Books, Arts & Manners: Dreaming of Fidel

Havana Dreams: A Story of Cuba, by Wendy Gimbel (Knopf, 224 pp., $24)

THIS remarkably entertaining book—a work that combines literature, history, and biography—sets out to tell the story of a single Cuban family and the way that it was sundered and misshapen by the revolution and its progenitor, Fidel Castro. The principal figure is Natalia Fernandez Revuelta, a stunning Creole beauty from Havana’s high society. The supporting cast consists of her mother, Doña Naty; her daughter Alina; and Alina’s daughter, Mumín. The story moves back and forth from the 1920s to the present, so that Havana Dreams is among other things a vivid and compelling social history of twentieth-century Cuba.

MF

About the Author

Mark Falcoff

Mark Falcoff is an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Havana Dreams: A Story of Cuba, by Wendy Gimbel (Knopf, 224 pp., $24)

THIS remarkably entertaining book—a work that combines literature, history, and biography—sets out to tell the story of a single Cuban family and the way that it was sundered and misshapen by the revolution and its progenitor, Fidel Castro. The principal figure is Natalia Fernandez Revuelta, a stunning Creole beauty from Havana’s high society. The supporting cast consists of her mother, Doña Naty; her daughter Alina; and Alina’s daughter, Mumín. The story moves back and forth from the 1920s to the present, so that Havana Dreams is among other things a vivid and compelling social history of twentieth-century Cuba.