656
PARTISAN REVIEW
The elementary lives of his fictive characters are painted in tropical
colors: the putrid colors of overripe fruit and spoiled meat, the sensual
colors of ebony black skin, all the grades of mulatto and the occasional
Caucasian blond, sensually mixed, rubbed together, an explosive-erotic
blend. When Pedro Juan isn't shoving a girlfriend out the door
to
hus–
tle some pallid tourist for a few dollars, he's hustling aged female
tourists, "the old lady meat market," until he gets arrested for display–
ing his merchandise to an elegant foreigner in a pearl necklace. Or he
gets beaten up by a Brazilian dyke (who does an 0
Clabo
cultural col–
umn) who's seduced another one of his mulatto girlfriends. Every two
or three pages some exchange of human fluids takes place. Yet
Dirty
Havana Trilogy,
despite its guttersnipe social set, its raw lust, its emo–
tional depravity, accomplishes a metaphysical or spiritual journey into
the dark night of the soul: Pedro Juan Gutierrez stands revealed in the
flesh, sexually and morally
naked;
and Cuba, the courageous little
island-nation which has defied the arrogant superpower off its shores
for over forty years, is, in the process, stripped
naked.
"Naked Cuba" deals with the "crisis" that set in after the Cuban–
Soviet marriage of convenience went bust in the early nineties. The arti–
ficial prices for exported sugar and imported oil were cut off, the safety
net ripped apart-and its socialist citizens went into a free fall.
We had been locked up in a zoo for thirty-five years. We had been
given a little food and medicine, but we had no idea what it was like
out there beyond the bars. And all of a sudden came the switch to
the jungle. Our brains were sleepy and our muscles soft and weak.
Only the fittest could hope to survive. I was trying, hard. Very hard.
Nonetheless, this book is radically nonpolitical. Pedro Juan's gaping
bafflement at the State's degraded myths: "On the corner there was a
huge new billboard. In big, brightly colored letters, it read: 'Cuba, land
of men of stature.'
In
one corner a black athlete leapt against a blue sky.
I don't know.
It
was incomprehensible... " is only matched by his con–
temptuous amusement at liberal-minded European tourists and busi–
nessmen, with their profiteering from the new dollar economy and their
(un)officially sanctioned flirtation with the cut-rate and flourishing
trade of prostitution: "The guy showed every sign of being a European
traveler, down
to
his olive-green backpack. He was an explorer braving
the tropical jungle, broadening his horizons by conversing with the
native whores....Oh the magnificent tropics, humid and sensuous,
within the reach of any budget."
