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Original Title:	Trilogía sucia de La Habana
ISBN:	0060006897 (ISBN13: 9780060006891)
Edition Language:	English
Setting:	Havana(Cuba)

Dirty Havana Trilogy Paperback | Pages: 392 pages

Details Appertaining To Books Dirty Havana Trilogy

Title	:	Dirty Havana Trilogy
Author	:	Pedro Juan Gutiérrez
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 392 pages
Published	:	February 5th 2002 by Ecco (first published 1994)
Categories	:	Fiction

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For the last four decades, Fidel Castro's communist Cuba has survived a harsh economic blockade. In 1993, Castro attempted economic reform by allowing Cubans to use U.S. dollars and begin their own business ventures—"a huge messy free-for-all." This time of confused, low-rent capitalism is the backdrop for Pedro Juan Gutierrez's gritty, powerful, and atmospheric novel-in-stories, Dirty Havana Trilogy, translated from the original Spanish version by Natasha Wimmer. Gutierrez, whose prose sings of grime and simple, hard-clay truths, much like the words of Junot Díaz, is a well-known member of the Latin American visual poetry movement and a magazine journalist living in Havana. Dirty Havana Trilogy is written from the semiautobiographical point of view of Pedro Juan, a 40-year-old sex-starved ex-radio journalist cobbling together an existence by selling everything from himself to drugs to whatever he can get his hands on. "Everything's worth something here," he writes. Pedro Juan is an ex-radio journalist because in a "model" communist society nothing bad is acceptable news. Through his tormented lead character, Gutierrez provides a window into his reasons for writing such a crude book. "That's why I was disillusioned with journalism and why I started to write raw stories.... I write to jar people a little and force others to wake up and smell the shit.... That's how I terrorize cowards and mess with people who like to muzzle those of us who speak up.... My stories could run bare-assed out into the middle of the street, shouting, 'Freedom, freedom, freedom.'" That said, be warned: Dirty Havana Trilogy is not for the faint of heart. It is raw, squarely confronting poverty, racism, violence, prostitution, and the lengths Cubans go to in order to secure the almighty buck. In one story, the man who lives across the hall from Pedro Juan, in the crumbling apartment building that serves as the focal point for much of the book, is busted by the cops for stealing human livers from the morgue and selling them on the streets as pork livers. But survival isn't the only thing on the minds of Gutierrez's colorful characters. Oddly enough, it's the quest for release, for fits of pleasure, for some sliver of happiness no matter how warped the avenue may seem to the world outside Havana. And that quest is manifested in the hard-core sex that permeates the pages of the book. An orgasm is one of the few pleasures no one can be denied. As violent and nauseating as the sex -- and the life -- may seem on the surface, Gutierrez achieves the difficult task of lifting his characters from the muck, giving his Dirty Havana Trilogy an intellectual and emotional depth that far outweighs the carnal. Near the end Gutierrez writes, "Born in the ruins, they just kept trying not to give up or let themselves be beaten so severely that at last they were forced to surrender. Anything was possible, everything allowed, except defeat." The book then becomes a manifesto, a well-wrought fight against literary persecution, a release the same as an orgasm, where the truth behind every dark corner, behind every door, must be told. Dirty Havana Trilogy comes from the same womb in which literature was born, a book that just may someday be held up beside those of the mighty dead. Nelson Taylor is a freelance writer and author of the travel guide America Bizarro, published by St. Martin's Press.

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Ratings: 3.76 From 3270 Users | 305 Reviews

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The US-published English language edition of 'Dirty Havana Trilogy' describes it as, "A Novel in Stories". While it is a gruesome portrait of Havana in the 1990s, in my mind this is most certainly NOT a novel. It's more like snatches of life, notes on the depraved lengths that inhabitants of Fidel's Cuba had to go to in order to survive. I didn't mind that there was lots of sex and general unsavoury behaviour going on. What I did mind was that there was no discernible story arc, just more and

I'm not sure if I really enjoyed this, to be honest. Its three stories, but I can't really see any reason for them being separated into a trilogy rather than a bunch of short stories. There is no storyline in any of the three parts, every chapter is just a different account of supposed daily life of those struck by the crippling poverty & awful quality of life in 90's Havana. That element itself is what I enjoyed about the book, as it was a culture & place I knew nothing of before



this book SHOCKED me with g's ability to craft such steaming hot--often funny--raunchiness into such truly gorgeous sophisticated tales. it's one of those novels that each chapter stands on it's own and each closes on a really poignant note. but it's DIRTY. just plain filthy. and hairy and stinky and raw. i mean, you'll blush on the train and look over at people thinking they must be able to sense it--to smell it on you even. but it's really really great nonetheless. i tried another of his books

This is required reading for anyone visiting Cuba for tourism, subversion (see Alan Gross), or anti-US-Government solidarity (see me, who went 15 times to help deliver and tune 250 American pianos in the face of the embargo). God knows I wish I had 1) learned Spanish and 2) read Gutierrez beforehand. I was traveling blind. Bad Spanish can improve over time in Cuba but I spent months at a time without realising what it must be like to be trapped there. Pedro Juan is a defrocked journalist who

"Cities, like dreams are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perceptions deceitful, and everything conceals something else" Italo Clavino, Invisible Cities***Just a word of warning there will be mature content in this review due to the explicit content of this novel.***This novel is a series of short vignettes that are roughly in chronological order. The book is raw, focusing on the poorest of the poor of Havana. It is 1993

Were down-and-out in Havana during the economic crisis of the early 1990s when people appear with buckets to ask for slices of meat off of a dead horse. The political situation has changed to the point where police come by to see rafters off and wish them good luck on their dangerous trip to Florida. We follow the main character, a man in his early 40s -- he constantly reminds us how old he is. He used to be a journalist who traveled in Europe with a former artist wife but hes ended up divorced,