Scenes for Tourists offers a scrawny, unprejudiced and honest vision of Cuban society at the end of the XX Century. Narrated from the perspective of a protagonist who thinks that "because of marginality, illegality, and the etcéteras, I live in avoidance," it presents a social reality described without reservations, excempt from the idealization of the lost paradise promised by the Revolution in its first years as well as from the satanization proclaimed by the bitter opponents of the revolutionary process.

Traveling on an old bicycle that breaks quite frequently, on the eternally late bus, on the train that is always running behind, on the plane that she almost misses "thanks to that little coffee", to travel all the way to Baracoa on the farthest east of the island, or thanks to some charitable driver who stops to bring her closer to her destiny, the protagonist of Scenes for Tourists, moves and describes: her mother, "at the center of a broken living room, she is deboned and dry;" the bakery, where she needs to wait for her ration of bread, "a little semi raw ball of flour"; among the old men of the neighborhood, "who have lost almost all their teeth"; the visit to the hospital, where the narrator had number 126, they have only called up to number 4 and its already 11 o’clock; the train terminal, where "Until midday nothing comes by to take us anywhere." "We are in the middle of a bunch of people carrying packages, children and dogs as if everything were the same", "A narrow and dirty cafeteria announces its skinny pizzas for three pesos", "the prostitutes [who] reappear chorreadas at six in the morning."

This woman, whose body travels in space and time from one point to another, is psychologically a static being who obsessively analyzes herself and her surroundings through her incessant and circular thinking, thoughts where she restates over and over that she is hungry, a hunger that transcends her physical need for nourishment. She analyzes the effects that drugs produce on her, any drug, including alcohol, and repeats to herself that she does not know what to do with her life. Her thoughts about the reasons why she acts the way she does remain far from any kind of action, as if the emotions of the narrator were blunt and her logical thinking brimming with an extreme sensibility.

Her sophisticated intellectual reflections correspond to those of an educated woman, but she is incapable of expressing her pain, and unable to express her love. She is capable of speaking about her sexuality, but not about her sensuality. She speaks of love briefly and infrequently, and when she does, she never directly addresses her loved one, but is always in a situation in which her lover is absent and she is the stranger. This internal trip, equally or more intense than the external one, makes Scenes for Tourists a book that is both memorable and an indispensable read.