The moving, wry, wildly beautiful story of a boy exiled from his childhood by the Cuban revolution.
Carlos Eire spent his boyhood in an island paradise, engaged in hair-raising adventures but secure at the heart of his somewhat eccentric family. He battled the neighbour's monkey, waged breadfruit wars in the street and blew up as many lizards as he could.
Then, in January 1959, the world changed: President Batista was suddenly gone, a cigar-smoking guerrilla had taken his place, and Christmas was cancelled. The echo of firing squads was everywhere. And, one by one, the author's schoolmates began to disappear - spirited away, alone, to the United States. Soon that would be Carlos's fate too.
Carlos Eire was born in Havana in 1950 and left his homeland at the age of eleven, one of the 14,000 unaccompanied children airlifted out of Cuba by Operation Pedro Pan. He is now a professor of history at Yale University.
