This story of Cuba is based on three generations of one middle-class family - the pampered socialite Dona Natica, born 1900, her daughter Naty, born 1925, and Naty's youngest daughter Alina, born 1956. As the photographs show, all three women are exceptionally beautiful. It is easy to understand how the young Fidel Castro was briefly captivated by Naty.
Alina, who made a well-publicised escape from Cuba in 1993, is his daughter, a fact that he has neither denied nor officially acknowledged.
Gimbel has a personal connection with Cuba: her mother was a Vassar graduate from a clerical New England background and her father was Cuban. When her parents' marriage broke up less than a year after her birth, Gimbel was sent to stay for part of every year with her Cuban grandmother, who was, as far as one can gather (Gimbel is oddly coy about dates when she is writing about her own life), a contemporary of Dona Natica.
Wendy Gimbel's grandmother came from the same wealthy middle class as Dona Natica, and it is the extravagant world of pre-revolutionary Cuba that has captured Gimbel's imagination. She tries, unsuccessfully, to hide her contempt for Fidel and his revolution. Gimbel is a well-connected New Yorker, who writes for various publications, including the New York Times, Vogue and The Nation. When she visited Cuba for the first time as an adult in 1991, she was on a nostalgic quest for her grandmother's Cuba.
In a telling anecdote she recounts that where some people look at architecture or flora and fauna to gain a sense of place in a new country, she is married to a lawyer whose method is to locate the nearest courthouse and watch a trial from the visitors' gallery. She continues: "When I want to read a culture, I listen to stories about families, sensing in their contours the substances of larger mysteries."
Her style as a writer is immediately reminiscent of that of Phyllis Rose, a fellow New Yorker, who published a collection of essays last year, The Year of Reading Proust, which had very little to do with Proust and a lot to do with Phyllis Rose's privileged lifestyle. It sounds dire, but was in fact elegantly written, unexpectedly thoughtful and informed by a lively interest in all things cultural. Interesting, therefore, that Phyllis Rose is among the numerous people thanked in Gimbel's lengthy acknowledgements.
These two writers share a tendency to treat history as high-grade gossip. Whatever the many shortcomings of this method, it makes for compulsive reading, and does help to bring the past to life.
It is often the trivial detail that sticks in the mind. Gimbel's history of the Revuelta family is characterised by one generation's inability to understand its successor.
Thus, Dona Natica bemoans her daughter Naty's affair with Fidel, which eventually broke up her marriage: "She had everything, a husband who adored her, two beautiful daughters, five household servants, twelve goblets of Baccarat crystal."
When Naty's husband leaves Cuba for Miami in 1961 with their eldest daughter, the bewildered man goes to a department store and buys two complete place settings of Wedgwood china and two crystal goblets so that he and his small daughter can eat dinner at home. Neither of them had ever cooked anything before, nor been to a food market.
Gimbel does not claim to give the whole picture, but by concentrating on one, often ignored aspect of the whole - how life has changed for the Cuban bourgeoisie, both those who stayed and those who left - she manages to say something new about the chaos and the extremes of life in Cuba over the past hundred years.
