Dirty Havana Trilogy

Rating:
Summary: Good Book!
Review: A good read, in both Spanish and English. Evoking Bukowski, yes, as everyone will mention, but I think references to Miller are misleading. He lacks the intellect and the broadness of vision. He is more a Nelson Algren than a Miller, with the decisive quality of making the gutteral and the harshness of Western banalities into something everyday. But is it a more "real" vision of Cuba (but it is not a book evoking Cuba as a whole because it a vision of the city and city life)? Hardly. Why would this be MORE real than 'De donde son los cantantes' (From Cuba with a Song) by Sarduy or Hemmingways 'Old Man in the Sea'? It is all a matter of how we've come to see our respective worlds in general.

Rating:
Summary: Dirty Havana in Stark Relief
Review: Dirty Havana Trilogy in summary, is a compilation of the author's sexual escapades. I bought this book with the hope of getting an insight into the life, society and situations of Cubans. I was quite disappointed. There is no storyline or aim to this book and I am still trying to figure out WHY this book is highly recommended. Its the last piece of writing I will buy of Pedro Juan Gutierrez!

Rating:
Summary: Griity look at modern Cuba
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: My Favorite book of all time
Review: Having first heard of this book in of all places "Vibe" magazine , I thought it would be just another book about Castro, Che, and such. Much to my delight it was the final step in my living my life long dream of visiting Havana, Cuba. Having now gone to Havana twice I can see how the stories in this book can be or rather must be true. It showcases a man's struggle to find food, not only for the body but also for his soul, although the methods are at times not the greatest,nor always the right thing. Having talked to many people in my two trips to the island of Cuba, about the "Special Period" I find that Pedro's tales are just the tip of a shocking real life story.

Rating:
Summary: Dirty Havana Trilogy
Review: I came across this book while vacationing down in Mexico. An excellent read if you prefer a sparse, terse style of a gritty subject matter. NOT for the faint of heart, nor for politically correct bores.

"Dirty Havana Trilogy" is a series of short chapters, vignettes, of daily life in Havana during the harsh mid-90s. If you have been to Cuba, or are planning on visiting, then read this book.

When conditions become so harsh as to drive a population to harsh measures, they will be taken. The alternative is slow starvation and death. With this as a backdrop, read Pedro Juan Gutierrez's book with great empathy. The graphic descriptions of sex and rum and cigars lift the crushing weight of a painful, meager daily existence.

I found myself reading a chapter or two aloud to a table of friends. Inevitably, some were put off, but many more gathered around, wanting to hear more. Many times, we were all doubled over with laughter. Try it and see for yourself.
I read the book straight through from cover to cover. I highly recommend this book to anyone with an interest outside of the United States.

...

Rating:
Summary: A True Novel
Review: In this book, Pedro Juan Gutierrez writes about his tyring times in Cuba in the early - mid 1990s. This is the period of recession right after the collapse of the Soviet Union that President Fidel Castro called the "Special period". There are also short tales about the struggles of others such as Pedro Juan's neighbors. Some may find his style of writing raunchy and offensive but in light of the pessimistic environment in which he lives, it is understandable. Pedro Juan (a former jounalist) now finds himself in a downward spiral having to come up with a plan every day on how to get food in his stomach or to just temporarily escape reality through drinking or promiscuous sexual encounters. He often hops from one odd job to another, sells black-market produce, befriends foreigners, begs, sells his body or anything else to get enough money to just get by with.

This book is no Shakespeare, that's for sure. However, the way it was written and the content of this book had me glued to it. I found myself several times late at night reading it, telling myself "OK....after this chapter, I'll stop".....but instead kept reading a few chapters more. I have travelled to Havana and other parts three times and have seen the desperate way of life of these truly beautiful people in that country. This book is written by someone who is living through this, not a foreigner.....so it really gives the reader a raw sense of life in Cuba. I recommend this book to anyone, but especially to those who plan to travel or have travelled to Cuba.

Rating:
Summary: More than sex in Havana
Review: Mr. Gutierrez's book is more than just the story of promiscuous sex and survival in the Havana of 1994-5, when the economic crisis in Cuba was worse than ever. His style sometimes reminds me of Hemingways's: concise, clear, strong, makes you feel that you are there: touching chairs, feeling the breeze from the Malecon, having an encounter with a beautiful mulatta. His main character's alienation and desperation reminds one of one of those French existential characters who happens to have Di Chirico's and Hopper's paintings or posters on his wall. As bad as things were in Havana at that time, there is a certain excitement in his description that makes the reader want to get rid of many of the trappings of our consumerist society in order to experience the lightness of existing as a self. In a surrealistic manner,bbhe destroys traditional morality in order to arrive at a more honest view of what is really moral in a world where the most important thing is individual survival

Rating:
Summary: Oddly Enthralling
Review: Pedro Juan Gutierrez will never be confused with Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters. Instead of the English countryside, Gutierrez here delivers a no-holds barred, unflinching look at the dark side of Cuban culture in the 90's, in which sex, drugs and rampart poverty are prevalent. Pedro Juan, the author and narrator, tell us probably more than we ever wanted to know about sweat, excrement and semen on the rooftops and hallways of crumbling tenements in the once beautiful apartments along Havana's Malecon district.

There is little narrative structure to the novel, which consists of three "parts" that all sound pretty similar to me, with titles like "Marooned in No Man's Land", "Nothing to Do", and "Essence of Me." Although translated from the native Spanish of the author, the book has a ring of authenticity to it, and the language never feels false or cardboard(as if anything was lost in translation). I forgot I was reading a translated book by page 3.

Gutierrez reminds me of a cross between Bukowski and Henry Miller, living day to day trying to survive in a society gone mad, with the help of Chango and other Santeria deities who he believes look out for him and present opportunities for him to succeed. The book is not for the squeamish, but if you approach it with an open and curious mind many will find fascination and an occasional flash of brilliance in the narrative. We see couples fighting then copulating in public, on Havana's streets or rooftops, while others on neighboring rooftops watch in amazement. The narrator earns enough to buy a little rum and weed selling lobsters, "pig" livers and drugs on the black market, and when those supplies dry up he (and most characters in the book) are not above selling themselves or demanding that their lovers hustle tourists with a few extra dollars in their pockets. Old ladies sit in their apartments terrified that a tropical storm will tear their walls off, and sometimes we see apartments left standing without walls, like a dollhouse. Water supplies dry up, and dozens of people live in cramped quarters with no water and predictable hygeine problems.

Sound like your typical novel? It is anything but. However, just as you have gotten your fill of two bit hustlers and husbands who have left behind families for a treachorous raft trip to Miami, Dirty Havana Trilogy throws you a little nugget of sardonic wit or irreverent philosophy that would make me laugh and reread the page. Some examples include:

"Cuba may be the only place in the world where you can be yourself and more than yourself at the same time. But it's hard." (p. 220

"After socialism and don't bite the hand that feeds you, it was every man for himself. To hell with compassion and all the rest of it. We were having a good time." (p. 186)

"My life is always being wrecked by the cursed trio: love, health, money. Love is a lie, money slips through the fingers, health is ruined in a second. That's the way it is for me." (p. 348).

If any of these little nuggets appeal to you, and if you don't mind little chapters about cellmates picking their stinking feet in jail, then this is the book for you. I found it a refreshing change of pace, and a very realistic if graphic glimpse into a Havana ravaged by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Recommended, with a warning label.

Rating:
Summary: Vulgar Times Three.
Review: Some of my favorite works of literature were at one time considered very risque by the general public and these include Tropic of Cancer and Death on the Installment Plan, but those books, regardless of the amount of sex they detailed, were drenched in artistic merit. I cannot say the same thing about Dirty Havana Trilogy. Try as I could, I simply could not finish this text on either of the occasions that I tried. Gutierrez's constant crude and vulgar description eventually turn the stomach. Defacating, farting and other human actitivites are things that humans do but I have no wish to read books that celebrate memorialize them. Then there's the other bodily function of sex that is so prevalent it becomes boring. It's all sex all the time and I thought that the work, and its narrator, had little intellectually to offer the general public. I gave this two stars as there is some sociological information shared which is valuable, such as illumination of the pitiful living conditions in Cuba. However, there is little plot and its hard to feel any sympathy for a main character so obsessed with himself who has so little to offer readers.