How do you make a home in Communist Cuba, where Christmas trees are banned by government order and billboards blare slogans like ''Mr. Imperialists: we are absolutely unafraid of you!''? In a land frozen in the '50s, where pastel fintails dot the streets, and the once-bounteous Woolworth's lunch counter now serves only squash and pink meat? How do you make a home where basics are such a luxury that even cops stop tourists to ask for soap? Tattlin, a mother of two, found out when her energy-consultant husband was transferred to Cuba for four years. Her descriptions, like the country itself, mingle the sublime (a trip in which they float like otters down a pristine jungle river) with the squalid (sexual tourism, asthmatic children, desperate employees). Tattlin (an assumed name) treads lightly on the political and the personal, instead acting as a keen observer of this amazing and conflicted country.
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