Cuban Missile Crisis and Snow

Many stories have been written about wars especially Cuban missile crisis, which has been interesting for many people around the world. Most of them are about people’s situation and political views. This is probably one of the few stories that describes the Cuban crisis in the children’s views and it also describes the happenings in an elementary school during the crisis. Julia Álvarez was born in the Dominican Republic and spent the early years of her life in there. When she was ten years old an unsafe political climate forced her family to move to the United States (New York City). While she had heard many wonderful stories about the United States, her experiences were full of fear and danger immediately after moving to their new home. Soon reading became her only escape from their situation. After a while she immersed herself with writing and then she stated writing her first book. Some of her most famous books include: When Tia Lola Came to Stay, Before We Were Free, In the Time of the Butterflies, and Yo! The story of “snow” is from one of her most famous books name “How Garcia girls lost their accent” (1991).

In this book she captures perfectly the fear and the wonder of a young immigrant girl from the Dominican Republic who has never seen snow before. This story is her first experience of seeing a snow during the Cuban missile crisis (Women’s Voices From the Borderlands, ed. Lillian Castillo-Speed (New York: Touchstone, 1995), 126-128) (How Garcia girls lost their accent by Julia Alvarez). October 1962, John F Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were almost starting a nuclear war that many believed that if it wasn’t stopped world war 3 could have happened. In May 1962 Nikita Khrushchev, the president of Russia proposed the idea of placing nuclear missiles on Cuba to deter any future invasion attempt. Cuban missile crisis (Known as October crisis in Cuba) could have been a serious danger to everyone and as the book ‘The Week The World Stood Still says’, Kennedy was the person who prevented the war. “The evidence from the missile crisis tapes is unusual and even surprising, but no less true: Kennedy often stood virtually alone against warlike counsel from ExComm, the JCS and the leaders of congress during those 13 historic days. Nonetheless he has never abandoned his commitment, even after the missile crisis to undermine the Cuban revolution and get rid of Fidel Castro” (The week the world stood still by Sheldon M. Stern).

Even though I am not American or I wasn’t evolved, after gaining some information, I praise Kennedy for his decisions. “You will never know how much bad advice I had” (John F. Kennedy). The title of the story is ‘snow’ but in the whole text the word “snow” can be seen only 4 times and also until the last paragraph the title doesn’t match the subject matter. In my point of view snow is a symbol of peace and the sign for showing that the danger has passed. I think the most interesting part of the story is how the children and Julia felt about snow. Snow was unknown to Julia, and because of our natural disposition, she felt some danger from it.

Another interesting part for me was the other students who were already leaving in New York and they must have seen snow in winter, but they followed Julia’s thought because they were in such a fear that they didn’t expect anything pleasant like snow. It shows that fear can sometimes get the power of thinking form us. In this story fear played an important role. While they should have had a peaceful childhood, all of the time the children had to deal with many problems and fears. It has a massage for everyone that to know that how wars ruin children’s life and how it take their childhood away. It is our job to make these mistakes not to happen again and give everyone the SNOW. Snow is not a symbol in most of the literatures, but in this story it is the symbol of peace and happiness that every child deserves. This text is a massage for helping the children all over the world with stopping the wars.