Pedro Juan Gutierrez’s Dirty Realism

In Pedro Juan Gutierrez's Dirty Realism: Reinventing Cuban Spaces, Lori Oxford conducts a series of close readings that expound on Gutierrez's interpretation of life and reality in the spaces of the Special Period throughout the five works that make up his Ciclo Centro Habana Cycle (1998-2003). Gutierrez's settings oscillate between the utopian, the dystopian, and the heterotopian in unexpected fashion, often revealing his protagonists' surprising affinity for the latter two. In her examination of Gutierrez's use of these interwoven -topian spaces, Oxford shows how the three spaces, although apparently contradictory, have managed to coexist in Cuba and demonstrates how they are all reflected in Gutierrez's fiction, often simultaneously, just as they exist in Cuba's reality.