His behavior and his attitude are egocentric bordering on sociopathic, and while blaming society and even his victims for what befalls him and them, he does have momentary feelings of regret for his actions. Gringo is a hero in his neighborhood, a teenager who has admiring followers and, at the same time, vociferous detractors.

Yet there is a moral to this progression, one that cannot be ignored as the hero/antihero slides into an inevitable sky-fall toward his destiny. One human action follows and exacerbates another in an endless progression of base self-interest. The seemingly casual interaction between the characters, and the insatiable desire of some of these characters to rise above their circumstances, is what encompasses the spirit of the book. The Black Cathedral offers the reader biographical/autobiographical insight into remorseless criminality and the blatant disposability of human lives in a “dog-eat-dog” environment where survival is instinctual. Running through its entirety is a series of human emotions that often blind us to the failings of any society: passion, love, hatred, disposability, and family and societal dysfunction. Apart from the obviously Cuban loci and equally identifiable Hispanic names, The Black Cathedral could have been set anywhere that lesser fortunate masses of humanity congregate. Its two-hundred-plus pages blend together in a juxtaposition of actions and opinions, points of view and vicarious commentaries. Due to its narrative structure, a series of short paragraphs moving from character to character, and from present to past then past to present, it is certainly a “read at one sitting” novel. THE BLACK CATHEDRALis an interesting piece of prose writing. It is a portrait of what remains when dreams of utopia have withered away.New York. Told by a chorus of narrators-including gossips, gangsters, a ghost, and a serial killer-who flirt, lie, argue, and finish one another's stories, Marcial Gala's The Black Cathedral is a darkly comic indictment of modern Cuba, gritty and realistic but laced with magic. This generation will carry these traits beyond the borders of the neighborhood, the city, and the country, unable to escape the shadow of the unfinished cathedral. In a neighborhood that roils with passions and conflicts, at the foot of a cathedral that rises higher day by day, there grows a generation marked by violence, cruelty, and extreme selfishness.

Arturo Stuart, a charismatic, visionary preacher, discovers soon after arriving that God has given him a mission: to build a temple that surpasses any before seen in Cuba, and to make of Cienfuegos a new Jerusalem. Haunting and transcendently twisted, this English-language debut from a Cuban literary star is a tale of race, magic, belief, and fate The Stuart family moves to a marginal neighborhood of Cienfuegos, a city on the southern coast of Cuba.

The Black Cathedral by Marcial Gala