`Art Cuba: The New Generation,' edited by Holly Block; Harry N. Abrams.(Knight Ridder Newspapers)

It's a story of dollars and defiance, exoticism and occasionally excellent art. And it's one that has long fascinated the art world.

This is the story that unfolds in "Art Cuba: The New Generation" (Harry N. Abrams, $49.50), edited with an introduction by Holly Block. It's the first coffee-table book in the United States devoted exclusively to contemporary art in Cuba, with dozens of color illustrations and essays by four writers on the island, including critic Gerardo Mosquera, who's also an adjunct curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York.

Block's book picks up where Luis Camnitzer's landmark 1994 study, "New Art of Cuba", left off, highlighting the work of more than 60 artists who were particularly active in the 1990s.

Permitted to travel "somewhat freely" according to Block, they've shown their art internationally and sold it for dollars since 1993, when owning dollars became legal in Cuba. With collectors in the United States, Europe and Latin America fueling a steady market for Cuban art, dollars have made artists there among the most financially comfortable members of the island's society _ in sharp contrast to the state of most artists, including Cuban exiles, in the United States.

"Art Cuba" doesn't aspire to the historical sweep of the survey by Camnitzer. That book began with an analysis of the legendary "Volumen I" show in Havana in 1981, an exhibition remembered both for its radical break with the socialist-inspired realism of previous years and for the modernist influences of painters such as Wifredo Lam and Amelia Pelaez.

Artists who took part in that exhibit, including Jose Bedia and Ruben Torres Llorca, found their energetic art provoked greater repression as the decade continued, prompting them and others to flee the island for Mexico City, Miami and elsewhere.

Only a few artists from" Volumen I" stayed behind, among them photographer Jose Manuel Fors, who is featured in "Art Cuba". In the wake of this exodus, Cuba watchers assumed the country had been drained of all its vigor in the visual arts.