host of other prejudices, including that which I like to call the Mussolini principle, which is the assumption that underdeveloped or inferior nations need strong leaders and draconian measures in order to function properly. So, just as the Italian fascist dictator Mussolini was constantly praised in Europe and North America for finally making the trains run on time in unruly, darker-skinned Italy, Fidel Castro and his henchmen are praised for finally bringing health care and education to the even unrulier and darker-skinned Cuban people. The chief assumption behind such praise, of course, is that such people are essentially different, and congenitally incapable of enjoying the same kinds of rights and freedoms as more advanced light-skinned Europeans and Americans. Another wrong assumption that
guides such thinking is that Cuba was a Third World country before Fidel came along and “improved” it. The real truth is just the reverse: on many accounts, Cuba was on a par with or ahead of many European countries, and ahead of most other Latin American nations, in 1958. Nothing proves this more convincingly than the fact that, between 1900 and 1958, more than one million Europeans migrated to Cuba, seeking a better life, and between 1959 and today, more than two million Cubans have fled the island while no one, from anywhere, has migrated to it.
This glorification of Castrolandia is pervasive and, oddly enough, the higher one goes in the social scale here in America, the more one is likely to encounter it. In my profession, it is absolutely impossible to escape it, for most academics—though bright and well educated—are predisposed to champion the Mussolini principle unflinchingly and unquestioningly when it comes to Cuba and Latin America in general. Seven years ago, for instance, the University of Wisconsin revoked an invitation to speak they had offered me earlier because, as the dis-invitation e-mail put it—I would represent “the unjust oppression of the Cuban people by the exile community.” Four years ago, when Fidel Castro fell gravely ill, I was approached by the Op-Ed editors of the New York Times and asked point-blank if I would be willing to condemn my fellow exiles who were celebrating Fidel Castro’s imminent demise on the streets of Miami. As the editor put it to me: “We don’t think these revelers are right; after all, Fidel Castro allowed them all to leave with his blessing back in the early 1960s.” When I proposed a different essay, in which I would evaluate Fidel Castro as the ultimate Machiavellian prince, the editors said that “would not be right,” and sent me packing. In essence, they were not interested in my opinion, but merely looking for a Cuban who would express their wrongheaded, unjust opinion. And when I wrote an essay exposing the duplicity and bias at the Times, no other newspaper in the United States would publish that essay.
