Gutiérrez, Pedro Juan 1950-

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GUTIÉRREZ, Pedro Juan 1950-

PERSONAL: Born 1950.

ADDRESSES: Home—Havana, Cuba. Agent—c/o Author Mail, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 19 Union Square W, New York, NY 10001.

CAREER: Author and magazine journalist.

WRITINGS:

Espléndidos peces plateados, Nueva Géneration (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 1996

Nada que hacer, Anagrama (Barcelona, Spain), 1998.

Trilogía sucia de la Habana, Anagrama (Barcelona, Spain), 1998, translation by Natasha Wimmer published as Dirty Havana Trilogy, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2001.

El rey de la Habana, Anagrama (Barcelona, Spain), 1999.

Animal tropical, Anagrama (Barcelona, Spain), 2000.

Melancolía de los leones, Ediciones Unioón (Havana, Cuba), 2000.

El insaciable hombre araa, Anagrama (Barcelona, Spain), 2002.

SIDELIGHTS: Dirty Havana Trilogy, Cuban writer and poet Pedro Juan Gutiérrez's debut novel, is set in the "special period" that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of its huge subsidies to the Cuban government. The regime was left in shambles: there were dramatic shortages of all the basic necessities; food, drinking water, medicine, and decent housing were almost nonexistent. What drives the book and its characters is the day-to-day grind of survival, by any means at all, and enough sex to forget the despair of it all. "I was getting used to lots of new things in my life," the novel's protagonist, Pedro, says, "getting used to poverty, to taking things in stride. I was training to be less ambitious, because if I didn't, I wouldn't make it." It has been fifty years since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, and the only maxim left standing is "you can't let down your guard."

Gutiérrez's alter ego in this frankly autobiographical novel is a down-and-out dropout living in downtown Havana. He was once a radio journalist with a wife and kids who wrote propaganda for the government. After going from odd job to odder job, including a stint distributing human livers to restaurants (he is told they are pigs' livers), he lives the hustler's life. He lives on the roof of a dilapidated building on the Malecon and cruises for the European sex tourists who are arriving in droves. "It's been years since I expected anything, anything at all, of women, or of friends, or even myself, of anyone," Pedro says.

In the background is the continuing clandestine exodus to Miami of thousands of potential refugees, who set themselves adrift in the Straits of Florida hoping to make it on rafts of truck tires, oil drums and palm trunks. They leave the island, and no one knows for certain if they make it or not.

Gutiérrez writes in a brutally honest style, in the tradition of Genet, Bukowski and Miller. The despair he sees around him is somehow transformed into a primal joy of living. The theme of the book is moral, as well as physical, survival. Like Miller and Genet, Gutiérrez explores these larger issues of morality, religion and government through sex. As Taro Greenfeld wrote in the New York Times, "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."

Despite the vitality of the sex and the exotic setting of decaying Havana, Dirty Havana Trilogy is a sad book full of characters at the ends of their ropes. As Roger Kaplan commented in the National Review, "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."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Gutiérrez, Pedro Juan, Trilogía sucia de la Habana, Anagrama (Barcelona, Spain), 1998, translation by Natasha Wimmer published as Dirty Havana Trilogy, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2001.