Down but not out

ROGER KAPLAN National Review, United States April 30, 2001

   The novel is set in the worst part of the so-called "special period" that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of its massive subsidies to Castro's regime. The misery of those years was quite dramatic. Cubans could not get basic necessities; medicine, food, water, clothes, and adequate housing were scarce. For the most part, then, Dirty Havana Trilogy shows its characters simply grubbing about for enough food to keep starvation at bay, and for enough sex to forget the despair of a meaningless life in a hopeless place. The theme of the book is survival in the sense at once animal and moral in which Solzhenitsyn understood it in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Gutiérrez does not directly pit an individual against a totalitarian state, but rather throws his hero against a system that challenges him to continue believing in his own humanity.

   The narrator and hero of the loosely connected stories that make up the novel is a man named Pedro Juan (the author's name as well, underscoring the autobiographical nature of the work), a down-and-out resident of central Havana. Pedro Juan was once a radio journalist, but he got sick of having to write PR for the regime. Now he lives in a colony of makeshift studios on the roof of a dilapidated building, not far from the Malecon, a boardwalk that has become a cruising ground for every kind of sex. His friends and girlfriends share cigarettes and rum, and ply various small-time rackets to pick up the few pesos they need to survive. When Pedro Juan's regular girl picks up a foreign sex tourist, they are flush for a few days, until the money runs out and the scrounging begins anew. Pedro Juan expects nothing from anyone, and his aim in life is simply to enjoy the small pleasures still within his reach, which are simple and animal. Half a century after the triumph of a revolution that was supposed to inaugurate an era of solidarity and social justice, the only ethic anyone can live by is the one with which this chronicler of Cuban misery concludes: "You can't let your guard down."

   In effect, Pedro Juan and his friends are dropouts. The regime can tolerate no intellectual or political dissent, but it puts up with a certain degree of bohemianism. Pedro Juan's behavior-sexual and otherwise-would be shocking in the U.S. (to the extent we still have a capacity to be shocked by squalid excess), but in special-period Cuba, Pedro Juan, rebelling against the spiritual atrophy that the regime demands, is normal: "I don't have a bad reputation in the neighborhood: I'm not a druggie, or a flasher, or a troublemaker, or someone who's always mixed up with the police. It doesn't matter if every once in a while you smoke a joint or [masturbate] or get plastered, that doesn't give you a bad reputation. Moderation in all things. It's the guy who's always high and always showing his [member] to the neighbors who's really screwed up. He's the kind who'll come to a bad end."

Pedro Juan occasionally allows a female tourist to pick him up and trade his virility for money and foreign cigarettes for a few days. His attitude is philosophical: You cannot do anything in this world without money, and everything exists on a commercial basis, so why should he object if people make the best of what they have?

   "I became a hustler," he explains in one candid description of his own depraved condition:

   But I only went with old lady tourists. I don't have the stomach for faggots, I really don't. I get violent and I want to beat them up. It's different with the old ladies. . . . The old ladies with money flock to you, like bees to honey. Some of them like blacks, but they're scared of them, too. They think they're thieves and murderers. And I play on their fears, so I get more clients. "Oh, yes, they're terrible murderers and real animals. They're bastards, and they like to hit women." . . . They look at me in horror and they believe every word of it, and then they ask me for my phone number, so they can give it to their friends who are coming soon for the summer. They live in a dream world. They think everybody has a telephone and a car and eats steak for lunch. Idiots. Naive, maybe. But I was having fun and making good money, and that was all I cared about.

   Pedro Juan and his neighbors live in a world of hustling, petty crime, and sometimes major crime, as when young desperadoes break into a neighbor's shack and assault her with knives. They are driven to madness by hunger and need-as with the man who makes a small fortune selling calf livers on the black market, until it is discovered that they are human livers taken from the morgue where he works.

In the last section, Gutiérrez tells the story of a true believer, "who had never milked the Revolution for her own profit. She was utterly honest, convinced that the only way to behave as a righteous revolutionary was to uphold honor, order, discipline, self-control and authority." This righteous lady has had a breakdown, to which the state has responded by giving her electroshock treatments. Now she is penniless and reduced to begging, saying to passersby, "Give me a few cents, for the love of God, for cigarettes and coffee. . . . Be nice. Don't hurt me." Despite his cynicism, Pedro Juan leaves no doubt that this is the true barbarism of his country's rulers: For all the revolutionary talk about a "new man," neither the system nor anyone in it seems able to summon the decency to help a desperate woman.

   Dirty Havana Trilogy is a sad book, in which people are usually hungry and unhappy. It does not say everything, or perhaps not even most things, about Cuba today. But it is probably the most honest depiction of life under Castro to have emerged in recent years. In his tales of squalor and petty hustling, Pedro Juan, who presents himself as a cynic and moral bottom-dweller, is in fact a humanitarian who in his own way fans the sparks of solidarity and friendship that Communism would replace with mindless discipline and paranoia. A detailed political treatise could not better demonstrate Castroism's failure to create a "new man" in place of the old one, wicked and sinful, yet compassionate and generous as well.