Cuba: Books: Recommended Reading on Cuba

Recommended Reading on Cuba

NON-FICTION

Havana Dreams: A Story of a Cuban Family, Wendy Gimbel, 1999. Gimbel’s first memoir is a study in contrasts – social, economic, spiritual—as she envisions the Cuba she remembers from her youth when she visited her socialite grandmother under Batista, to her return to her family’s country in the 1990’s during Fidel Castro’s rule.

Havana Nocturne: How the Mob Owned Cuba…and then Lost It to the Revolution, T.J. English, 2007. A spellbinding narrative of Cuba in the 1950s and how such American mafia kingpins as Meyer Lansky and “Lucky” Luciano collided with the revolutionaries Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.

FICTION

Cuba and the Night, Pico Iyer. 1995. A wonderful travel writer and essayist’s first novel is a lyrical love story about an American photographer who falls for a young Cuban woman in the haunting landscape of Castro’s Caribbean island.

Dreaming in Cuban, Cristina Garcia. 1992. In her debut novel, Garcia employs magic realism to trace the path of three generations of Cuban women from the 1930’s to 1980.