Se reúnen en este texto tres historias independientes de personajes que comparten la cotidianidad habanera, sobre todo su nocturnidad. Ellas contienen un elemento comú el muro del malecón, lugar de grandes misterios y confidencias, donde se dan cita cubanos y extranjeros, ya sea para enamorar, tomar el fresco marino en las noches calurosas o admirar la majestuosidad de su belleza. La trama de estos cuentos, hilvanada con sutileza por el autor, pone al desnudo la cara de algunos seres que viven en la sociedad cubana al amparo de su propia sombra.
Miguel Barnet, is one of Cuba's most distinguished writers and poets as well as a member of the island's National Assembly. He is also the president of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC), an organization with more than 8,000 members. He is an outspoken intellectual, having studied first in the United States and later at the University of Havana. He is best known for his testimonial novel Biography of a Runaway Slave, Biografía de un Cimarrón in Spanish, but he has written dozens of other novels, poems and articles, including a number of stories for Cigar Aficionado. He's been called the Truman Capote of Cuba.
Barnet first came to national attention as the poet of La piedra fina y el pavorreal (1963) and the much-praised La sagrada familia (1967), a lyrical autopsy of petit bourgeois domestic life. Publication of Biografía de un cimarrón (1966; The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, 1968), the first in an ethnic tetralogy of documentary narratives, brought almost immediate international acclaim and established him as an innovating pioneer of the testimonial genre in contemporary Latin America. La canción de Rachel (1969; Rachel's Song, 1991), Gallego (1981), and La vida real (1986) confirmed his reputation as Cuba's premier exponent of the documentary novel.