I think this must be the first book I’ve written about since I started this column in 1998 that is certain to cause offence. That is not, I hasten to add, why I have chosen it, but merely something of a warning to readers of a delicate disposition.

Dirty Havana Trilogy has attracted controversy since it was first published in Spain in 1998 and in English translation three years later. Some critics loved it (Time Out thought it “an intellectual and deeply introspective piece, full of passion and honesty”) while others loathed it (Village Voice in New York condemned its “bland sensationalism”).

Illustration by James Hackett

The novel is really a series of vignettes set in mid-1990s Havana, just as the Cuban capital was feeling the full force of the economic crisis that hit Fidel Castro’s regime with the collapse of the Soviet bloc. The narrator, Pedro Juan (whose name suggests rather strongly that the book is at least semi-autobiographical), is a former journalist who seems to have fallen out with the authorities, and who lives a precarious existence of hustling, occasional paid employment, and immoral earnings of various types. He lives in one of those gloriously dilapidated apartment blocks on the Malecón — the sort of distressed art deco that is snapped by legions of tourists. In reality, his apartment crawls with cockroaches, has only occasional water, and is literally crumbling away.

The first thing that may cause offence is that his life largely revolves around sex, and this is often described in fairly graphic terms. Anyone looking for titillation, however, is likely to be disappointed, as these many encounters are described in terms that are clinically detached and often more revolting than erotic. Carnal pursuits, suggests Pedro Juan, are about all that is left to pass the time in a city where the shops are empty, the secret police are ubiquitous, and nothing seems to matter.

This wider sense of despair, too, is likely to arouse hostility, not least among those who remain faithful to the dream of the Cuban Revolution and its attempt to create a new society. The Havana that Gutiérrez evokes is anarchic dystopia rather than socialist utopia, a dark and hostile urban landscape inhabited by beggars, lunatics, and a rich array of criminals. These classically lumpen types could not be any further from the exalted New Man that Che Guevara believed the revolution would create.

In the short stories that make up the book, Pedro Juan tells of a life of almost intolerable boredom and deprivation, made bearable only by the occasional bottle of rum, bag of marijuana, or sexual encounter. Work is pointless, as the few pesos earned in legitimate employment are without value. The cunning survive by peddling illicit goods, prostituting themselves with tourists, or simply preying on the weak. In a claustrophobic city of predators, the main aim is to escape by any means possible, preferably to the Promised Land of Miami.

Now, clearly this version of Cuban reality is unlikely to go down well with anyone who believes that the island is a model of revolutionary purity. Nor is it likely to appeal to a reader more interested in the well-worn im. . .

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