Havana Dreams: A Story of a Cuban Family

At the center is Dona Natica, a Batista-era socialite who, despite Castro's Communist regime, cloisters herself in the past, living in a decrepit mansion amid ancient crystal and china and pointing out her resemblance to England's Queen Elizabeth to anyone who visits. In direct opposition to Natica is her daughter Naty. In the heat of a revolutionary passion, she denounced her bourgeoisie existence (including a wealthy doctor husband and a young daughter) and took up with a hothead rabble-rouser named Fidel Castro. She corresponded with him while he was jailed for his failed insurrection against Batista--their letters are a fascinating inclusion in the book--and, when he was freed, bore his quasi-acknowledged daughter, Alina. Castro's revolution soon replaced Naty as his object of affection, and she dreams still of regaining his attention. These two women's sense of longing is passed on to the next generation as Nina, the elder of Naty's daughters, pursues an almost unrealistically stereotypical suburban life in America while Alina dreams of Miami and freedom and the father she never really knew. These women's tales, lyrically conveyed by Gimbel, hint at the complexity and richness of the modern Cuban experience.

Product Description
A fascinating, powerfully evocative story of four generations of Cuban women, through whose lives the author illuminates a vivid picture--both personal and historical--of Cuba in our century.

"When I want to read a culture," writes Wendy Gimbel in her prologue, "I listen to stories about families, sensing in their contours the substance of larger mysteries." And certainly in the Revuelta family she has found a source of both mystery and revelation.

At its center is Naty: born in 1925, educated in the United States, a socialite during the Batista era, who after marriage to a prominent doctor and the birth of a daughter became intoxicated with Castro and his revolution (here, published for the first time, are the letters they exchanged while he was in jail). Though her husband and daughter immigrated to the United States after Castro's victory, Naty remained in Cuba to raise her second child, Castro's unacknowledged daughter, only to be ultimately confronted by his dismissive, withering judgment: "Naty missed the train." Her two daughters, one of whom settles well into life in America, while the other never recovers from her father's intransigent repudiation of her; her granddaughter, who Naty desperately believes will return to Cuba when--not if--Castro is removed from the island; and her mother, an unregenerate reactionary: these are the lives that complete this extraordinary story.

Each of the women is irrevocably marked with a part of the island's terrible and poignant tale, and Wendy Gimbel has created a rich and intense narrative of their lives and times. Havana Dreams leaves us with an indelible impression of familial obligation and illicit love; of the heady but doomed romanticism of revolution; and of the profound consequences of Cuba's contemporary history for the ordinary and most intimate lives of its people.


From the Hardcover edition.

Wendy Gimbel has the imagination and flair for hyperbole to be a writer of
Harlequin romances. That she chose to write a pseudo-biography of three
generations of Cuban women, each given in her own way to emotional
obsessiveness, does not mean she can be trusted to provide anything like
an objective history, either of these women or of Cuba.

Driven, it seems, by an intense hatred of Fidel Castro, Gimbel seems pruriently
focused on Naty Revuelta's long-ago liaison with Castro, and intent on
finding a crack in Revuelta's continuing loyalty to her former lover. Once she
has that, she can, and does, close her narrative.

Gimbel seems incapable of mentioning the name of Fidel Castro without
qualifiying it with vilifying adjectives -- even a portrait of him as a toddler she
can't help but label as "petulant".

Her tendency to amateur pschology runs rampant throughout the book as she
attempts to define, understand and finally pigeonhole each of the subjects of
her gossipy curiosity; but nowhere is it as extreme as in her pat statements
defining Castro's state of mind at various points in his shared history w/ Naty
Revuelta. For example, in relating a letter exchange between the two during
Castro's imprisonment, which foments a scandal when a partisan prison guard
switches and reroutes Castro's letters to his wife and to Naty, Gimbel brushes
off Fidel's necessarily guarded explanations to Naty with "The past recedes because
it's no longer useful to him." And so on throughout the book. She seems to
imagine herself within his mind, which to her has one dimension -- pure evil.

This is not to argue that Fidel Castro does not or should not have his detractors
as well as his admirers (indeed, does a neutral attitude toward this man exist?)
But, for a book that claims to be a biographical documentary of four generations
of Cuban women, the subtext of the Gimbel's hatred of Castro is so strong as to
cast doubt on the veracity of her other observations, both of her presumed
subjects and of the island they inhabit.

Even as a writer of fiction, Wendy Gimbel would do well to attempt a more
nuanced approach to individual emotional motivations, especially when the
characters she is "studying" (or creating, as the case may be) are in situations
complicated by potentially risky political and social compromise.

Ms Gimbel has a highly developed and florid vocabulary, especially when
describing her characters' physical attributes, their fashion choices, and their
elegant dinnerware and furniture. Augmented by the dropping of names of
fashion designers and XVth century craftspeople, this seems to satisfy a need
to lend credibility to her presence among the aristocracy manque to whom
she has ingratiated herself.

She does cast a wee bone to the betterment of living conditions amongst
ordinary Cubans since the revolution, but only as a parenthetical aside, so
insignificant that I was unable to find it for a quote. And she does show a
sensitivity toward the feelings of the exile -- certainly relevant to the
multitudes of exiles and refugees in this conflicted world.

One senses here a longing for the return of aristrocracy and all it portends
to the Cuba that Gimbel mourns. It's easy to see how she has missed the boat
entirely on what the Cuban revolution has been about to the millions of
Cubans who through the revolution's continuity -- and despite its
shortcomings -- have learned to experience such luxuries as food, shoes,
education and healthcare, and to whom Chanel and chenille are as remote
as snow.


A great story.   March 6, 2003
 4 out of 6 found this review helpful

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


Flawed, but poignant   November 16, 2001
"Havana Dreams" was written as a memoir, Wendy Gimbel's attempt to capture the romance of Cuba in its heyday and the heartbreak of Cuba today. The premise is great, but the execution doesn't hold up as well. Gimbel is a strong writer, and her narrative is evocative and moving, but she organized her material in the wrong way. Instead of a memoir, she should have just written about someone else. What's really interesting here is the story of Fidel Castro's lover Naty, her mother Dona Natica, and Naty and Castro's daughter Alina. It's got everything: passion, intrigue, mystery, and betrayal. If Gimbel had concentrated on Naty and the Revuelta family, the book would have been much stronger. For example, by inserting her own maternal abandonment issues into Naty's story, she weakened the book overall. On the other hand, it can't have been easy to try to pull the truth out of these women who each wanted to control their stories, none of whom were above changing details to make themselves (Dona Natica and Alina) or Castro (Naty) more sympathetic or more impressive. Although flawed, "Havana Dreams" is a poignant, romantic tale, much like that of Cuba itself.