An intimate, anecdotal account of life in Cuba in the mid-1990s by the American wife of a Euro-business husband, posted (with their children) to Havana. Tattlin writes with verve of the "rowdy, ambiguous, ironic and sometimes exhilarating time" between the special period (when the economy was especially bleak after the collapse of the Soviet Union) and the 1996 Helms-Burton bill reinforcing the U.S. embargo.  (CBA74, $13.95)