Havana Dreams: A Story of Cuba.

Havana Dreams: A Story of Cuba by Wendy Gimbel Alfred A. Knopf. 256 pages. $24.00.

In Havana Dreams, Wendy Gimbel traces the last century of Cuban history through the true story of three generations of women in one extraordinary family. In explaining her approach, she writes simply that "family remains the lens through which I look at the world." But such a lens is particularly useful when turned on Cuba. Looking at generational differences is crucial for understanding the Cuban revolution's longevity and its present state of decay.

The matriarch in Gimbel's chosen family is Dona Natica, a bitter, haughty lady in her late nineties who likes to point out her resemblance to Queen Elizabeth II. Although she has chosen to remain on the island, she lives a life of internal exile: "Dona Natica, suspended in time, impervious to change, concentrates on her favorite subject: the glorious past." She regales Gimbel with stories of her debonair English father, the sedate Havana of her childhood, and the pleasure-loving city of the 1920s. Her amulets are the silver hairbrushes, hand-painted fans, crystal, and jewels that she has salvaged from this long-lost era.

Dona Natica's daughter, Naty Revuelta, is frozen in her own moment in time: the two years in the early 1950s when she exchanged passionate letters with Fidel Castro while he was serving jail time for the failed raid on the Moncada garrison. "We were all in love with Fidel," she says. "What happened to me happened to the whole country." While Fidel was clearly smitten with Naty, the romance ended after his wife discovered the affair and he became reabsorbed in politics after his release. Naty, by contrast, never moves on. She "resists time," Gimbel writes. "She tries to bend it around, sending it spinning in the direction of the past."

The final generation in this family history is represented by the self-obsessed, petulant Alina, "who missed the romance of the Sierra Maestra, [but] lived in the realities created by Fidel's abuse of power." Alina, Castro's illegitimate daughter, is a darling of Cuban exile leaders after her escape in 1993. But even they grow fed up with her. Although an extreme example, Alina's estrangement from her father and his regime reflects the mounting alienation of other Cubans of her age "who know the revolution [only] through confinement, scarcity, and despair."

While Gimbel is a gifted storyteller, Havana Dreams is fundamentally flawed by her insistence on reducing all politics to psychodrama. For her, the saga of Naty Revuelta and her family can be summed up as "the angry, narrow quarrels between mothers and daughters, the excitement of illicit lovers, the challenge of eroticism, the search for a father, the doomed romanticism of it all." Gimbel sniffs out a psychological motivation for every principled political act--whether Naty's grandfather's participation in the Spanish-American War, Naty's husband's early support for Castro, or Naty's own lifelong commitment to the revolution.

For all its contradictions and disappointments, the Cuban revolution is not a tale of naive romanticism that curdled into egomania. Likewise, the complex mix of loyalty and resentment that Cubans feel toward their leader cannot be depicted as a love affair gone sour.

Gimbel's anti-Castroism also makes her miss the distinct epochs of Cuban socialism over the last thirty-nine years. For the author, aside from an initial burst of romantic enchantment, the revolution is a flat monolith of bleakness and tyranny. She is also oblivious to the way class determines Cubans' attitudes and responses to the revolution. Gimbel could not have composed the same story of paradise lost if she had focused on a poor, black family instead of the country's pre-revolutionary elite.

However, Gimbel is right to insist that Castro's grip is loosening. "Cuba, whatever she will be, no longer takes the measure of herself from Castro," she concludes in the epilogue. "A generation with designs of its own is replacing both antagonistic exiles and supporters of his fading regime." Now if only American writers could begin to write about Cuba with more subtlety.