Havana Dreams
A Story of a Cuban Family
-
- 9,99 €
-
- 9,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The centerpiece of this highly personal, disjointed history of modern Cuba is a brief affair between a married Havana socialite named Naty Revuelta and Fidel Castro, carried out mostly in love letters written in 1953-54 while the future dictator was in jail. The affair fizzled, but not before Castro supposedly left his paramour with a daughter, Alina, who created a minor sensation in 1993 when she immigrated to the U.S. and joined protesters demonstrating against the Cuban leader's 1995 U.N. appearance in New York City. Castro never publicly acknowledged the legitimacy of the daughter, and though references are made to photographs of the Cuban leader and Alina together, none are included here. Gimbel (Edith Wharton) interviewed four generations of Revuelta women to reconstruct the family's story through their sad experiences as deposed Cuban elites, scorned lovers and defectors. The result is a virulently anti-Castro document with a confusing mix of characters either relieving the glorious pre-revolutionary past or denying that such a past ever existed. The book is often sentimental--"Fidel Castro knew how to make love to a woman without ever touching her." But the love letters, like much of the book, provide little insight into Castro's development and suggest only that even a hardened revolutionary can churn out banal but tender sentiment when smitten with a woman.
