Dirty Havana Trilogy

Pedro Juan Guiterrez's novel Dirty Havana Trilogy (2002) certainly lives up to its name. The filthy tales of sex, squalor, desperation, depravity, desire, and sadness call to mind similar writers of living on the margins of decent society like Bukowski and Miller. It is a series of vignettes divided into three sections (novels): "Marooned in No-Man's-Land," "Nothing to Do," and "Essence of Me." The stories take place during the special period in the early to mid-90s when Cuba was struggling from the effects of the collapsed Russian empire, which left the country unmoored and people struggling and starving in away that they had not previously known. It seemed as though the first two volumes were used to make the reader comfortable with the depraved appetites of the protagonists so that he could create more disgusting and desperate and depraved goings on in the third part of which many were extremely dark and less humorous than those shenanigans depicted early in the novel. In between all the filth and depravity Gutierrez manages to pain a portrait of what it is like to live in Central Cuba among the decay and poverty that creates a less than ideal picture of the failings of the communist system in Cuba. I ma glad that the people are finally going to get a taste of the wealth that lies beyond the waters surrounding the Caribbean island would-be paradise.