In the Cold of the Malecon

In his first book to be published in the U.S., Ponte gives readers a short collection of six elliptical stories from inside the Cuban revolutionary experience, closer in spirit to the fiction of Eastern European dissidents than to that of Caribbean fabulists. Unlike exiled writers who see the island as either a mythical homeland or a political cause, Ponte paints a picture that will strike the U.S. reader as surreal in its simplicity. In ""Coming,"" Cuban students reluctant to return to the island from their college experiences in Russia arrive to find that there is now no need for their newly acquired language skills: they are the last of a generation even as they embark upon their new lives. ""Like coffee,"" Ponte writes in ""Station H,"" the conversation in an isolated train station ""tries to squeeze as much juice as possible from a very few things,"" which is true of Ponte's stories in general. Incidental details--the departure of a train, the memory of an untranslated phrase in an unknown language--take on accumulated power throughout these tales, yet never quite become symbolic of anything in particular. But the text is also supplied with powerful metaphors. When electricity is shunted from one neighborhood to the next in ""Heart of Skitalietz,"" a character says, ""I've had the security of knowing that another someone like me, another me in some illuminated part of this same city, does things for me, lives my life."" Cool, assured and quietly insightful, these tales provide rare glimpses into a Cuba often lost behind newspaper headlines. (Oct.)