Not sure about the three stories on their own, but together they make an interesting juxtaposition -- the same man, same cafe, a woman, but the times are different, the music is different and the woman's actions are different. Can't say that I really 'got' what these stories are about, but the setting was interesting to me.
I most enjoyed the first story because of the Santeria rite they attend, the people all dressed in white, the dancing, the strangeness of it. Reminds me of a story my mom told me about when she was a little girl in Cuba. Her grandmother from the Canary Islands had a respect for Santeria. Her grandmother wanted to take her to a Santeria rite similar to what was described in the first story, and my mother' mother (the daughter of this grandmother) told her that if she feels uncomfortable at the rite, to tell her grandma she wants to go home. She went and did feel freaked out and asked her grandmother to take her home. The funny thing is that many years later, my mother, a very religious Catholic, started attending ecumenical services, speaking in tongues. A frightening thing for me to witness, so much so that she only did that once in front of me probably because the look on my face was clearly one of full-on horror. My mom invited me to a "healing" service at the Anaheim Convention center. I went (I was either in high school or first year of college). I disliked it from the start. There was a weird excitement that bordered on hysteria in the crowd, and once the minister started "healing" people, I couldn't take it, I had to leave.
Anyway, the language is flowing and interesting, I certainly wanted to know what was happening and enjoyed them enough to finish the trio. ( )

Como todo cabrera infante buenisimo, se lee de un tiron, los juegos de palabras, las ironías, es como sentir un cha chacha cortito y que uno quiere que siga tocando. Tres cuentos , o uno solo , como se quiera musica, mujeres, cine, literatura y política. Que escritor perdió cuba por ortodoxos y no entender el arte ( )

`..the chachacha, like abstract art, like beatnik literature, like hermetic poetry, like jazz, of course- all are guilty art forms. Why? Because in a communist state, everything and everybody is guilty. Nobody, nothing is free of guilt. Not even art. Especially not art."
p. 108
`The narrative is informed by that old witchcraft called memory. After all, nostalgia is a sometime thing, and in spite of his musing the narrator is always looking into a rearview mirror. All his literary reflections come from the same book found in the Lost and Found Department."
p. 14
Three interconnected stories taking place in different periods of Cuban history. The author wants to have them read set to different music, indicative of the times. All three stories open with almost the same scene, almost the same words- sort of like different music pieces with the same theme. He calls them love stories, but I see them more as stories relating and placing Cuban intellectual thought and culture in the Western arena of thought, and explaining the place of an artist in a communist country more than anything else.
An interesting device, interesting content, some really striking thoughts and images, but in the end the writing was too clever somehow. There were too many puns, making reading choppy because one has to pause to think about them, and clever references to Western literature and philosophy. In the end, it appeared too Western in its intellectual scope, not enough South American or Cuban for me, whatever I was expecting. ( )