Date: April 17, 2007

Time: 10:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m. EDT

Target Age Level: Students in grades 9-12 or community colleges studying social studies, history, political science, economics, geography, philosophy or ethics

Cost: Free!

Program Description:

As part of the "One Book, One Philadelphia" Project, MAGPI will sponsor an interactive videoconference event for high school students in political science, social studies, history, economics and geography. Using Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy as a primary text, students will have an opportunity to explore the human side of the Cuban Revolution. Led by the author, Dr. Carlos Eire, this discussion will investigate religion, political ideologies, socialization, culture, philosophy and immigration. Students will have a unique opportunity to hear Dr. Eire's personal story, including why he chose to write this memoir.

Each class that participates in this event will be assigned a topic question on which it will present. Presentations will be 3-5 minutes in length. Following each presentation, Dr. Eire will facilitate discussion.

Each teacher that participates in this project will receive a copy of Waiting for Snow in Havana, compliments of The Free Library of Philadelphia.

It is not expected that all students will be familiar with the whole of Eire's work; however, students should be familiar with a chapter or chapters that are applicable to their presentation.

Preparing Students for this Event:

Review chapter or chapters of Eire's work: Prior to the videoconference, students should be familiar with some portion of Eire's book, Waiting for Snow in Havana. We encourage students to read the book in its entirety, but realize that is not always possible.

Prepare Presentation: Your site is responsible for developing a 3-5 minute presentation based on an assigned topic quesion. You'll receive your assigned topic question in your registration confirmation email. Your site will give their presentation during the videoconference event. We encourage you to be creative with your presentations and use whatever format (i.e. mock interview, digital media presentation, power point, etc.) that appeals to your students.

Presentation Topic Questions: Each school will be assigned one of these questions:

• What is communism?  Are its lofty goals of total egalitarianism attainable?  Are its repressive measures justifiable?
• Debate, pro or con:  "Communism is good for third world people, but not for North Americans or Western Europeans."
• How does Eire feel that his experiences in Cuba affected his personal philosophy?  Does he feel that his experiences there affected his life mission? (and if so, how?)
• What about those proofs for the existence of God? What role do they play in Eire's interpretation of his own history? Of life in general?
• How does one measure justice, especially in cases where the official policies of a government are labeled as ultimately just, but its effects can be felt as unjust by many of its people?
• In what ways do political emigres differ from other immigrants?

Prepare Handout: Your site will design a one-page handout based on your presentation. Handouts should be emailed to Heather no later than April 13, 2007 at 12:00 noon. Handouts will be posted on this website by 5:00 p.m. that day. Teachers should download, print and distribute all presentation handouts to students before the videoconference.

About Dr. Carlos Eire:

Born in Havana, Carlos Eire fled to the United States at the age of 11. He is currently the T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University, where he has been a faculty member since 1996. An authority on religious reformations, faith, and spiritualism in modern Europe, Mr. Eire lectures widely, and is the author of From Madrid to Purgatory: The Art and Craft of Dying in Sixteenth Century Spain and War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship From Erasmus to Calvin, and co-author of Jews, Christians, Muslims: A Comparative Introduction to Monotheistic Religions. He lives in Guilford, Connecticut, with his wife and their three children.

About Waiting for Snow in Havana: Confessions of a Cuban Boy
From Publisher's Weekly

"Metaphors matter to me, especially perfect ones," Yale historian Eire writes in this beautifully fashioned memoir, as he recounts one of many wonderfully vibrant stories from his boyhood in 1950s Havana. As imaginatively wrought as the finest piece of fiction, the book abounds with magical interpretations of ordinary boyhood events-playing in a friend's backyard is like a perilous journey through the jungle; setting off firecrackers becomes a lyrical, cosmic opera; a child's birthday party turns into a phantasmagoria of American pop cultural icons.

Taking his cue from his father, a man with "a very fertile, nearly inexhaustible imagination, totally dedicated to inventing past lives," Eire looks beyond the literal to see the mythological themes inherent in the epic struggle for identity that each of our lives represents. Into this fantastic idyll comes Castro-"Beelzebub, Herod, and the Seven-Headed Beast of the Apocalypse rolled into one"-overthrowing the Batista regime at the very end of 1958 and sweeping away everything that the author holds dear. A world that had been bursting with complicated, colorful meaning is replaced with the monotony of Castro's rhetoric and terrorizing "reform." Symbols of Jesus that had once provided spiritual enlightenment by popping up in the author's premonitions and dreams were now literally being demolished and destroyed by a government that has outlawed religion.

The final cataclysm comes when Eire and his brother, still young boys, are shipped off to the United States to seek safety and a better life (another paradise, perhaps). They never see their father again.As painful as Eire's journey has been, his ability to see tragedy and suffering as a constant source of redemption is what makes this book so powerful. Where his father believed that we live many lives in different bodies, Eire sees his own life as a series of deaths within the same body. "Dying can be beautiful," he writes, "And waking up is even more beautiful. Even when the world has changed." Taking his cue from his beloved Jesus, the author believes that we repeatedly die for our sins and are reborn into a new awareness of paradise. How fortunate for readers, then, that by way of Eire's "confessions," they too will be able to renew their souls through his transcendent words.