On the first day of January 1959, eight-year-old Carlos Eire awoke to a tropical sun peering through the wooden shutters of his Havana bedroom. There were "galaxies of swirling dust specks" in the soft light and he "stared at the dust, as always, rapt." The child watching those tiny floating particles could not have known how much his own boyhood galaxy had just changed. Thanks to the power-lust of a young revolutionary, this innocent would soon lose his safe place in a simple world of lizards and lightning bugs, of parents, aunts and uncles, and be rocketed past childhood into...