Judging from the irreverence that has been the hallmark of her entire life, Natalia Bolivar Arostegui (1934) doesn’t strike one as someone who was born in Havana’s aristocratic neighborhood of Miramar, whose garden walls are as impregnable as its safe deposit boxes; she appears rather to have been born in the more proletarian quarters of Pogolotti, where dockers return to put an end to their rumba-filled nights – or rather returned, for it’s been several decades since she was last inclined to visit Havana’s more picturesque neighborhoods on “anthropological impulses,” as she puts it. If there’s one description that does not fit her it is that of the serene and lethargic old woman sitting on the armchair of nostalgia. There is still much blood coursing through her veins, and the memory of that unrepentant young woman who added more fuel to the fires of the 1950s, becoming involved with Jose Luis Gomez Wanguemert, a married man who was a known opponent of dictator Fulgencio Batista, is still too vivid. It was, as they say, quite the scandal at the time. Lydia Cabrera’s lapdog “My first memories are of my nanny, Isabel Cantero, who took care of me from the day...