A literary crime novel on the last island of socialism, during a period of intense depseration.

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Praise for Robert Arellano's previous novels:

"The story of Oedipus underlies Arellano's first 'print' novel, but the main story is the author's style, which takes its cue from William S. Burroughs, Philip K. Dick, Charles Dickens, Jack Kerouac, and Tom Robbins . . . a funny and surprising book. Recommended for literary collections."
--Library Journal on Fast Eddie, King of the Bees

"[Don Dimaio of La Plata] is one of the bawdiest, dirtiest, rowdiest, and raunchiest novels I've come across in a long time. And it's hilarious . . . Don Dimaio is an anti-hero for all ages, or for any adolescent/post-adolescent in heat and in love with language."
--Providence Sunday Journal on Don Dimaio of La Plata

One hungry, hallucinatory night in the dark heart of Havana, Mano Rodriguez, a young doctor with the revolutionary medical service, comes to the aid of a teenage jinetera named Julia. She takes refuge in his clinic to break away from the abusive chulo who prostituted her, and they form an unlikely allegiance that Mano thinks might save him from his twin burdens: the dead-end hospital assignment he was delegated after being blacklisted by the Cuban Communist Party and a Palo Monte curse on his love life commissioned by a vengeful ex-wife. But when the pimp and his bodyguards come after Julia and Mano, the violent chain-reaction plunges them all into the decadent catacombs of Havana's criminal underworld.

Inspired by fifty years of Cuban noir, from the Cold Tales of Virgilio Pinera to Reinaldo Arenas' Before Night Falls, Arellano's Havana Lunar intertwines an insider testimony on the collapse of socialist Cuba with a psychological mystery that climaxes in the eye of Hurricane Andrew.

Robert Arellano's parents fled Havana in 1960. He has been working on Havana Lunar since 1992 when, as a student in Brown University's graduate writing program, he visited Cuba on a research fellowship. He has returned ten times, chronicling the Revolution in journalism, essay, and song. He is the author of two novels, Fast Eddie, King of the Bees and Don Dimaio of La Plata, both published by Akashic.