After being the witness of a terrible accident in which his mother, grandmother and brother died, Rey gets to be hospitalized in a reform school. The kid flees and becomes one of tens of thousands of homeless individuals who lurk Cuban capital's streets. He learns to beg, steal, lie, to drink, take drugs, fight, but mainly he learns to take advantage of his huge sexual potency. Homophobic, Rey becomes a royal lover, he wins the heart and the skin of almost all women with whom he enters in a relationship with.
Hence he gets the notorious nickname El Rey de la Habana (The Havana King): a king of sex, a monarch of orgasmic pleasure, a "royalty" of erotic scenes. Lacking social identity, being 17 years old, the King of Havana does not know anything else than to sell pleasure and be entertained by many of his girls.
Therefore, the book is designed in the style of magic realism, but it has an aesthetic sense in which magic is repudiated, and realism overstated. To conclude, The Havana King is a great Gutierrez masterpiece choked with sadness and condemned to fascinate readers with charms of the abyss of human decay.