Testifying to the squalor and grit of contemporary Cuba, Pedro Juan Gutierrez's novel in stories chronicles the misadventures of Pedro Juan, a former journalist now living from hand to mouth, half disgusted and half fascinated by the depths to which he has sunk. Like the lives of many of his neighbors in the crumbling, once elegant apartment houses that line Havana's waterfront (and its notorious cruising strip, El Malecon), Pedro Juan's days and nights have been reduced by the so-called special times - the harsh recession that followed the Soviet Union's collapse - to the struggle to feed himself and the escapist pursuit of sex. Collecting garbage, peddling marijuana or black-market produce, clearing undesirables off the streets, whoring himself, begging, sacrificing to the santos, Pedro Juan scrapes by under the shadow of hunger - all the while observing his lovers and friends, and strangers on the street, their suffering and their own lifesaving schemes, with an unsentimental, mocking, yet sympathetic eye. Banned in Cuba but celebrated throughout the Spanish-speaking world, Gutierrez's picaresque novel is a fierce, loving tribute to Havana and the defiant, desperate way of lie that flourishes amid its decay.