“Tough” Writing in Pedro Juan Gutiérrez. Sexuality, Being Mulatto, and Society in Dirty Havana Trilogy

Abstract

Dirty Havana Trilogy (1998) by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez textualizes the antagonism between official Cuban discourse and daily life in Central Havana during the 1990s. The tone of a “tough” writing brings the exercise of freedom of expression to a situation of “insile”, or internal exile, which oscillates between text and context, autobiography and autofiction, and the individual and the collective. The urban spaces where eschatology, sex, race and homosexuality are invisible to that discourse, in the novel transgress the intended social normativity. However, this expression is marked by a basic paradox. If this writing ‘denounces’ what the ruling party makes invisible, the narrative voice in turn reproduces the phallic economy of the State, both on the material level and in the narrative articulation of sexualized and racialized desire. This tension will demonstrate how the conditions of writing generate productive contradictions in the text.