Download or read book Waiting For Snow In Havana written by Carlos Eire and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-12-11 with total page 579 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A childhood in a privileged household in 1950s Havana was joyous and cruel, like any other-but with certain differences. The neighbour's monkey was liable to escape and run across your roof. Surfing was conducted by driving cars across the breakwater. Lizards and firecrackers made frequent contact. Carlos Eire's childhood was a little different from most. His father was convinced he had been Louis XVI in a past life. At school, classmates with fathers in the Batista government were attended by chauffeurs and bodyguards. At a home crammed with artifacts and paintings, portraits of Jesus spoke to him in dreams and nightmares. Then, in January 1959, the world changes: Batista is suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla has taken his place, and Christmas is cancelled. The echo of firing squads is everywhere. And, one by one, the author's schoolmates begin to disappear-spirited away to the United States. Carlos will end up there himself, without his parents, never to see his father again. Narrated with the urgency of a confession, WAITING FOR SNOW IN HAVANA is both an ode to a paradise lost and an exorcism. More than that, it captures the terrible beauty of those times in our lives when we are certain we have died-and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.
Download or read book A Boy from Cuba written by Peter H. Sust and published by Tate Pub & Enterprises Llc. This book was released on 2014-09-23 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When he was just a boy, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara moved into Peter H. Sust's small fishing village outside of Havana. Not long after, ten-year-old Peter was put on an airplane to the United States with his sister to escape Cuba after Castro's takeover. Once in America, the young Cuban immediately began working to become an American, learning the language, customs, and laws of his new home. From a trip across the south from Florida to California at only eleven years old to the memorable characters he met working odd jobs in Stockton, California, Peter found that America had everything a boy could hope for---endless opportunity for those who weren't afraid to work.
Download or read book A Boy from Cuba written by Peter H. Sust and published by . This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When he was just a boy, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara moved into Peter H. Sust's small fishing village outside of Havana. Not long after, ten-year-old Peter was put on an airplane to the United States with his sister to escape Cuba after Castro's takeover. Once in America, the young Cuban immediately began working to become an American, learning the language, customs, and laws of his new home. From a trip across the south from Florida to California at only eleven years old to the memorable characters he met working odd jobs in Stockton, California, Peter found that America had everything a boy could hope for-endless opportunity for those who weren't afraid to work.
Download or read book A Cuban Refugee s Journey to the American Dream written by Gerardo M. González and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2018-08-01 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A touching memoir recounting the journey of a young Cuban immigrant to the US who went on to become a professor and university dean. In February 1962, three years into Fidel Castro’s rule of their Cuban homeland, the González family—an auto mechanic, his wife, and two young children—landed in Miami with a few personal possessions and two bottles of Cuban rum. As his parents struggled to find work, eleven-year-old Gerardo struggled to fit in at school, where a teacher intimidated him and school authorities placed him on a vocational track. Inspired by a close friend, Gerardo decided to go to college. He not only graduated but, with hard work and determination, placed himself on a path through higher education that brought him to a deanship at the Indiana University School of Education. In this deeply moving memoir, González recounts his remarkable personal and professional journey. The memoir begins with Gerardo’s childhood in Cuba and recounts the family’s emigration to the United States and struggles to find work and assimilate, and González’s upward track through higher education. It demonstrates the transformative power that access to education can have on one person’s life. Gerardo’s journey came full circle when he returned to Cuba fifty years after he left, no longer the scared, disheartened refugee but rather proud, educated, and determined to speak out against those who wished to silence others. It includes treasured photographs and documents from González’s life in Cuba and the US. His is the story of one immigrant attaining the American Dream, told at a time when the fate of millions of refugees throughout the world, and Hispanics in the United States, especially his fellow Cubans, has never been more uncertain. “Author and educator Gerardo M. González brilliantly illustrates the joys and struggles of the refugee experience, and the inarguable role of education as an open door to opportunity. This is a delightful read, and one that will inspire you to achieve greatness regardless of the odds.” —Dr. Eduardo J. Padrón, President, Miami Dade College “There can be no more persuasive testimony to the power of intelligence, commitment, and inspiration than Gerardo M. González’s memoir. The contribution of immigrants to America’s prosperity and national achievements is undeniably impressive. Yet, this transformational story of challenge and achievement, while individually exceptional, is nonetheless emblematic of the experience of countless immigrants who have made America better than it could otherwise have been. No finer antidote to the simplistic sloganeering of the immigration debate exists.” —John V. Lombardi, President Emeritus, University of Florida, and author of How Universities Work
Download or read book Waiting for Snow in Havana written by Carlos Eire and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004-01-13 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A survivor of the Cuban Revolution recounts his pre-war childhood as the religiously devout son of a judge, and describes the conflict's violent and irrevocable impact on his friends, family, and native home.
Download or read book Cuban Cracker written by Carlo Driggs and published by . This book was released on 2020-08-21 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Everyone loves a good Rock & Roll memoir, especially when that tale starts from humble beginnings and reaches unimaginable heights. When a compelling story bridges from one person's account into the lives of some of the biggest names in the business? It becomes Rock & Roll legend. Carlo Driggs had worked with some of the most iconic bands and artists in the history of rock, and his narrative is a fascinating glimpse into that world. He was the founding member of Chicago's rock legends and The Rolling Stones opening band KRACKER; his first success in the major leagues of rock and the first band signed to Rolling Stones Records label. In 1978 his band, Foxy, charted with the hit song, "Get Off," which Carlo co-wrote that went on to gold and platinum status. In 1983 he became Paul Revere and the Raiders' lead singer where he remained for over twenty-one years. Carlo shares with you his life story, from his early days in Cuba, his emigration to the United States, early mistakes, as well as his success that took him on a rocky forty-seven years on the road as one of the first Cuban American rock stars in United States history. A rags to riches, living the American Dream tale, with bumps along the way! Carlo opens up about the music business, his love life, how he put his first child up for adoption and their fairy-tale reunion, his disillusionment with the industry he loved, new ventures he had unfolding, all the way up until his untimely death just as his book was nearing completion. Carlo's life has something any fan of the world of Rock & Roll would love.
Download or read book The Boy Who Said No written by Patti Sheehy and published by Oceanview Publishing. This book was released on 2013-05-25 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a boy Frank Mederos’ grandfather teaches him to fish, to navigate the seas, and to think for himself, much needed skills under the new Castro regime. When Frank is drafted into the army, he is soon promoted to the Special Forces, where he is privy to top military secrets. But young Frank has no sympathy for Fidel. He thirsts for freedom and longs to join his girlfriend who has left Cuba for America. Frank yearns to defect, but his timing couldn’t be worse. After two unsuccessful escape attempts, Frank learns that the departure of the next available boat conflicts with upcoming military exercises. If he stays, he will miss the boat. If he doesn’t, he will be the object of a massive manhunt. Problems abound: How will Frank escape the army base without being seen? Where will he hide until the boat comes? How can he outwit his commanding officer? And how can he elude hundreds of soldiers ordered to bring him back “dead or alive”? Frank’s true story, a tale of love, loss and courage that will keep you on the edge of your seat until the last page is turned.
Download or read book The Boys of Redcliff the Story of a Boy from Cuba written by Walter C. Rhoades and published by . This book was released on 1927 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Waiting for Snow in Havana written by Carlos M. N. Eire and published by . This book was released on 2003-03 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Boy from Cuba written by Walter C. Rhoades and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Sense of Belonging written by Mel Martinez and published by Forum Books. This book was released on 2008-08-05 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The swift and improbable rise of Mel Martinez to the top echelon of America’s government began not with a political race but with a burst of gunfire. In April 1958, an eleven-year-old Martinez huddled on his bedroom floor while Cuban soldiers opened fire on insurgents outside his family’s home in the normally sleepy town of Sagua la Grande. With that hail of bullets, the idyllic Cuba of his boyhood was shattered. If political unrest made daily life disturbing and at times frightening, Fidel Castro’s Communist Revolution nine months later was nothing short of devastating. Martinez’s Catholic school was suddenly shuttered as the Communist regime threw priests out of the country. A sixteen-year-old boy from his town was seized and killed by a firing squad. When armed militiamen shouted violent threats at Martinez for wearing a cloth medallion as a sign of his Catholic faith, his parents made a heartrending decision: their son would have to escape the Castro regime—alone. Under the greatest secrecy, the Martinez family arranged through a special church program to have Mel airlifted out of Cuba to America. After months of painstaking planning (and a simple mistake that nearly scuttled the entire arrangement), fifteen-year-old Martinez stepped on a plane bound for Miami. He had no idea when—or if—he would see his family again. A Sense of Belonging is the riveting account of innocence lost, exile sustained by religious faith, and an immigrant’s gritty determination to overcome the barriers of language and culture in his adopted homeland. Martinez warmly recalls a bucolic childhood in Cuba, playing baseball, fishing at the beach, and accompanying his father on veterinary visits to neighboring farms. He also vividly recounts the harrowing changes under Castro that forced him to flee, as well as the arduous years he spent in American refugee camps and foster homes. And he captures the sheer joy of being reunited with his family after four years of wrenching separation. Having embraced life in America, he set about the delicate task of guiding his parents through their struggles with assimilation while also building his own family and career. Through it all, Martinez embodies the ideal of service to others, whether comforting a younger child on the flight from Havana to Miami or giving legal advice pro bono to his father’s friends in the Cuban-American community. Though his story ends in the hallowed halls of the U.S. Capitol, Martinez has never forgetten the boy who experienced the loss of liberty under Communism. A Sense of Belonging is a paean to the transformative power of the American Dream.
Download or read book Leaving Glorytown written by Eduardo F. Calcines and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR). This book was released on 2009-03-31 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this absorbing memoir, by turns humorous and heartbreaking, Eduardo Calcines recounts his boyhood and chronicles the conditions that led him to wish above all else to leave behind his beloved extended family and his home for a chance at a better future. Eduardo F. Calcines was a child of Fidel Castro's Cuba; he was just three years old when Castro came to power in January 1959. After that, everything changed for his family and his country. When he was ten, his family applied for an exit visa to emigrate to America and he was ridiculed by his schoolmates and even his teachers for being a traitor to his country. But even worse, his father was sent to an agricultural reform camp to do hard labor as punishment for daring to want to leave Cuba. During the years to come, as he grew up in Glorytown, a neighborhood in the city of Cienfuegos, Eduardo hoped with all his might that their exit visa would be granted before he turned fifteen, the age at which he would be drafted into the army.
Download or read book Waiting for Snow in Havana written by Carlos Eire and published by Turtleback Books. This book was released on 2004 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This haunting memoir of the Cuban Revolution, seen through the eyes of a small boy, is the heartbreaking story of the author's privileged childhood in pre-Revolution Havana, and how he lost everything, including his father.
Download or read book Learning to Die in Miami written by Carlos Eire and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2010-11-02 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Continuing the personal saga begun in the National Book Award-winning Waiting for Snow in Havana, the inspiring, sad, funny, bafflingly beautiful story of a boy uprooted by the Cuban Revolution and transplanted to Miami during the years of the Kennedy administration. In his 2003 National Book Award–winning memoir Waiting for Snow in Havana, Carlos Eire narrated his coming of age in Cuba just before and during the Castro revolution. That book literally ends in midair as eleven-year-old Carlos and his older brother leave Havana on an airplane—along with thousands of other children—to begin their new life in Miami in 1962. It would be years before he would see his mother again. He would never again see his beloved father. Learning to Die in Miami opens as the plane lands and Carlos faces, with trepidation and excitement, his new life. He quickly realizes that in order for his new American self to emerge, his Cuban self must “die.” And so, with great enterprise and purpose, he begins his journey. We follow Carlos as he adjusts to life in his new home. Faced with learning English, attending American schools, and an uncertain future, young Carlos confronts the age-old immigrant’s plight: being surrounded by American bounty, but not able to partake right away. The abundance America has to offer excites him and, regardless of how grim his living situation becomes, he eagerly forges ahead with his own personal assimilation program, shedding the vestiges of his old life almost immediately, even changing his name to Charles. Cuba becomes a remote and vague idea in the back of his mind, something he used to know well, but now it “had ceased to be part of the world.” But as Carlos comes to grips with his strange surroundings, he must also struggle with everyday issues of growing up. His constant movement between foster homes and the eventual realization that his parents are far away in Cuba bring on an acute awareness that his life has irrevocably changed. Flashing back and forth between past and future, we watch as Carlos balances the divide between his past and present homes and finds his way in this strange new world, one that seems to hold the exhilarating promise of infinite possibilities and one that he will eventually claim as his own. An exorcism and an ode, Learning to Die in Miami is a celebration of renewal—of those times when we’re certain we have died and then are somehow, miraculously, reborn.
Download or read book Next Year in Cuba written by Gustavo Pérez Firmat and published by Arte Publico Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Firmat discusses his life as a boy born in Cuba but raised in America, in an exiled family living in the constant expectation of Castro's fall--a situation that caused conflicting emotions that he had to deal with in his later years.
Download or read book The Boy from Cuba A School Story Etc written by Walter C. RHOADES and published by . This book was released on 1900 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Boys from Dolores written by Patrick Symmes and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2008-05-06 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Chasing Che, here is the remarkable tale of a group of boys at the heart of Cuba's political and social history. Chosen in the 1940s from among the most affluent and ambitious families in eastern Cuba, they were groomed at the elite Colegio de Dolores for achievement and leadership. Instead, they were swept into war, revolution, and exile by two of their own number, Fidel and Raúl Castro. Trained by Jesuits for dialectical dexterity and the pursuit of absolutes, Fidel Castro swiftly destroyed the old Cuba they had come from, down to the hallways of Dolores itself. At once sweeping and intimate, this remarkable history by Patrick Symmes is a tour de force investigation of the world that gave birth to Fidel Castro – and the world his Cuban Revolution leaves behind.
