CUBA IN MIND, edited by Maria Finn Dominguez, Vintage (softbound) 276 pages, $14

When Columbus arrived in 1492, he called Cuba "the most beautiful country that human eyes have ever seen." Since the revolution that made Fidel Castro the communist dictator of Cuba in 1959, the image of Cuba has become largely negative, and a U.S. embargo has prevented Americans from traveling there.

This volume changes everything.

Maria Finn Dominguez, a faculty member in English at Hunter College of the City University of New York, designed and taught a writing course for CUNY students who attended Casa de las Americas in Havana, Cuba. When she discovered that the kind of volume she wanted to assign to her students didn't exist, she collected writings from numerous sources and produced her own: "Cuba in Mind."

Dominguez has organized the book into four categories, the first being "Travelers," which features British writer Anthony Trollope and American poet William Cullen Bryant, both of whom visited Cuba in the 19th century, plus more modern writers such as Robert Stone and Andrei Codrescu.

Then she moves to "Expatriates," Americans who actually lived in Cuba for some time — crime novelist Elmore Leonard, spy novelist Graham Greene and the legendary Ernest Hemingway.

Her third category is "Aficionados," writers who developed a love-relationship with the country, such as Langston Hughes, a prominent black poet who went to Cuba in 1930; Allen Ginsberg, a controversial American poet who visited Cuba in the '60s, after the Cuban revolution; Pico Iyer, novelist and travel writer, who visited Cuba in more recent years and wrote a novel, "Cuba and the Night," in which he mixes romantic relationships with the politics and beauty of the country.

The fourth category is "Exiles, Immigrants and Their Offspring," such as Carlos Eire, who was 11 when he immigrated to the United States without his parents after the revolution, and who then wrote "Waiting for Snow in Havana," which won the National Book Award for nonfiction in 2003. Also, Rosa Lowinger, who left Cuba with her parents, settled in Los Angeles and has a book, "Tropicana Nights," a memoir of the Tropicana Cabaret, scheduled to be published this year by St. Martin's Press.

The writings found in this volume are rich and varied. Hemingway wrote: "People ask you why you live in Cuba and you say it is because you like it. It is too complicated to explain about the early morning in the hills above Havana where every morning is cool and fresh on the hottest day in summer. . . . You could tell them that you live in Cuba because you only have to put shoes on when you come into town, and that you can plug the bell in the party-line telephone with paper so that you won't have to answer, and that you work as well there in those cool early mornings as you ever have worked anywhere in the world. But those are professional secrets."

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