Havana Dreams.

Mr. Falcoff, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, is at work on a study of U.S. - Cuban relations.

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, Dona Naty; her daughter Alina; and Alina's daughter, Mumin. 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. aaLike most of her coevals in Havana's upper-class circles in the 1940s, Natalia married young, and (also typically for that time and place) she married a man twice her age. Orlando was a prominent physician, and able to support her in grand style. The photographs in the book evoke a world long since vanished -- an Art Deco villa, English furniture, plenty of servants, and an abundance of spare time that left a beautiful young wife searching for meaning, even after the birth of her first child, Nina. Moreover, as time went on Natalia found she had less and less in common with her husband. Mrs. Gimbel offers an interesting contrast in the life of Natalia's mother, Dona Naty, who experienced a similar estrangement from her husband in the 1930s, which she resolved in a wholly conventional way: by burying herself in the lives of her children and other relatives, and by busying herself with charity projects. Natalia's restlessness took a different and more dangerous route -- that of revolutionary politics. In the early 1950s the most glamorous figure in Cuban politics was a young lawyer by the name of Fidel Castro, who was serving a long jail sentence for attempting the violent overthrow of the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Natalia began a private correspondence with Castro which was initially political and philosophical, but ended up being embarrassingly personal. Excerpts are reproduced here; they reveal a Fidel Castro utterly unlike the one Cuba and the rest of the world has come to know -- gentle, hesitant, groping for truths rather than proclaiming them with the aid of machete, gun, prison, and exile. Shortly after he was amnestied in 1956, he and Natalia had a brief affair. The result was her second child, also a daughter, Alina. By the time she was born Castro had long since departed for Mexico. Three years later he returned to Cuba and led a successful guerrilla movement to power. But his affair with Natalia was over. Not long after his return, she confessed to her husband that her second child was not his but that of the revolution's Maximum Leader. Orlando's response was to take Nina with him to live in the United States. Natalia was left in the big house in Havana with her daughter and her aging mother, to fend for herself in a world increasingly marked by political repression, economic scarcity, and emotional neglect. When Alina was ten years old, she learned that the vaguely familiar bearded man who appeared periodically at her birthday parties was her father. But by the time she reached the age of reason the dictator had little use for her; he went on to father children by other women, and sent for her but rarely. "In an allegory about Cuba," Mrs. Gimbel writes, "her father would represent Power; Alina, Damage -- the fruit of the revolution." Whereas Natalia quickly resigned herself to having made the wrong choices in life, Alina has always been a rebel. After many marriages she decided to leave for the United States, where she was shortly joined by her small daughter, Mumin. Thus when Castro visited New York City two years ago to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, he was forced to confront the embarrassing spectacle of his own daughter leading the demonstrators outside the Cuban mission on Lexington Avenue. On the other hand, exile in the United States has not wholly resolved Alina's problems. Her attempt to re-establish relations with her legal father, Orlando, was not successful. Even worse, her half sister, Nina, who was raised far from the epicenter of Cuban emigration in Miami, is wholly American; she is married to an American and has only the vaguest memories of her Cuban childhood. At the end of the day, then, the Fernandez Revuelta family is a microcosm of the Cuban nation, divided by geography and politics, destroyed by an all-devouring presence that even now decides on matters large and small for a helpless and emotionally dependent population. As Mrs. Gimbel puts it with a remarkable economy of words, "no one in the island [has been] able to swerve far enough to avoid a collision with Fidel Castro." Considering the amount of mythology put out by the Castro government about Batista's Cuba -- a mythology eagerly grasped and retailed by our media and intellectual elites -- Mrs. Gimbel's reconstruction of the Bad Old Days is balanced, fair, and remarkably complete. She informs us, for example, that "in the Fifties Havana was decadent -- it's true -- but it was [also] fast, racy, and fun." She covers her left flank by adding that before the revolution "nothing was available to the poor." She might have continued: And, nearly forty years later, nothing still is.