November 23, 2011 — Coral Gables — Airlifted out of Cuba nearly 50 years ago to escape Fidel Castro’s regime, Yale University scholar Carlos M. N. Eire still remembers the insults he endured as a little boy attending school in Miami, including being asked by classmates if he used a toilet in his native country.
Even as Eire grew older, misconceptions about Cuba persisted, and today he, along with thousands of other Cuban exiles, continue a struggle to dispel beliefs that oppression and human rights violations are nonexistent on the island.
“Cuban exiles live in a Hitchcock film that keeps getting worse, but no one believes us,” Eire, the Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale, told an audience of more than 250 people at the University of Miami’s Newman Alumni Center on November 21. “Anyone who lived in Cuba before Castro has been eyewitnesses and bears the scars of a system which is not only soul sucking but mind sucking.”
His lecture, sponsored by the UM Libraries’ Cuban Heritage Collection and the Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies, was made possible by the Goizueta Foundation, a grant-making organization created in 1992 by the former Cuban-born chair and CEO of the Coca-Cola Company, Roberto C. Goizueta, to provide financial assistance to educational and charitable institutions.
Author of the award-winning book Waiting for Snow in Havana, Eire knows first hand about the repression in Cuba. He came to Miami in 1962, one of more than 14,000 children who were shuttled out of Cuba as part of Operation Pedro Pan. After he left Cuba, he never saw his father again—an unfortunate circumstance endured by many of those children—and was reunited with his mother only after being shuffled between foster homes in Florida and Illinois.
But Eire overcame his difficult childhood, eventually studying at Yale, where he earned a Ph.D. in 1979.
Throughout his distinguished academic career, he learned painfully that many people, including the mainstream media, were still largely unaware and misinformed about the plight of Cubans who remain in the country.
During his UM talk, titled “My Struggle Against Lies About Cuba,” Eire said many people believe that Cuba, prior to Castro, was a Third World country under the rule of a severe dictatorship, and that Castro’s regime is the “prize the island has to pay” for having “free education and free health care.”
He urged audience members to continue writing letters to newspaper and other publication editors complaining about inaccurate stories on Cuba, even at the expense of becoming “pests.”
