BOOK REVIEW DESK
Sex and the City

KARL TARO GREENFELD The New York Times. New York, United States March 25, 2001, Sunday

Dirty Havana Trilogy By Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. Translated by Natasha Wimmer. 392 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $25.    In Cuba during the early and middle 1990's there was very little food, less rum and barely any drinking water. What the hero of Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's new novel-in-stories lives on, as far as I can tell, are marijuana and copulation: they keep him from going insane.

   The narrator of ''Dirty Havana Trilogy,'' who is also named Pedro Juan, is a former journalist who has fallen out with the Castro regime and been reduced to sharing the roof of a Malecón building with other impoverished Habanitos and their livestock. It is 1994, and Havana is a tragically underfed city, with families living 12 to a room, and the salvation offered by a visiting German or Spanish sex tourist is not wealth or jewelry but the prospect of a full stomach. Many of the girls in this novel do eventually opt to become prostitutes. And no hooker in Pedro Juan's world has a heart of gold. They dump him when someone more handsome or richer or better endowed comes along. Fidelity is utterly alien to Pedro Juan as well; he literally can't walk down the street without becoming aroused. The narrator's priapism almost seems inevitable given the lack of alternatives in this decrepit, lawless state. Sex, apparently, is a great way to pass the time.

   Pedro Juan wanders from odd job to even odder job, from selling sugar-cane ices to collecting street people for what seems to be some sort of state-run euthanasia program to distributing human livers to restaurants (he is told they are pigs' livers). No job lasts more than a few weeks. In between, he is either languishing in jail or living off a prostitute. And in the background there are always the thousands of would-be refugees stringing together truck tires and water bottles and bits of scavenged wood into rafts and setting themselves adrift in the Caribbean, hoping to make Miami. Those departed hang over the novel's characters like half-ghosts -- Pedro Juan's lovers never know if their husbands or sons made it to the United States or died at sea. Periodically, some of these newly rich Cuban-Americans return to find that their wives or mothers have taken up with Pedro Juan, who promptly gets the boot.

   In the tradition of other ribald, earthy, urban authors like Blaise Cendrars, Charles Bukowski and Henry Miller, Gutiérrez is an exuberant writer, unapologetically explicit but also splendidly Dionysian. (''I like to smell my armpits while I masturbate'' is a typical chapter opening.) The translation, by Natasha Wimmer, energizes rather than distracts. What Gutiérrez, who lives in Havana, shares with that gritty crowd is the ability to evoke sensory experience in his prose, and to use the immediacy of that description to make sense of a world that simply doesn't make sense. What motivates a man in an imploding society like 1990's Cuba? The promise of good sex, Gutiérrez knows, will keep a man going far longer than a regular paycheck or a balanced diet. (It will certainly keep a man reading.)

   Gutiérrez not only makes you believe that sex is enough for his narrator, he makes you wonder how you ever thought that anything else mattered. At one point he is describing a beautiful mulatto woman who, he explains, carries herself well and walks with a swing in her step: ''This is why it's so hard for Cubans to live anywhere else. Here you may starve and you may struggle. But the people are out of this world. Like that mulatta. She must have been 23, but when she was 40 or 50, she'd still be just as beautiful. And you always know she's there and that someday you could love her and the two of you could be happy together. While it lasted.''

Through sex, Gutiérrez knows, we also explore all the really important issues: religion, morality and race. As a white man, Pedro Juan resides at the top of Havana's sexual food chain. He is, of course, an equal opportunity fornicator. But he is also acutely aware that it is in choosing whom we partner with -- and especially live with -- that we most honestly express our racial openness. You may hire a black vice president or a white sales manager, but will you marry someone of another race? In Pedro Juan's Cuba, where sex is everything, self-definition through partner selection becomes even more important. Even in Havana today, many paler-skinned prostitutes will gladly entertain a decrepit, violent, Caucasian client but turn down a young handsome black customer. If sex is all you have, then, tragically, it becomes your only means of expressing your racism.

   I doubt that any writer living in the United States today could publish a book as unremittingly macho as ''Dirty Havana Trilogy.'' Let me correct that: I doubt that any writer besides Iron Joe Bob Briggs could produce a text so unremittingly macho and get it published. That Gutiérrez lives in a society that is at once courtly and chivalrous toward women while at the same time brutally chauvinistic -- and isolated from the prevailing currents of political correctness and sensitive guyness -- lets him take liberties most contemporary writers shy away from.

   The setting also allows the book to transcend its occasional raunchy extremes. Havana is just exotic enough that some of the salacious, misogynist material is softened or gauzed-over by a sort of rough-trade magic realism. If the same tales were set in Miami or New Orleans or even New York they would come across as gratuitously vulgar -- they'd be seen as a kind of ''Cuban Psycho.'' But ''Dirty Havana Trilogy'' is not only entertaining; it's also curiously uplifting as it illuminates the darker places of a society on the brink. On the brink of what, Gutiérrez has no idea. And he doesn't really care. Because there is always the promise of that beautiful mulatto woman.

Karl Taro Greenfeld is the deputy editor of Time magazine's Asian edition and the author of ''Speed Tribes: Days and Nights With Japan's Next Generation.'' His next book, about Asian subcultures, will be published next year.

Published: 03-25-2001, Late Edition-Final, Section 7, Column 1, Page 13

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