A friend gave me this book while I was in Miami. That was fitting. Miami is the gateway to America Latina, the landing spot for Cuban refugees from Fidel Castro's Revolution. Now it is a multi-lingual city with a cosmopolitan mix of Spanish, Spanglish, and numerous other tongues. Carlos Eire came to Miami with 14000 other children exiled without their parents from Fidel's Revolutionary Cuba. What surprised me most was the similarities in lives which have been so different-- his and mine.

I grew up in the Ybor City barrio of Tampa. Tampa is a boring place with no character, a racist holdover from its' Southern past and theme park present; but Ybor City had its' own presence. It was a community of Cubans, Mexicans, and Jews with great Cuban restaurants like The Columbia and Las Novedades. There were deviled crabs and boiled peanuts in the street, smells of hot Cuban bread and strong café con leche. It was my childhood in a little Havana created by refugees from the Spanish-American War. I exiled myself when I was old enough to flee to the strange Yankee world of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Woodstock, NY for 30 years and finally ended up in Mexico learning Spanish and fighting lizards as Eire had to learn English and left his lizard murders and lizard dreams and lizard-shaped island behind.

Carlos Eire, has a PhD. in religion and history from Yale. This, they say, is his first book "without footnotes". It is heartfelt and real and describes both pre-Castro Cuba and the post- revolutionary world of the "Maximum Leader" and of ...Ché (who) came up with the great idea of doing away with money altogether... No money at all... So all the banks have been closed, and all accounts have been seized...". A different reality than he felt when Castro came down from the mountains smoking a cigar, mounted on a Sherman tank.

I was as entranced with that image of Castro and his guerillas coming from Oriente Province in 1959 as was he. It was even lauded in Junior Scholastic magazine back in salute-the- flag Florida, this freedom fighter winning with American help against the evil dictator. The reality of the Revolution was shown him even quicker than to us. He was there . How different was growing up in Havana with a judge-father who thought himself the reincarnation of Louis XVI! He was of the elite under Batista, the privileged class as only a two-class society can be privileged. I was rather poor. He is exiled alone and has to scrounge for food. I was an American with all that offers and entails.

I was brought up in a religious house that was not Catholic and I, unlike Carlos, did not go to a religious school. He is Catholic with a vengeance, now professor of history and religion at Yale and is forever haunted by the Catholic school legacy of confession and guilt and all the things that, even living now in Mexico; are beyond my understanding. He, the religion professor, winds much of his thoughts around Kant's proofs for the existence of god and his, Eire's, personal "proofs". I don't think about it much even now that I have a terminal disease. We are different no matter how very American he has become. That is one of the reasons to read Eire, to find a whole new realm of thought and belief and history.