Telex from Cuba by Rachel Kushner

I really enjoyed reading this book. It was a fictional account of an enclave of Americans living in Cuba in the late 1950's. Leading up to Castro's rise to power, the book followed several families' stories as they came to Cuba as employees of United Fruit and Nicaro Nickel Mine.

Large sections of this book were narrated by two adolescents whose parents worked for these companies. Precocious and observant, they provided a candid view into the double standards around race and class between the Americans and the Cubans. The reader also sees how ignorant the Americans are around the magnitude of the political situation, both nationally and locally. There are descriptions of cocktail parties right out of "Desperate Housewives", and of Parisian-style ice cream parlors, representing a lifestyle that is a sharp contrast to what is happening in most of the country at the time.

There are other narrators who take smaller parts of the story, most notably a dancer at a cabaret who is active in the political underground and her lover, an international drifter. Their sections of the story evoke very strong atmospheres also, in the steamy cabaret, the ill-run rebel camps, and the increasingly dangerous city. Notably, the cabaret dancer is named "Rachel Z" in the book, perhaps a tip of the author's hat to her place in her own family's Cuban story.

What I liked most about this book was that it was not told in strict chronological order. As each narrator took over, time shifted, sometimes back and sometimes forward. At several points, their stories overlapped and the same moment was described from different vantage points, sometimes to my surprise. This kept several of my fingers in different chapters of the book as I was reading, eager to compare these fragments to each other to understand better what Kushner was trying to say about each character.

I have not read much set in Cuba and this was a delightful introduction and a well-preserved place and time.