The Dirty Realism of New Cuban Fiction

‘Inside the Revolution, anything” goes the mantra of Fidel Castro’s Cuba. “Outside the Revolution, nothing.” And Pedro Juan Gutierrez’s “Dirty Havana Trilogy,” a corrosive portrait of that magnificent city as a fetid ecosystem of godless desperadoes, pushes the limits of the official credo to the deadly tautness of a slingshot. The fact that Gutierrez is able to live in Havana and not in jail after penning such a derisive work speaks to one of the mysteries-and possibly the secret-of the 42-year endurance run of Castro’s Cuba. Complaining is OK; doing something about it-like starting a new political party or organizing a demonstration-is not. Indeed, Cubans have made the complaint, the safety valve of the Revolution, into an art form. Even Cuba’s minister of culture, writer Abel Prieto, has just published his own novel, “El Vuelo del Gato” (‘The Flight of the Cat’), which takes its share of swipes at the failures of the revolution. But Gutierrez slams the complaint full-tilt boogie to the wall. (Not surprisingly, “Trilogy” was not published in Havana, but a Spanish-language edition by Editorial Anagrama sold by street vendors gets gobbled up quickly. Cuba’s Writers Union claims that it offered to publish an “abridged” version, but Gutierrez took a pass on a censored version.)

Gutierrez’s novel is a string of some 60 vignettes divvied up into three piquantly entitled sections: “Marooned in No Man’s Land,” ’Nothing to Do” and “Essence of Me.” Beginning in 1993, the nadir of the Special Period, the government euphemism for the grim years that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s patron for more than 30 years, “Trilogy” follows the daily scramblings of its narrator, Pedro Juan, who, like the author, is a former journalist, street vendor, scammer and occasional pimp poseur.

Gutierrez is most reminiscent of Zoe Valdes (author of “La Nada Cotidiana,” published here as “Zocandra in the Paradise of Nada’), who also mines Cuban street life and marginalization. Both excel in transposing Havana street talk, and each is at risk of being a one-trick pony, confined to the shock-jock genre of “I’m writing as dirty as I can.” In fact, there is little difference between “Dirty Havana Trilogy” and its predecessor, “El Rey de La Habana” (‘The King of Havana’), which also chronicles the scuffling of the baddest, coolest stud on Havana’s El Malecon.

Though it is largely true that sex-even infidelity-is the national sport of Cuba, Gutierrez’s sex is always detached and devoid of love. Sex is a divertissement, a respite from boredom, a balm against feeling, a cheap opiate. Regrettably, the stereotype of Cubans as mindlessly promiscuous is pounded ad nauseam. Pedro Juan, whose partners of choice are naturally mulattas, another stereotype, boasts his own philosophy: “Sex isn’t for the squeamish. Sex is an exchange of fluids, saliva, breath and smells, urine, semen, shit, sweat, microbes, bacteria. Or there is no sex. If it’s just tenderness and ethereal spirituality, then it can never be more than a sterile parody of the real act.”

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What’s unsaid is that sex today in Cuba is the one zone of complete unfettered freedom, where rebellion and dissidence are tolerated. One can argue there is a tradition of dirty writing in Cuba. Most notable is Chapter 8 of Jose Lezama Lima’s Proustian masterpiece “Paradiso,” which Valdes did an apparent knock-off of in her own first novel. But Gutierrez even outdoes Reinaldo Arenas’ famed libidinousness. His Pedro Juan, ever the Iron Man, by Page 8 is bragging that one conquest “had 12 orgasms with me, one after the other. She could have had more.” In the parlance of the recovery movement, Pedro Juan is a hopeless sex addict with palpable self-loathing. And it is only toward the end of the book that there is any admission of feeling. “My heart is hard now, and the only feeling I have for women is in my erections.”

Nevertheless, Gutierrez vividly re-creates the claustrophobic squalor of Havana’s underbelly with ultraviolet cameos of its lost souls and gritty survivors. These passages-searing in their rigor and lack of sentimentality-make “Trilogy” a page turner that few are likely to put down. Gutierrez is well served by the superb translation of Natasha Wimmer.

“Tough Guys” is among Gutierrez’s most evocative chapters; here, Pedro Juan has bicycled to the funky neighborhood of Marianao for a spiritual “checkup” with his santera. But before they begin, the santera discovers that her neighbor has hung himself from the ceiling, his naked body latticed with stab marks. Another neighbor, a family man, runs to embrace the dangling boy. The santera tells Pedro Juan she’ll have to give him a rain check:

“I can’t give you a session today. A fresh death gets in the way. And all that blood. That boy who hanged himself was queer.... Do you know what he did yesterday afternoon? He was riding a horse on the land out back, but he whipped the horse so hard it kept bucking until it threw him. Well, then he stabbed the horse in the neck and killed it.... They’d been together a long time. I never understood it. The man has a wife and children; he’s handsome, the kind of guy who carries a machete and is always getting in trouble with the police. But what do I know? I guess they liked each other.”

The revelation of a secret sexuality and the anguish of being homosexual in a machista culture are also explored in Abilio Estevez’s “Thine is the Kingdom” but on an entirely different canvas.

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A more challenging work, “Thine Is the Kingdom” is an interesting counterpart to exiled writer Ernesto Mestre’s equally inspired novel “The Lazarus Rumba,” published last year. Whereas Gutierrez is almost self-consciously the Cuban descendent of Bukowski and Genet, 46-year-old Estevez’s ancestor is Virgilio Pinera, the lyrical Cuban master, harassed during his life for his homosexuality and ironic iconoclasm but rehabilitated and revered in Cuba today. Indeed, “Kingdom” is dedicated to Pinera, who died in 1979. Like his mentor, Estevez writes achingly well, reminding one of Fitzgerald’s description of his “Gatsby” as “blankets of beautiful prose.” A work of elastic genres-fables and history melded into Cuban magical realism-it is a daunting, unrealized task for translator David Frye.

Set on the eve of the Cuban Revolution, in a once stately, now decaying Havana mansion called the Island, Estevez’s work is peopled with a troupe of disparate eccentrics: among others, a deranged Barefoot Countess; a wannabe singer named Casta Diva and her mute husband; Merengue, who hawks pastries from his pushcart; a geriatric Jamaican English teacher; and a Wounded Boy, who was found wrapped in a Cuban flag, his body dimpled by arrow piercings. “Kingdom” abounds with whimsy and fanciful chaos and is transparently allegorical. With the grounds of the estate littered with imitation Greek statues and bordered by a marabou grove called the Beyond, there is the feeling of “Last Year at Marienbad” speeded up to a Caribbean frenzy.

“It’s raining. Furiously. Since this tale is being written in Cuba, the rain is falling furiously. It would be another matter if this were being written anywhere else in the world .... All you can describe here is a frenzied storm. In Cuba, the Apocalypse comes as no surprise; it’s always been an everyday occurrence. Which is why this chapter begins with a downpour that forebodes the end of time.” “[T]he characters in this book,” the narrator tells us halfway through his tale, “have never learned to live alone. Cubans don’t want to know that men are all alone in the world ... Cuba is a nation of children, and children (as everybody knows) like to get into mischief when there’s an adult who’ll see them

Occasionally a historical personage-such as music legend Beny More, who died in 1963-walks onstage: “Behind her, of course, came the Greatest Singer in the World, Beny More! Merengue shouted in greeting, what a great band you have! In his wide-brimmed hat, denim overalls, red-and-yellow checkered shirt, Beny looked thinner than usual, tired, haggard, a little sad despite the smile that never left him .... Not even Uncle Rolo could hold back his admiration and he shouted, The day you die, Beny, the Island will go under.”

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Both Estevez and Gutierrez are Cuban baby boomers, their childhoods forged in the revolutionary culture of the preposterous New Man, their teen years bearing witness to the flight of thousands during the Mariel boat lift. Moreover, they confront the staggering literary legacy of such post-war giants as Jose Lezama Lima, Virgilio Pinera, Severo Sarduy and Alejo Carpentier.

Curiously, both novels omit any direct mention of Castro, although they abound in elliptical asides. In “Kingdom’s” last chapter, the narrator confesses, “I have tried to keep my characters on the sidelines of political life, obeying (too closely) Stendhal’s famous stricture to the effect that politics produces the same effect in literature as firing a pistol does in a concert, the truth is that firing a pistol would seem inevitable to me now.” On New Year’s Eve, 1958, one of his characters (accidentally) burns the island down.

“We were unaware that we were pieces on a chessboard in an incomprehensible game, we couldn’t see that the flight of the tyrant to the Dominican Republic, the entrance into Havana of the victorious Rebels (whom we took to be sent by the Lord) would transform our lives as if we had died on December 31, 1958, to be born on the first of January 1959.”

Always, for Estevez as for Gutierrez, Fidel Castro’s 42-year social experiment is the unidentified elephant in the room.