Customer Reviews

Dirty Havana Trilogy

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

Following the collapse of the silver spoon better known as the Soviet Union, Castro decided to "reform" the Cuban economy in the early nineties. However, the slight change in what a local can own and sell has little effect on the disenfranchised intellectual community.

As an idealistic youth, Pedro Juan expected to become a great writer, but by early 1993, he can no longer deal with journalist reports that treat everyone as if they are morons. He quits his day job and becomes a Communist entrepreneur selling anything and everything including his body. At time he crosses the economic legal line and lands in jail. As he becomes more depravingly self-centered, Pedro Juan seeks wine, women, and weed with no hope for more than a bleak decaying future even with the beautiful Caribbean just outside his reach.

DIRTY HAVANA TRILOGY is a gritty, at times deliberately written in poor taste, series of grimy vignettes loosely tied together through the main character. The story line is not for the faint of heart as Pedro Juan Gutierrez paints a grim, gray look at modern Cuban society. Readers will loathe and sympathize over the downward spiral of the antihero, who compensates from a lack of mental activities with many me-me physical pursuits. Bluntly, Pedro Juan is a racist, sexist person, who deserves no empathy, yet manages to garner plenty from the audience. This novel is quite graphic sexually. It is also a no holds look at a decaying society that Pedro Juan symbolizes in every way possible, spiraling into depravity. This well-written quasi-autobiography will either bring adoring fans to the author or condemnation for bad taste without counting how Fidel will react.

Harriet Klausner

A must-read for would-be visitors to Cuba! As a cuban-american and lifelong student of Cuban history I was mezmerized by this down and dirty account of life in modern day Cuba. The graphic descriptions of sex and survival are not for the squeamish. Pedro Juan captures the hopelessness and despair that drive so many young cubans to risk their lives on rickety rafts. This "Dirty Havana Trilogy" assaults your senses but won't let you put it down.

Gutierrez is a more honest Henry Miller--he reveals the rotten, despairing philosophical underpinnings of his sexual behaviour. Unlike Miller, who tried to justify his actions, Gutierrez is brutally honest about himself. The settings and events are often sordid and disgusting, but the narrator himself is a higher being, a refined sensibility still capable of acknowledging the truth about the actions to which he is driven. The Dirty Havana Trilogy also recalls "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", but the ultra low-budget sewer that is Castro's Cuba makes the Communist Czechoslavkia of Milan Kundera's time look like Donald Trump's New York.

Clearly, this is not a book for those who are easily offended. There is lots of meaningless death, meaningless sex, casually pejorative slurs on people of colour and women, descriptions of filthy and disgusting environments. But, notwithstanding the blurbs on the dust jacket of the book, Gutierrez's work is a very moral work in the sense that any reader will clearly see the cost of such behaviour and be unlikely to imitate the narrator.

It would be fascinating to systematically compare this book, with its indictment of the moral choices remaining to the ordinary person living under Casto's government, to Armando Valladares' "Against all Hope", which is also available on Amazon.com, of course.

This is another interesting addition to the "lying in the gutter and looking at the stars" genre. Highly recommended for those who are up for it.

I was reading an article about P.D. James the English mystery writer. She was quoted as saying if you really want to know about a society; read fiction.

I have always been interested in Cuba. Its been the place an American is not supposed to go to(yet many do go, for many different reasons). Its right in our own back yard. For me its the romantic notions in Hemingway. Its also Meyer Lansky and Mob. Che who has become some kind of romantic marytr.

I have read a number of newspaper articles on Cuba. I was prepared for this book. It is truly gritty. It is not for the faint of heart. But, I feel it is an important novel.

If you can look past the sex, violence, poverty and desperation(which is hard to do), you will find symoblism. I think there is a disappointment with communist experiement. The lack of freedom. The breakdown of communist world. But I don't think it's that simple. I think the author's Cuba and its people still thumb their noses at America while they shake their heads in disappiontment at Fidel and Raul.

I think Cuba is a microcosim of any multiethnic society in decline. What keeps the country afloat is the passion and spirit of the people. I believe the author makes that point. The last chapter is Cuba. But read the book to get the flavor of this very hot and humid place.

Anyone with an interest in contemporary Cuba absolutely must read this book. You may not like it (some readers may be put off by the vulgarity and explicit sexuality), but it stands as a testament to the writer's honesty and artistic courage, and it gives an inside view of an aspect of life in Havana that is unflinching. I've been to Havana. This book depicts a side of the city that the government does its best to make sure no outsiders ever see (and I don't mean this as a political tract against the Castro government -- all governments are solipsistic, including the U.S.). Personally, I found Pedro Juan's writing hard to take at times but also very humanistic and brave. As a novel it's not very satisfying - it's more a series of vignetts. But the writing is colorful, raunchy and hilarious in a down-and-out sort of way. All in all, this is the most important book to come out of Cuba since the writings of Reinaldo Arenas.

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.

I read the book in Spanish and found it quite a fascinating window into the lives of the poor in Cuba in the early '90s. Interestingly, none of the reviewers here have pointed out what to me is the most obvious influence on Gutierrez's writing, namely the work of the American writer Charles Bukowski -- it's all there, in particular the emphasis on women and alcohol, and the narrative which fans view as charmingly episodic and critics as pointless. I take some exception to reviewers pointing out the narrator's racism -- without question his thoughts don't pass the litmus test of American political correctness, with its fetishistic emphasis on inoffensive speaking, but the narrator lives in a society that for all its shortcomings is far more racially mixed and integrated than the US and I don't believe his actions are those of a racist actor.

More than a political or social comment on early 90s life under Castro, Dirty Havana Trilogy is a biology tract. It depicts the habits, instincts, and behavior of human animals in the cage of intellectual deprivation, physical starvation, and social morass.

Devoid of dreams for a better tomorrow or the knowledge of where the next meal is coming from, immediate physical relief -- whether brought on by food, water, alcohol, sex, or violence -- becomes the only thing attainable in Gutierrez's bleak panorama. And when the squeeze is on, his lab rats do all manner of hideous things to one another to get it.

I picked up the book on a whim on the hope that I'd get an insight into contemporary Cuba. I finished the book thinking that I had instead just gotten a tour of hell, the variety of which exists in any number of poverty-stricken areas of the world. But while it lasted the tour was compelling, vivid in its savagery.

For all of the umbrage taken to the comparisons to Genet and Miller, Gutierrez compares to no one more closely than Charles Bukowski. The subjects are the same: alcohol, sex, sloth with a self pity chaser, the mundane details of minimum wage life. The techniques are the same as well: short sorty minimalism, terse, brutal and claustrophobic.

As with Bukowski's compilation-style novels, it would be a mistake to say that Dirty Havana is great literature, but it does very effectively deliver the author's day-to-day experience. Grinding meditation on hunger, filth and lust may simply not be to your taste - compare to olives and licorice as similar love-it or hate-it kinds of food.

A first-person tale from the slums of Havana. This almost-pornographic loose collection of short stories is fascinating in the manner of a bloody car wreck, and holds the reader's attention in much the same way.

The violent, misogynist, overtly racist exploits of the protagonist Pedro Juan in Dirty Havana Trilogy are in many ways a morality tale about the depths to which we sink when forced to cope with grinding poverty. Gutierrez doesn't glamorize Pedro Juan's racist and sexist attitudes and actions; readers won't mistake them for anything but the vices that they are.

Pedro Juan's sexual exploits are repetitive to the point of being predictable, and perhaps that's the author's point. This isn't the story of Cuba, this is a look at a character that has fallen through the cracks and his interaction with those around him. The tropical climate is interwoven into the tales, but aside from this fact Dirty Havana Trilogy could have as easily been set in any slum around the world.

This isn't great literature and I suspect that must readers will find it to be forgettable, but as an unflinching snapshot of a weak human being pushed past his limits it is interesting. And ironically, occasionally funny.