Pedro Juan Gutierrez / DR
Walking randomly by the radius “Books in Spanish” of a great Parisian bookstore, I discovered Pedro Juan Gutierrez. “Discovering” is a strange word for a 59-year-old author. But Pedro Juan Gutierrez lives in Havana, where he is censored, and this has probably prevented him from becoming one of the most famous authors of his generation. “Anclada en tierra de nadie” (“Marooned in No Man’s Land”) was his only book I found in that bookstore. Actually it is the first volume of his “Dirty Havana Trilogy”. The book has no other purpose than to describe the reality of everyday life in Havana. A very crude reality. Sex and betrayals, hunger and theft, dirt and penury, fear and violence… The author portrays his double, Pedro Juan, trying to survive in the 1990s oppressive and decaying Havana. And trying to escape with rum, women and marijuana.
Similarities with the author are obvious. As he no longer accepted to be an official journalist, telling what the authorities were telling him, Pedro Juan Gutierrez was disgraced and had to take many food jobs. He was an ice cream seller, a soldier and an agricultural worker in turn. Now he lives of his art and he is published in Spain. Not in Cuba, of course. Or “in a skeletal form”, as he says, as a large majority of what he writes is censored.
The most impressive in “Marooned in No Man’s Land” is that Pedro Juan Gutierrez never talks about politics. But the critics against the Cuban regime is therefore even more corrosive and efficient because the description of a crude reality highlights the failure of ideals and the absurd of a repressive regime.
Often compared to Bukowski or Henry Miller, Pedro Juan Gutierrez has a very individualist style but at the same time he does not forsake the sensation of the other. He still lives in Havana Center. For more information, look at his website.
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