Elena Schwolsky’s new book Waking in Havana: A Memoir of AIDS and Healing in Cuba is a well-written, moving account of her work as a nurse in Cuba’s HIV/AIDS prevention program. In describing her work, she shares a valuable, heartfelt, ground’s eye perspective of life, love and laboratories in modern Cuba. Schwolsky’s recollections are not so much a linear blow by blow account as a living, breathing, re-creation of the pulse of the island’s efforts to martial its resources to fight the plague of AIDS. The author weaves a rich tapestry of everyday events and lively characters caught up in the larger struggles that defined their time.