Outerwear Edit from Shopbop
To share your reaction on this item, open the Amazon app from the App Store or Google Play on your phone.

These promotions will be applied to this item:

Some promotions may be combined; others are not eligible to be combined with other offers. For details, please see the Terms & Conditions associated with these promotions.

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.
Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban: A Novel Kindle Edition

4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 35 ratings

Based on the wildly popular, semi-autobiographical "Havana Honey" series published by Salon.com, Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban is a gritty portrait of one woman's determination to infiltrate modern Cuba and find the father she has never known.

While on her search, privileged American Alysia Briggs ends up broke and alone in Havana. She's then forced to adopt the life of the jineteras -- educated Cuban women who supplement a desperate income by accommodating sex tourists.

With an eye for detail and a razor wit, Lisa Wixon relates Alysia's journey and creates a love song to Cuba, a heartfelt tribute to a resilient people facing soul-numbing poverty in a land where M.D.s and Ph.D.s earn $18 a month, and a pair of jeans costs twice as much.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

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.

From Booklist

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

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000NJL732
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ HarperCollins e-books (October 13, 2009)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ October 13, 2009
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 1137 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 379 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 35 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Lisa Wixon
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read book recommendations and more.

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
35 global ratings

Review this product

Share your thoughts with other customers

Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on August 14, 2015
    Lisa Wixon's insight into the Cuban psyche is astounding! Really a good, entertaining as well as informative read.
    One person found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2024
    I read this on Libby, and although it may not be for everyone, I found it interesting and educational and enjoyable. It is hard to believe that something so well written and so colourful is this authors first novel. I would definitely read something from her again period I think she has a definite future in historical fiction as she does it so well. Mature adults.
  • Reviewed in the United States on May 13, 2014
    This book taught me about life in Cuba today in an entertaining way! It's sexy and well-written, reading like an autobiography.
    One person found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2013
    The novel lists some of the problems happening in today's Cuba. But it is very careful not to blame the Communist dictatorship as the root cause of the more numerous problems Cuba has confronted in the last 52 years.
    In fact, it praises some of Castro's crazy projects like ;bringing sick boys from the areas of Shernovil from the former Soviet Union;(while Cuban children don't have access to milk), and emphazising thay the Cuban countryside was dry and bleak because of the American embargo against the Castro dictatorship.
    Many of these arguments are aberrant and completely disconnected from reality. Lisa should understand that prostitution is not a dignified way to live or to survive in ANY political system.
    The year spent there was already sown with her engraved political ideas, typical of the non-Cuban leftists who are closer to Castro, than they are to the Cuban people!!!
    3 people found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United States on June 24, 2006
    Half Blonde, Half Cuban works on several different levels in an extraordinary way for a first novel from an obviously very talented writer.

    Like Cuba, the character of Alysia is a constant enigma, that you are trying to figure out until the last page.

    If you are thinking of visiting Cuba, or are just interested in the mystery of that Island nation, this book is must reading. One of the key things of a visit to Cuba is a foreigner's inability to read all the signs, no matter how world-wise the traveller is or how well you speak Spanish. You'll have a better time and understand that complex people, that despite incredible hardships manage to be full of vitality.

    I found the sensitive exploration of the plight of Cuban women that are forced to become "Jineteras" to feed themselves and their families the only one I have ever read that gets to the truth. Despite the harsh realities, they remain dignified and in control of themselves rather than succumbing to the humiliation of the sex tourism that has been foisted on the Island's population.

    Much better still is that an American girl that had it all ends up having to sell herself, in that special Cuban way, to stop the starvation that is a real problem for anyone living there. No Cuban writer - and I have read plenty - conveys things in such a meaningful way to the reader because Alysia sees it from our point of view - Westerners with enough to eat and freedom - as if we too joined the Cuban people's plight.

    But the book is much, much more than some of the hot sex scenes and some not-so-hot scenes that you make you squirm for the plight of that people. Wixon takes you around Havana and its characters as she searches for her father, an odyssey that rivals anything I have read on that special relationship, (the special nature of the father-daughter union) in a fun way, just as if she were a Cuban showing you around.

    Orisha's, undercover Government agents,Turistas of all shapes, sizes and inclinations, and the woman of that Island are all portrayed in real tones, so real you get attached to the entire family of characters.

    From El Floridita ( one the many Hemingway haunts in Havana) to the road to Moron you are constantly visiting that Island and seeing the diversity and beauty that is Cuba, that decades of oppression have failed to dimish.

    There is something in here also about searching for more than your father but your country, your sense of place, and in conveying this the book really makes it.

    I eagerly await Ms. Wixon's next book and strongly recommend this one.
    4 people found this helpful
    Report
  • Reviewed in the United States on May 6, 2005
    Lisa Wixon's debut book is so beautifully written, it manages to charm the pants off you and engage your full empathy and compassion at the same time. An intial introduction of the material made me leap to the conclusion that this book would be painful to read: The story of the of a young Cuban- American searching for her father in a communist country, stripped of her financial resources and her dignity, forced to prostitue her body to finance her quest. However, Ms. Wixon flawless delivery of her heroines experience balances her desperation with hilarious situations, such as Alysia's lack of grace as she learns to salsa, struggling to be veiwed as sexy in a society that wears thier sexuality as effortlessly as a comfortable shirt.

    I literally could not put this book down. The writing was so crisp and vivid, the descriptions detailed and intricate, but so freshly laid out that you had to rumenate over many of the sentences to allow the full tangy flavor of them to sink in.

    What I appreciated most about this full bodied immersion into the Cubano realm was how amazingly unique a people they are. The Latin intellect that allows them to hold opposing beliefs and make peace with that conflict. Thier dignity and humor, not downtrodden and defeated, but thier inane ability to see down the road, bide their time, and appreciate how temporary their current nighmarish situation is. Quick to find fun, eager in thier joy and most of all their dignity and pride. I was overwhelmed by respect and admiration for this pride, peppered with humor, layered with a love for family and friends. An utterly delicious banquet of prose, I am eagerly anticipating Ms. Wixon's next course. Bravo!
    5 people found this helpful
    Report

Report an issue


Does this item contain inappropriate content?
Do you believe that this item violates a copyright?
Does this item contain quality or formatting issues?