BOOKS OF THE TIMES
It's Hard Work Being a Hedonist in Cuba

RICHARD BERNSTEIN The New York Times. New York, United States February 5, 2001, Monday

DIRTY HAVANA TRILOGY By Pedro Juan Gutiérrez Translated by Natasha Wimmer. 392 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $25.    The Cuban ''new man,'' that dream of revolutionary idealists and cynical bureaucrats, would appear to be the main target of ''Dirty Havana Trilogy,'' Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's lewd, impious and brilliant novel of contemporary Cuba. Mr. Gutiérrez's main character and narrator, whose name, like the author's, is Pedro Juan, drifts through the soulless wreckage bequeathed by 40 years of socialist revolution. His life serves as a kind of exhibit, a corrosive parody of the official, prettified versions of human nature.

   ''Dirty Havana Trilogy,'' translated from the Spanish by Natasha Wimmer, is banned in Cuba, though an original-language version was published in Spain. Mr. Gutiérrez, who is described on the dust jacket as a writer, painter and poet, is not what Cuban revolutionaries would take to be a model citizen, though his political comments are discreet and indirect. There is no frontal attack here on Fidel Castro, who hardly exists in Mr. Gutiérrez's Cuba.

   Rather, ''Dirty Havana Trilogy'' is a portrait of the Cuban dystopia seen through the eyes of a single person whose very individuality -- given the pressure to be loyal to ''the pack'' -- is itself a scorching sort of affirmation.

   Mr. Gutiérrez's talent is of the rough-hewn, prolo-macho sort; it is politically incorrect by anybody's standard, Mr. Castro's or the National Organization for Women's. But his caustically hedonistic vision is bluntly, defiantly honest, even if it also leads him into a repetitiveness that mirrors the repetitiveness of ordinary life itself, the repetitiveness involved in the routine of seeking pleasure in a materially and spiritually deprived universe. What distinguishes Pedro Juan, the narrator, is his intolerance of falseness, of the kind of cant he hears in snatches from passing propaganda loudspeakers.

   But he would be a rebel in some other kind of society as well, a rebel against anything tainted with what he would consider bourgeois sentimentality. At one point Pedro Juan, whose sexual endeavors occupy a major portion of ''Dirty Havana Trilogy,'' mocks the expression ''to make love,'' preferring the four-letter obscenity for the sex act instead. To make love is, in his vision, to deny the truth of the elemental human; it is to cultivate a lie.

   Mr. Gutiérrez's novel is a series of loosely connected episodes and observations, mostly of the hustlers and prostitutes who live and play, have sex, drink rum, smoke marijuana and try to pick up their daily increment of cash where they can. Pedro Juan, who gives us disorganized nonlinear bits and snatches of autobiography, writes most in the year 1994, at the height of the Cuban exodus to Miami when food shortages threatened the population with mass starvation.

''I was getting used to lots of new things in my life,'' he tells us. ''Getting used to poverty, to taking things in stride. I was training myself to be less ambitious, because if I didn't, I'd never make it.''    He has been married; there are children in the picture. He writes poems and stories and was once a journalist in Havana, but he couldn't stand having always to write ''as if stupid people were reading me, people who needed to be force-fed ideas.'' For a while he worked for a radio station, but was only allowed to broadcast ''sound and practical'' bulletins about being healthy and safe. For Pedro Juan the phrase healthy and safe is another mendacious piety. He lives in a world that stinks of human waste, that is insufferably hot, where the wells run dry, where violence breaks out savagely and suddenly at night and during the day, where people live on top of one another, and there's no water to bathe with.

   Pedro Juan, in the daily struggle to survive, sells meat and lobsters on the black market (and spends two years in prison as a consequence). He encounters horrors and moves on, like the time he watched a friend commit suicide by jumping to the pavement below, where the dogs nibbled on his brains. He lives off the earnings of one of his girlfriends who is a prostitute, but then again most of the women who inhabit Pedro Juan's world pick up the occasional trick when the opportunity presents itself.

   He works nights as a garbage collector or unclogging gas pipes in the rat-infested basements of apartment dwellings or trapping pigeons on the roof where he lives as a squatter and selling them for food or getting money from elderly female tourists who come to Cuba in search of sexual excitement. He is, in other words, a gigolo, a pimp and a black marketeer, and somehow, because of his spirited candor and his good humor, we like him.

   ''Only an angry, obscene, violent, offensive art can show us the other side of the world, the side we never see or try not to see so as to avoid troubling our consciences,'' Pedro Juan says, giving us his credo, his vision of the poet's place. Later: ''So it's best not to think too much and instead just concentrate on having fun. Rum, women, marijuana, a little rumba whenever possible.''

   One temptation would be to attribute his elemental hedonism entirely to the sanctimonious void of Cuba under Communism, the absence of anything to do. But it is equally possible that Mr. Gutiérrez sees the way of life he describes as a kind of freedom, a closeness to the reality of human nature. His book makes clear his contempt for Cuba's social engineers, but it is of no comfort either to Judeo-Christian moralists or bourgeois sentimentalists. ''Dirty Havana Trilogy'' is an exploration, and often a Sadean one at that, of human nature stripped to its essentials.

   In the brutality of his honesty, Mr. Gutiérrez reminds one of Jean Genêt and Charles Bukowski. He takes us on an unforgettable journey into a world where politics, spiritual anomie and desire make their troubled accommodation.

Published: 02-05 -2001, Late Edition-Final, Section E, Column 2, Page 7

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