Young and lesbian, hungry and lost, the narrator’s voice in these "scenes for tourists" helps us take a look at Cubans society through the alternative glass of a creative being who, without any interest in politics, survives in a society that does not accept her and that does not nourish her.

The title of the book, Scenes for Tourists, foretells the unusual contents of this collection of short stories, which both sarcastically and subtly, reveals instances of daily life in Cuba as few tourists actually experience when they visit the beautiful island.

The mother who adores God, but who would give anything for a dress; the limits of the cooking combinations for macaroni, eggs and beans; the brief and only escape from that limited and desperate world that marihuana provides; the pope’s visit and its consequences in a country that for a long time has imagined that it is secular; the sexual encounter of two women who soon find themselves being observed and laughed at by the local men who believe themselves the owners of their intimacy; the boring fun of a young generation without resources... what is missing from the image that theses scenes paint is Hope.

Nonetheless, what it does not lack, above all, is reality. Its pages are soaked in reality and it soon permeates to the reader to become solidarity with that young generation of Cubans who, removed for the reality of their parents, perceive their own thanks to their high level of education, since they are able to recognize their limitations thanks to the intellectual progress that the same society that limits them has provided. It is a contradiction and, in this book, a dead end that, after having removed the characters from their parent’s reality, makes them crash with an extreme and painful realism that they attack with practicality while they try to navigate the bureaucracy and delays that limit them.

Scenes for Tourists, while it does present a criticism to actual Cubans society, is not a cry for what it used to be, of for what it could be. The reality of this book bases itself on its neutrality, in its narrative of the individual experiences of beings who would probably be unconventional in most societies.

When the narrator tells about her trip to Toa, she uses the present tense, with the authority that her interior point of view offers her for having grown and lived in the same society she criticizes. Her being claims her right to Be, her right to Hope.

Almost at the end of the last scene, the narrator confesses: "I accommodate, I live the situation without tragedies", which summarizes the attitude of what seems to be, according to this book, a generation. The book ends with the definition of a tunnel: "artificially opened subterranean gallery"... and through the image of the tunnel comes the idea of light, that the reader has received through reading this book and that the young narrator’s voice will undoubtedly end up finding within her own humanity.