"By turns tender and terse, "Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban" takes the reader on a young woman's dizzying, sometimes shocking journey to find her Cuban roots, and succeeds in creating a refreshingly cynical, unpatronizing window into life in modern Cuba.

"In a post-Hemmingway era, when too many authors instinctively romanticize Cuban women as passionate or hot-blooded, Wixon accurately presents a brutal, comic tale of the contemporary Cuban condition, where too many bright, beautiful women have replaced morality and doctorate degrees with desperation and prostitution.

"I know a lot of Cuban men on the island who will loathe this book for waving Cuba's semen-stained sheets for the world to see, and for that Wixon deserves a bodyguard, and a great big you go, girl."

----Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, author of "Dirty Girls Social Club" and "Make Him Look Good"

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.

Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban

Rayo

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.