Customer Reviews

Havana Dreams: A Story of a Cuban Family

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I dont see how anyone can find it boring, and I am not of Cuban descent. Gimbel gives a fascinating picture of 100 years in the life of one Cuban family-and not just any family, since one member had an affair with Fidel Castro and a daughter by him. Gimbel was not telling the story of her own childhood, and she deserves credit for not letting it interfere with the subject family's story. Her Cuban background and early life in pre-revolutionary Havana does give her credibility and explains her access to these people at all. She gives enough of a historical and geographical persepective of the country to make me want to know more, and her detailed descriptions allow the reader to visualize each scene in detail. This book should not be taken as representative of the entire country over the last century--a different family could probably have told a very different story. The author makes an effort to remain in the background and let the people in the book tell her their feelings. Gimbel has certainly captured my interest with this book.

Havana Dreams scans the 20th century in the unforgettable account of a Cuban family, descended from aristocrats, who live the high life before Fidel, and the heartbreak after. This is the story of Naty Revuelta, and four generations of Cuban women. In 1952, Naty met Fidel Castro, a young revolutionary, and although she was married, began a passionate affair with him that resulted in his unrecognized daughter and his rejection of her mother. Despite the large number of friends and family who fled Cuba, including Naty's husband, a doctor and their daughter, Nina, when Fidel took over, Naty stayed with her mother, Dona Natica and her daughter by Fidel, Alina, in hopes that she and Fidel would eventually be together. This is the story of her hopes and dreams, as well as the heartbreak of lost love and a disentegrating society. We trace the lives of Naty's daughters and their daughters, who all end up in the States, one with an ordinary confortable life, and the daughter of Fidel who longs for the acceptance and position she feels she deserves. This is truly a powerful story, even moreso because itis true, of passion and what revolution can do in the light of modern Cuban history.

An excellent first hand account of the lives of people in an area in which time has stood still. Makes one realize why we need to support a democratic society but not compromise on the traditions and values of our respective cultures. This novel has tremendous insight into the Cuban heritage and the influence that communism and democracy has had on the civilization of a nation. Totally engrossing, realistic and awe inspiring. I strongly recommend Ms. Gimbel's novel to all who want to gain a greater understanding of multi-national traditions and the integrations of socities.

Hailed by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year when it was first released, this is a lyrically written chronicle of Cuba as seen through the eyes of the women of a prominent, yet notorious, Cuban family. It is also an elegant narrative of Cuba's past and its present, its good and its bad. Its genesis is the Cuban-American author's own memories of a pre-Castro Cuba of the nineteen forties and fifties, still steeped in its colonial miasma, redolent of family, traditions, and a certain indolence that was reserved for those who lived the life of patrones. I was drawn to this book, as I am also a Cuban-American, and the author's memories in many ways are mine, as well.

I was also intrigued by the intimate portrait of Castro's one time mistress, Naty Revuelta, and the history of her family as set against the backdrop of Cuba. I was interested in how her illicit relationship with a young, fiery revolutionary by the name of Fidel Castro would forever change her life and that of her family. Her family's fortunes and misfortunes parallel those of Cuba itself. Castro's own relationship with his island country would forever change Cuba also, turning it from a colonial paradise for the rich and well-to-do into a crumbling relic from the past, offspring of the mating between heady and romantic revolutionary rhetoric and reality.

Engrossing and memorable in its telling, the author paints a poignant, and fully engaging portrait of Naty, her mother, Dona Natica, a Batista era socialite, and Naty's two daughters, Alina and Nina, one of whom is the fruit of Naty's brief intimate relationship with Castro, the other the daughter of her cuckolded husband. Both her daughters are now expatriates, living in the United States. The story of Naty's family is presented in all its heartbreak and is artfully drawn against the grand panorama of what is modern Cuban history. This is a masterful and luminous book that will appeal to those with an interest in Cuba, as well as to those who enjoy a well-written memoir, steeped in historical context. Bravo!

Wendy Gimbel weaves together Cuba's present and past so poetically that history becomes literature. In light of current trends toward increased contact with Cuba and the problematical policies on refugees, Havana Dreams is especially timely. I strongly recommend this book for all who want to undertand Cuba from the inside out.

"In the best of times," writes Wendy Gimbel, "history is gentle; in Cuba, it has been harsh, severe." This simple statement belies a more complex truth -- that history has a defining potency, forming the most essential core of emotional experience; that we are, at heart, where we live -- and Gimbel brings the harshest aspects of that belief to light in "Havana Dreams," her evocative, compassionate story of the way three generations of Cuban women were affected by Fidel Castro's rise to power.

Gimbel's interest in the subject is deeply personal: As an infant, she was abandoned by her parents and raised by her grandmother, a Cuban matron who took her on annual visits to her family in Santiago, a place that would linger in her memory as blessed and idyllic, where "the children chased each other in tiled patios filled with sunlight, and ate the sour-sweet fruit that hung from the mamoncillo branches."

When she returned to the country as an adult, in 1991, she witnessed firsthand the way a single political event -- Castro's revolution -- could shape ordinary lives, altering the very texture of human experience: She saw emotional structures crumbled, family ties severed, friends and relatives driven into exile. The themes that had shaped her own early life -- abandonment, disillusionment, trauma -- were writ large on this tiny island, and Gimbel set out to understand what had happened: how historical context, both personal and political, could so inform us.

She tells this story through three women whose lives span the 20th century on the island: Naty Revuelta, born in 1925, a wealthy, restless socialite during the Batista era, who became Castro's lover just before his ascension to power; Naty's mother, an unrepentant reactionary named Doña Nacita, who lives almost entirely in the past; and Naty's daughter, Alina, who is Castro's illegitimate, unacknowledged child.

In Gimbel's hands, their lives become an intimate historical document, one that illuminates the intersection between a woman's internal and external worlds. I found the authoress to be a graceful and precise writer, so carefully evoking the particulars of their lives, and so deftly interweaving their tale with the larger story of Cuba's social and political transformation, that what emerges instead is a rich and varied portrait, one that remains true to its mission.

It is, as the book's subtitle suggests, a story of Cuba; it is also an achingly human tale about false promises, the blinding power of passion, the life-altering failures of family.

While I have to agree with the previous reader about the lack of a single voice for the book, I believe that the true beauty and worth of the book lie in Gimbel's rich portrayal of pre- and post-Castro Cuba. I think she elegantly captures and contrasts the Old World gentility of Dona Natica's days with the resigned but still hopeful people that inhabit current day Cuba. I didn't develop any connection to the main characters, but I appreciated their roles as icons for the different generations and voices of Cuban culture.

I just came back from my first visit to Cuba and I picked up this book and read it in one sitting. The book is intelligently and elegantly written, totally absorbing and captures Cuba perfectly. This is a wonderful book.

I loved Havana Dreams. I quote from London's Financial Times from the review that captured my interest. I am in complete agreement with it."This is a remarkable book about love, disillusionment and exile, a tale which in its simple way tells us as much about Cuba as any political treatise or weighty economic analysis."

A great story written by a great pen and a great heart.