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Cuba's Hammett: Interview with Leonardo Padura Fuentes

By Stephen Wilkinson

Archives - Dates and Topics

2005 – online

March – April 2005

Apr. 11 – 16 click here for related stories: Cuba solidarity

4-13-05, 8:42 am

From Morning Star

After years of success across Europe, the detective novels of Cuban author Leonardo Padura Fuentes have finally started to appear in English.

This spring, two novels featuring his charismatic policeman Lieutenant Mario Conde are being published in Britain.

The first, Adios Hemingway (Canongate) has already been critically well received. The second, Havana Red (Bitter Lemon Press) has just been published.

Until Padura began writing detective novels in the early 1990s, the genre in revolutionary Cuba was a medium through which an attempt had been made at using it to inculcate the masses in the correct mode of behaviour in a socialist society.

Borrowing heavily from formulas adopted in the former socialist bloc of eastern Europe, the Cuban genre had some successes, but these were outstanding because they shone amid a mass of mediocrity.

All too often, anodyne policemen chased predictable CIA infiltrators and sympathisers in hackneyed plots that held little suspense.

Then, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the real world that sustained this fictional counterpart disappeared and the way was clear for a revitalisation of the genre.

In stepped Padura with his four novels Las cuatro estaciones (The Four Seasons), all set in 1989, the cataclysmic year in which the Berlin Wall came down.

Just as in 1930s US, when Dashiell Hammett transformed the detective story from the genteel drawing room mysteries that had been popular in the prosperous 1920s into the hard-boiled thrillers more befitting the gangster age, Padura has brought about a similar genre shift in Cuba.

Padura's Lieutentant Conde is a divorcee and a drinker with a heavy sense of irony who tracks down corrupt officials and home-grown crooks in a familiar Havana - of crumbling buildings, street girls and shortages.

Havana Red or Mascaras (Masks) is a complex novel. On one level, it is a well-executed whodunnit about the murder of a transvestite in a Havana park, but, on another, it is an examination of Cuban attitudes towards homosexuality and a revisiting of themes first aired publicly by the 1993 Oscar-nominated film Strawberry and Chocolate - namely the persecution of Cuban artists and writers in the early years of the revolution because they were homosexuals.

At times, the sarcasm and behaviour of his policeman indicates an almost heretical attitude. Yet Padura remains in Cuba and is celebrated as one of the nation's greatest authors.

Padura's presence in the island and his novels are a great achievement because they illustrate that Cuban socialism is not as repressive as its enemies claim it to be, while, at the same time, showing how Cuba is not as perfect as some of its friends might want to believe.

I met Padura and asked him why he chose to deal with the question of homosexuality.

"It is bound up in Cuba with the marginalisation of a number of important intellectuals who were homosexual.

"The case of our most important dramatist, storywriter, poet and novelist Virgilio Pinera is perhaps the most well known and, for this reason, his story inspired me, although the novel does not relate his story exactly.

"What happened in the 1970s to this group of writers, actors and painters was a debt that was still unpaid. This episode had been covered in a mantle of silence almost as if it had never happened.

"I also chose it because, at the same time, it gave me the opportunity to reflect more profoundly on the relationship between the artist and his world.

"I would prefer it if the novel is not read solely as the story of a dead transvestite and an old homosexual who helps a policeman uncover the truth, but as a metaphor for life in Cuba, a life in which the masks worn by people hide not only sexual differences but religious and social ideologies, considered sometimes inappropriate by the official orthodoxy."

What is the position of homosexuality in Cuba today?

"Fortunately, at the official level, things have changed and today there is more tolerance, although, from time to time, one hears about some crackdown of transvestites or such like.

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"But, today, to be a homosexual in Cuba is not a political or a social problem. Nevertheless, deep down there is still a problem that is not entirely resolved and that is Cuban machismo, which has profound historic roots.

"On the other hand, more and more gays and lesbians are doing as they please.

"They live together as couples and they make their sexuality obvious and completely reject the old sexual prejudices."

Many British readers will find it surprising because, given the impression of Cuba that they receive from the media here, they will assume that a novel such as this would not be permitted.

"For sure British readers will ask how it is possible that an author who lives, writes and publishes in Cuba can talk so freely about the reality of life in Cuba and even criticise decisions of the authorities.

"But this is the truth. I live in Cuba, I write in Cuba and my books have never been censored.

"On the contrary, they have all won important prizes and they are all read widely. What is certain is that, in the 1990s, the levels of tolerance increased."

Could you explain why you took the decision to transform the Cuban detective genre and how you did it?

"When I began to write the first novel in the series, I did not propose to change anything.

"I simply had the intention to write a novel that would have a detective character. I wanted to write about Cuban reality, with an incisive vision, from within Cuban reality.

"I have always understood literature as having a social function. The result was that my novel contrasted sharply with what had been done before and that set a standard for others to follow."

Outside Cuba, you have had a lot of success. Surely the possibility to live elsewhere exists for you. Why have you chosen to stay when other artists and writers have left?

"I have no interest to live outside Cuba for many reasons and the first is that I am Cuban and it is my country, despite its problems, limitations and shortages.

"I need my surroundings in order to write. I must know my reality in order to interpret it and, if this is not enough, I like living in Cuba, even though, at times, I wish I were far away.

"And, even when I find myself at odds with what is going on, I wish to stay.

"I believe it is one's right not to be in agreement with everything.

"I am a thinking being and, as such, I must exercise the right to think.

"The necessity to know that one belongs to a place is very strong and I am bound to the island."

No doubt you had no idea Conde was going to be so popular when you began. How many more are you going to write?

"I have written six in total, although I have other novels that are not in the detective series.

"At first, I thought of writing only one novel with the character Conde.

"Recently. I have finished another - La Neblina del Ayer (The Fog of Yesterday) - which is going to be released in Spain in June and then afterwards in Cuba.

"At the moment, I have no intention of writing another, but one never knows.

"One thing is for sure, I will not abandon this character so dear to me. In the future, I do not know when, he will reappear."