Dirty Havana Trilogy

This is not the Havana of vintage postcards and Hemingway daiquiris. This is Havana in the 1990s after the Soviet money dried up — the Special Period, when the lights went out and people improvised survival with rum, sex, and dark comedy. Pedro Juan, the narrator, lives in a crumbling Centro Habana apartment and catalogues his days with the unflinching honesty of someone who has nothing left to lose. The prose is raw, explicit, and funny in the way that desperation sometimes is. Gutiérrez does for Havana what Bukowski did for Los Angeles: he shows you the city the tourist board pretends does not exist, and makes you unable to look away.