Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban: A Novel - Hardcover

Wixon, Lisa

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 006072174X ISBN 13: 9780060721749

Publisher: HarperCollins/Rayo, 2005

Synopsis

Based on the wildly successful Havana Honey series published by Salon.com, Dirty Blonde and Half Cuban tells the story of an American woman in search of her real father, and of the sexually liberated Cuban society she infiltrates in order to find the roots of her past.

In Dirty Blonde and Half Cuban Lisa Wixon asks: how far would you go to find your family? One woman's search for her father carries her into a world far from her privileged upbringing and into a perilous fight for survival.The setting is modern day, Communist Cuba. The heroine-narrator is Alysia Vilar, an American from an upper-class, politically connected Washington D.C. family. While Alysia's mother lies dying, she reveals a secret that shakes her daughter to the core: her real father is a man named José Antonio, a former Cuban translator with whom she had an affair. This propels Alysia into a remarkable odyssey, as she navigates both the rich culture and dark underbelly of Havana, Cuba, to search for the father she never knew she had. Her journey brings her into the orbit of a middle-aged Englishman and his 15-year-old lover and, shockingly, into the world of "jineteras," the educated professionals who are forced to prostitute themselves in order to survive.

One thinks of Cuba as the sexy, sultry forbidden resort land of JFK and Marilyn, of mojitos and exotic fruits. This is one woman's story on the streets of Havana. It is a story told with such gritty realism and narrative aplomb, you think it's a memoir. In the end, it's one young author's fearless entry into the literature of fathers and daughters, identity and self-discovery, and the journeys in between.

About this title

About the Author

Lisa Wixon has lived in Europe and Latin America and traveled to more than forty countries. She currently makes her home in New York City. Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban is her first novel.

From the Back Cover

Based on the wildly successful Havana Honey series published by Salon.com, Dirty Blonde and Half Cuban tells the story of an American woman in search of her real father, and of the sexually liberated Cuban society she infiltrates in order to find the roots of her past.

In Dirty Blonde and Half Cuban Lisa Wixon asks: how far would you go to find your family? One woman's search for her father carries her into a world far from her privileged upbringing and into a perilous fight for survival.The setting is modern day, Communist Cuba. The heroine-narrator is Alysia Vilar, an American from an upper-class, politically connected Washington D.C. family. While Alysia's mother lies dying, she reveals a secret that shakes her daughter to the core: her real father is a man named José Antonio, a former Cuban translator with whom she had an affair. This propels Alysia into a remarkable odyssey, as she navigates both the rich culture and dark underbelly of Havana, Cuba, to search for the father she never knew she had. Her journey brings her into the orbit of a middle-aged Englishman and his 15-year-old lover and, shockingly, into the world of "jineteras," the educated professionals who are forced to prostitute themselves in order to survive.

One thinks of Cuba as the sexy, sultry forbidden resort land of JFK and Marilyn, of mojitos and exotic fruits. This is one woman's story on the streets of Havana. It is a story told with such gritty realism and narrative aplomb, you think it's a memoir. In the end, it's one young author's fearless entry into the literature of fathers and daughters, identity and self-discovery, and the journeys in between.

Reviews

In search of her Cuban roots in modern-day Havana, American Alysia Briggs reinvents herself in Wixon's frank, fearless novel, based on her Salon.com Havana Honey series. At 13, Alysia loses her mother to cancer and is then raised in privilege by her cold, WASPy diplomat father. But she later confirms that her birth father was native Cuban José Antonio. Determined to track him down, Alysia dashes off to Cuba, but when all her cash is stolen and her diplomat father turns his back on her, she is stranded. Wixon evokes the exigencies of Cuban life as she graphically details Alysia's entrance into the sex trade and transformation to a jinetera, or jockey, "a fitting metaphor for what many educated and beautiful Cuban women do after hours to feed their families as well as their dreams." Though Wixon renders Alysia's yearning for José Antonio and her attraction to Cuba palpable while vividly capturing Havana's rhythms and the power imbalance between struggling native women and North American sexual tourists, the narrator's acceptance of the call-girl lifestyle is rife with contradiction. Alysia presents the role as empowering and occasionally pleasurable at the same time she reveals it as a dangerous and last-ditch response to poverty. Wixon leaves the reader, like Alysia, bewitched by Havana's allure even as the heroine's immersion in jinterismo strains credibility. Agent, Stephanie Abou. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

This first novel was initially excerpted in the online magazine Salon and features the ruthless sexual marketplace that is modern Cuba. Alysia Vilar travels to Cuba to track down her real father, a translator with whom her mother had an affair. Almost immediately, all of her money is stolen, and the thieving landlords kick her out of the house. She is taken in by a respected Havana heart surgeon named Camila, who makes $32 a month and supplements her salary by acquiring foreign boyfriends who deposit money into her account. Camila^B is known as a jinetera, and in order to survive and fund the search for her father, Alysia becomes one also. In a series of brutally graphic scenarios, Alysia plays out a grotesque form of courtship, in which she disguises her true ethnicity and her education and falsely flatters potential foreign boyfriends, known as yumas, into parting with vast sums of money. Part survival story, part eye-opening morality tale, this novel hits hardest in its depiction of proud women forced to prostitute themselves just to live. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

By Wixon, Lisa

Rayo

ISBN: 006072174X

Chapter One

I felt his hand on my bare shoulder, and it was all over.

In the oppressive August afternoon, the heat from another'stouch had the chilling effect of ice on a radiator. I'd been sitting alone, ina café in Havana near the former Hilton hotel -- the one ransacked byCommunists and renamed Habana Libre.

Free Havana.

The stacks of papers on my table were askew, some stained by thecafé con leche I chain-drink to keep my spirits up. He came at me from behind. I looked up into a tanned face and silky blue eyes framed by deep lines. Late fifties, I guessed, and not unattractive. He asked to sit. I shrugged casually. He asked if I spoke English. I nodded. Then he askedfor advice -- best bars, best beaches. My advice warranted a rum over ice,or so he measured, and he offered to buy me one.

I sighed. The papers were in a fantastic mess in front of me -- evidenceof my bootless investigation -- and, today, had not been revealing the cluesI'd hoped for. I piled them neatly. What the hell. A rum would be nice.

He smiles. I pretend, despite the mounting evidence to the contrary,that I'm a First World girl in a First World city, being offered a friendlydrink by an attractive man. That at the end of this exchange, we will tradebusiness cards and a flirtatious smile, and in a few days I'll find a messageon my cell phone and, who knows, there might be dinner and maybe amovie or a stroll and, you know, a date.

But I am not in the United States, my home, and he assumes he's notsparring with an equal, a woman of his socioeconomic rank; give or take afew rungs in either direction.

He rolls an ice cube on his tongue, momentarily losing himself to thepleasure of coolness amid the humid soup that is summertime Havana.Another drink, then another. He talks only of himself in determined pontification, and asks no questions of me. It's how he signals he's expectingto pick up the tab. This one, and the next.

I ask where he's from. "America," he says with a mixture of pride andcomplicity, as do all Yankees who sneak into Cuba.

"It's norteamericano," I say, playfully scolding. "We Cubans are offended that you claim the entire continent for yourselves. "He's not listening. Greedily, he takes in the size of my chest, the green jade ofmy eyes, the curve of one thigh crossed over the other.

"So," he says, leaning across the table. "I'm on the eleventh floor of theHabana Libre." He looks at me expectantly, while holding the check in hishand. "What'll it be?"

I can't blame him necessarily for the blunder. The café's bathroom mirror is not kind in its judgment; cracked and faded, it reflects myfreak-show appearance. These clothes, bought new in Washington, D.C.,three months ago, are frayed from wear and harsh soap and sun. I carrymy things in a plastic sack -- the Cuban girl's purse -- as my leather onehad been stolen months before. My body, once a healthy size eight, hasshrunk to a gaunt size four. Hipbones jut out for the first time in my life. Iam easily bruised. A Cuban diet does these things.

I am an American, in the sense that my passport says so, in that my university degrees and professional stints and taxes paid cement my belonging to her.

But I am Cuban. My first breath was Havana air, and my father -- as Irecently discovered -- circulates the blood of Cuba in his veins. I am aCuban-American. Like marbles in a tub, I noisily roll the moniker aroundin my head: Cuban-American. The hyphen is the fulcrum, the teetertotterthat swings up and down. Some days I'm more heavily Cuban. Onothers, I weigh in more American.

But today, this day, as the man's condom-covered cock slid betweenmy thighs and his chest spread my breasts, as he heaved over me, pushingand pulling and pushing hard still, and as I ran my nails hard down his spine, a painful reaction to the pleasure I didn't expect to feel, as his face crinkled and he collapsed and rolled over and dressed and threw American scratch at my knees, and as I gathered the bills from the floor and tucked them into my bra -- isn't that what prostitutes do? -- and as I took the elevator eleven floors to the lobby and walked past the smirking guards, and as I passed through the doors into the cruel sun of the afternoon, I realized that the teeter-totter had landed with a thud.

At that moment, I was only Cuban.

Continues...

Excerpted from Dirty Blonde and Half-Cubanby Wixon, Lisa Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Edition details

• Publisher: HarperCollins/Rayo
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 006072174X
• ISBN 13: 9780060721749
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256