HAVANA (AP) — There are murders so gruesome that they splash readers with blood. There are thefts, scams, humiliating secrets and bribes, but that is not what is important in the stories that the Cuban Leonardo Padura writes with relish.
For four decades Padura has turned police literature into the social and political chronicle of Cuba and, especially, Havana.
The island he describes has a mixture of economic deprivation, Afro-descendant syncretism, corruption, mischief, lilting music and growing inequality, all seasoned by a revolutionary process that marked the 20th century.
“I talk about the problems of individuals in Cuban society. And many times in my books, more than dramatic conflicts between the characters, there are social conflicts between the characters and their historical time,” Padura explained during an interview with The Associated Press in his house, in the populous neighborhood of Mantilla on the outskirts of the capital.
You can smell the smell of freshly brewed coffee—which he always offers to his guests—and the chirping of the birds that inhabit a patio with plane trees where his dogs are buried. In an adjacent studio his wife, screenwriter Lucía López Coll, works on a computer. A large painting by the visual artist Roberto Fabelo hangs on the living room wall and next to it a tiled kitchen receives the light of the tropics.
It is impossible not to think that the iconic detective Mario Conde was born there – nostalgic, loyal and a chain smoker – who accompanied Padura since his book “Past Perfect” at the end of 1991, the first of the tetralogy “The Four Seasons” that completes “Winds of Lent (1994)”, “Masks” (1997), “Autumn Landscape” (1998) and which also have him as the protagonist in 10 of his 14 novels.
Keeping track of the Count is a bit of taking Cuba’s time.
The detective’s last appearance was in “Decent People” (2020) in which, now over 60 years old, he is involved in the investigation of a homicide and corruption case against the backdrop of the historic visit to the island. of former US President Barack Obama and the Rolling Stones, at the highest point of the political rapprochement between the United States and Cuba in 2016.
“This character comes from a neighborhood similar to the one we are in. He is a man from my generation, my age, a year older than me. He has common experiences with me,” Padura said. “He has evolved in his view of reality because I have evolved… and that feeling of disenchantment that he has has a lot to do with the way we have been living all these years.”
And how is Cuba now after the tightening of post-2018 US sanctions and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic?
“We have almost crawled out of that moment and the country has not been able to get up,” he reflected. “All this implies that people begin to distrust the resources of a system to be able to solve certain problems.”
There is a lack of food, a shortage of medicine, rising prices, impoverished salaries, education and health are deteriorating, there is a lack of fuel, transportation is irregular and blackouts occur, Padura listed.
“There is a historical fatigue… People are tired, they have no alternative and they look for it by emigrating” which generates “an impoverishment of Cuban society”, in addition to the “aging of its population.”
The United States border authorities reported having had more than half a million encounters with Cubans in the last two years on their borders with Mexico, while more and more boats are intercepted trying to arrive irregularly through the Strait of Florida and a number are not A certain number of islanders leave for Europe and South America.
The chronicler who lives in Padura also recognizes another impact of the economic crisis on the island’s interior: the popular protests that had not been seen in decades.
“Two years ago (July 2021) there were large (demonstrations), now more recent ones (in March)… The main clamor was for food and electricity,” Padura recalled. “But people also shouted ‘freedom’. And the food and electricity was resolved by trying to fix some thermoelectric plants and with a little rice and sugar, but the other thing has not been talked about and I think it is an issue that should be discussed. talk in a very deep way.”
Born on October 9, 1955, Leonardo de la Caridad Padura Fuentes grew up in the same house in which he currently lives and was built by his parents, a Catholic housewife and a Mason father. As a child and young man, he had to go through the profound transformations and epic of the Cuban revolution with desires for equality and prosperity for all.
He studied Literature at the University of Havana and worked as a journalist in official media—El Caimán Barbudo and Juventud Rebelde—in the 1980s.
His first novel, “Horse Fever”, is a love story published in 1983, which was followed by a long pause in which his police forces were developing, while a gradual break with the authorities began until reaching the current tension. evident: Padura has the most important awards that a Cuban writer can win, but he does not appear in the local press and his books are rarely printed on the island. For him there are almost no presentations or conferences.
In these years there were also volumes of stories, essays and reports, while the Netflix platform released a miniseries with stories by detective Mario Conde in 2016.
It is curious that a Cuban narrator devoted himself to detective novels and imagined his detective—a former police officer and failed writer—in a country that does not authorize private criminal investigation and does not even include police news in its official media, the only ones with legal personality.
Padura won in 2012 the National Prize for Literature of Cuba and in 2015 the Princess of Asturias for Literature in Spain.
His best-known work is “The Man Who Loved Dogs” (2009), a recreation of almost 600 pages of the attack on the Russian revolutionary leader León Trotsky commissioned by the Soviet leader Iósif Stalin and his assassin Ramón Mercader —who died in Cuba in the years seventies—which the writer described as a reflection on “lost utopias.”
As he strokes his beard, squints his eyes, and settles into his chair, Padura reveals that he is working on a new, as yet untitled, fiction.
It seems that detective Mario Conde will take a break in this work that will revolve around a patricide but that, as in others in Padura, seeks to go further: shed light on the current exodus of young people and the remittances they send to their families. elderly or retired relatives, whose lives were spent in the midst of the revolutionary process and now suffer material deprivation.
“A reflection on the destiny that this generation has had,” summarized Padura.
