Rating: 
Summary: I couldn't put this book down!
Review: I just came back from my first visit to Cuba and I picked up this book and read it in one sitting. The book is intelligently and elegantly written, totally absorbing and captures Cuba perfectly. This is a wonderful book.
Rating: 
Summary: Potentially a good story but written with no continuity
Review: I looked forward to reading the book but found it very disconnected and boring in places. There were so many gaps in the narration that I found it difficult to keep up my enthusiasm and interest. What could have been a great story was mediocre at best. The story deserved better treatment.
Rating:
Summary: A remarkable book...
Review: I loved Havana Dreams. I quote from London's Financial Times from the review that captured my interest. I am in complete agreement with it."This is a remarkable book about love, disillusionment and exile, a tale which in its simple way tells us as much about Cuba as any political treatise or weighty economic analysis."
Rating:
Summary: story of an anything-but-ordinary cuban family
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I dont see how anyone can find it boring, and I am not of Cuban descent. Gimbel gives a fascinating picture of 100 years in the life of one Cuban family-and not just any family, since one member had an affair with Fidel Castro and a daughter by him. Gimbel was not telling the story of her own childhood, and she deserves credit for not letting it interfere with the subject family's story. Her Cuban background and early life in pre-revolutionary Havana does give her credibility and explains her access to these people at all. She gives enough of a historical and geographical persepective of the country to make me want to know more, and her detailed descriptions allow the reader to visualize each scene in detail. This book should not be taken as representative of the entire country over the last century--a different family could probably have told a very different story. The author makes an effort to remain in the background and let the people in the book tell her their feelings. Gimbel has certainly captured my interest with this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Not very interesting
Review: The book was boring. What could have been a compeling store was lost in the author never finding a voice. She jumps from story telling, to analyzing people, then regressing back to her childhood (which never tied into the book). I had to force myself to finish the book.
Rating:
Summary: Very poor development of the main character
Review: The interweaving of the writers' own experience of Cuba could have been potentially interesting in contrast or parallel to the telling of the Naty Revuelta's story. Apart from the fact that they both came from wealthy families, how they tie together (except social class must have helped her get the story) is unpersuasively developed. Hopefully the real Naty is far more interesting than the character painted. The presumed despair and disillusionment of the wealthy after the revolution was insufficiently presented to move me one bit. Fidel is portrayed entirely unsympathetically. The poor are hardly mentioned. The idealism of the revolutionaries are mentioned in passing. What exactly was the point of it? Naty as metaphor for Cuba? Maybe, but that's a pretty simplistic reading of Cuba--one of the great tragedies and dreams of this century. All in all, not much of a morsel.
Rating:
Summary: Havana Dreams Captures the Dream that was Cuba
Review: Wendy Gimbel weaves together Cuba's present and past so poetically that history becomes literature. In light of current trends toward increased contact with Cuba and the problematical policies on refugees, Havana Dreams is especially timely. I strongly recommend this book for all who want to undertand Cuba from the inside out.
Rating:
Summary: We experience modern Cuba, in a subtle--& dishy--true story!
Review: What a great read! Wendy Gimbel gives her readers the tastes and smells of Castro's Cuba and a sense of its place in history, while presenting a story as subtle as it is dishy! This is like a Cuban "Bill and Monica" as told by Tolstoy! Gimbel's account presents four generations of women whose lives are not only caught in the history of modern Cuba, but shaped by one woman's actual love affair with Fidel.(Gimbel even managed to get Castro's love letters!) The grace of Gimbel's prose makes Havana Dreams an aesthetic--almost musical--pleasure to read.
Rating:
Summary: We experience modern Cuba, in a subtle--& dishy--true story!
Review: What a great read! Wendy Gimbel gives her readers the tastes and smells of Castro's Cuba and a sense of its place in history, while presenting a story as subtle as it is dishy! This is like a Cuban "Bill and Monica" as told by Tolstoy! Gimbel's account presents four generations of women whose lives are not only caught in the history of modern Cuba, but shaped by one woman's actual love affair with Fidel.(Gimbel even managed to get Castro's love letters!) The grace of Gimbel's prose makes Havana Dreams an aesthetic--almost musical--pleasure to read.
Rating: 
Summary: Good read
Review: While I have to agree with the previous reader about the lack of a single voice for the book, I believe that the true beauty and worth of the book lie in Gimbel's rich portrayal of pre- and post-Castro Cuba. I think she elegantly captures and contrasts the Old World gentility of Dona Natica's days with the resigned but still hopeful people that inhabit current day Cuba. I didn't develop any connection to the main characters, but I appreciated their roles as icons for the different generations and voices of Cuban culture.
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