Dirty Havana Trilogy: A Novel in Stories (ISBN 0060006897)

Cashes on popular misinformation about Cuba:
I wholeheartedly agree with reviewer William Apt below me, when he says that this book portrays Havana residents as a bunch of lust-driven beggars and hustlers living literally in their own excrement. While it is the author's right to portray Havana in whatever way he likes, readers should not be misled into thinking this is the real city, as many of them do (as shown by their reviews). The real Havana, the real Cuba, is nothing like that. Its inhabitants are, for the most part, polite, affable people, as well as extremely clean (I can affirm that, during the whole length of my stay, every bad-smelling person I met was, without exception, a foreign tourist). The problem with this book isn't only that it can wrongly lead readers into thinking that Havana is nothing but one big slum filled with starved people dying to find dope or get laid; it's also that the story (insofar as it can be called a story, since there's no plot) is nothing but a succession of loveless, exploitative sexual encounters, peppered with racist and sexist comments by the unsavoury main character (possibly intended as a portrait of the author, with whom he shares his name) - and that, for me at least, just wasn't worth reading. If you like this sort of book, Gutierrez's fiction may be the thing for you. For this reader, however, the book was just badly written porn with an ugly, mysoginistic edge. And as social or political criticism it is, to say the least, phony and commercial (i.e., this is probably the way Gutierrez thinks Americans want to see Cuba). If you want to read a good book about Cuba, I recommend Pepe Navarro's "La voz del caiman" ("The cayman's voice"), a book consisting of interviews with and great photos of real Cubans from all walks of life, from a transvestite to Havana's town historian, which will tell you what living in that strange and unique country is really like.

A Great Work to be Read Beneath Its Surface:
As I read Juan Gutierrez masterful work, I was reminded of some of the great poetic dramatic monologues, particularly Browning's. No doubt that was an idiosyncratic association, probably not intended by Gutgierrez, but there is a lot to recommend the comparison. There is a single narrator, Pedro Juan, and the reader acts as the silent listener both rapt by the narrator's tales yet often repulsed by his character but unable to stop listening (the book is a page-turner). Of course the crucial element in a dramatic monologue is the reader's perception of a gap between the narrator's claims and what he actually discloses. Gutierrez discloses a protagonist who is selfish, often cruel, outlandish, occasionally sparing, at times brutally lustful, and shiftless. Where is the gap? The gap exists between the Pedro's disaffection with Cuba's socialist system and representing himself as being above it. I kept wondering, does Pedro really represent the kind of person who dissents from the socialist system in Cuba? If so, who would want the prevalence of that kind of selfish and dysfunctional person in a Cuba without socialism? Therefore, while many readers and critics focus of Pedro's dissent from the Cuban system and see the work only from that vantage point, I believe their reading misses how Pedro's dissent results in his undesirable character. I suspect that Gutierrez is operating on more textured level than many readers give him credit for and his real message is actually the opposite of what it appears to be on its surface. That is the mark of a masterful writer.

Visceral - then fades:
I'm not really sure what the real merit of this book is. Certainly it is a pugnacious, visceral, pungent look at the seam of Cuban life that includes plenty of men and women fornicating, fighting and flaneuring their way through life -such is the oppressive poverty inflicted on them by Castro (surely no one can mourn his stepping down this month - any leader of a country that denies its citizens basic freedoms is surely a rotten pernicious dictator, however iconoclastic). The first chapter incorporates a description of a sex act, the details of which would surely be censored by amazon were I to post them. There are a few riffs on living an honest life - in the vein of Bukowski - which hit at a gut level, but after fifty or so pages the routine begins to pall - another chapter, another day, another roil through Havana streets. Gautirez is a good writer, with a spare tough style (por supuesto) and good ear for dialogue and nose for odour. But it was more a depcition of tough guy low life anywhere any place than a particularly memorable insight into Havana, or any groundbreaking addition to the literature of this formidably literate island (believe me, Cubans are literary - when I visited Havana a couple of years ago I was assailed on the streets by raddled old guys hawking not cigars, but poetry).

Rum Soaked Pages:
The novel lives up to every promise of the title. Every page is a rum soaked lustful portrait of a society full of life, its struggle for survival told by (and symbolized by) 'Pedro Juan', a hustler always looking for his next meal, drink or lay. The Cuba that many only know through Hemingway is long past, yet the warm character of its people and the beauty of the Malecon comes through like a sweet sea salt breeze.

Read a wee bit deeper than the booze and sex ...:
There's some truth to the reviews submitted by readers prior to mine. The book is lewd & full of debauchery, but there's more to it. The stories are about the destitute and hopeless at the edge at risk of slipping outside civilized society. It's commentary about 1990s Cuba, but it's also about meaning and purpose. Pedro Juan's character has nothing, no one - he escapes the banality of poverty through booze and lots of graphically described sexual encounters. But the sex isn't glorious or even pleasant; in fact, sex is reduced to self-medication - and a commodity, a thing of value for trade in a decrepit barter economy. I liked the prose but not necessarily the vulgarity. Sometimes reality is most persuasively described in vulgar language. The book resonates with a desire for freedom - personal, economic, theistic. It appeals to that part of us that looks at at parents, or bosses, or politicians, or policemen, or society, or whatever force that tries to make us conform to whatever, and says "Fk You". Consider: "(I hate) those two words: sound and practical. They are pedantic and false. They serve only to hide the truth. Everything is unsound and impractical. All of history, all of life, every single era has been unsound and impractical by nature, but we curb our instincts and return to the fold like good sheep, and fit ourselves with reins and bridles. "I had been living a double life for a long time: sound and practical at the radio station, unsound and impractical at the building with Miriam. I still didn't feel free, but I was making progress. The truth is, I have no interest in any kind of straight and narrow life, no interest in anything that moves smoothly from one point to the next, tracing a route that clearly begins in one place and ends somewhere else. No. There's no use trying to be sound and practical or to live along a precisely plotted path. Life is a game of chance." -- Definitely subversive, but speaks to many of us who refuse to be pressed into the fold!