5-16-05, 14:56pm

A transvestite dressed in red silk is discovered strangled in a Havana park. The death of this son of a high-placed Cuban government official has Lieutenant Mario Conde off of official suspension and on the case in this first novel of Padura’s four-part series called the Havana Quartet starring the introspective and astute Cuban detective. For assistance on the case Conde is forced to seek out an aging, gay writer who was blacklisted in his youth. Padura won Spain’s Dashiell Hammett prize for Havana Red and is regarded in Cuba as one of its most popular and treasured writers.

Havana Red is a beautifully written crime story that compares well with the works by other detective writers like Walter Mosley, Sara Paretsky, James Lee Burke, and Andrea Camilleri. Havana Red is a thriller through and through, but it is also imbued with insights into Cuban society readers aren’t likely to find elsewhere.

It is an honest accounting that details a history of homophobia in a traditional society mixed with a ruling ultra-left ideology that regarded homosexuality as an intolerable bourgeois deviancy. As a result, gay and lesbian cultural workers and activists were isolated and marginalized in Cuban society. An underground of gay and lesbian Cubans was unfortunately closeted for decades in one of the most advanced societies on the planet.

In addition to the repression of homosexuals in Cuba, Padura’s novel unearths the age-old argument on the left about the value of art and culture with fresh insights. In this tale, ideologues and bureaucrats, unfamiliar with the production of art, condemn and ostracize gay and lesbian artists because of a perceived failure to adhere to a socialist realist aesthetic. One character remarks on the blacklisting of gay writers that '[t]he fact was, social commitment was confused with individual mind-sets and then extremists put us on the list of targets.... Someone with a Muscovite mentality thought uniformity was possible in this hot, heterodox country where nothing’s ever been pure.'

In other words, the ideology of 'socialist realism,' or the belief that art must foremost serve the purpose of promoting current political thinking, was a subjective construct that some ambitious and unethical characters abused for personal gain. No adequately objective criteria other than the ideologically and artistically deformed claim of a mechanical relationship between art and society had been developed for critiquing art. Padura’s work cries out for the elevation of new ways of judging art and literature.   While Cuba is beginning officially to recover from this deviation from socialist humanism and morality, Padura told the British left-wing daily Morning Star in a recent interview that anti-gay attitudes sometimes persist. Still, Padura adds, 'to be a homosexual in Cuba is [no longer] a political or a social problem.'

Of his novel, Padura states, '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.'

Discerning readers will correctly detect a critical stance in this work. The book’s popular reception in Cuba signals an acceptance of the fact that adherence to a single political line isn’t necessary to defend a society against imperialism. In fact, political diversity, social critique, and beautiful literature do Cuba great credit for its devotion to art and democratic values.

To the naysayers that demonize Cuba as a repressive society, it should be noted that the only groups likely to want to ban this novel are religious zealots and Republicans. Certainly Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, and other medieval right-wing evangelistas would cringe at the notion that gay people deserve fair treatment. These anti-democratic forces regard equality as part of some deviant 'homosexual agenda.' And Alabama Republican state legislator Gerald Allen is pushing a law to ban books by gay and lesbian writers and doesn’t regard it as censorship but as 'protecting the hearts and souls and minds of our children.'

Under the Republicans, the US has become what many people have condemned Cuba for: openly seeking to marginalize people who don’t or can’t follow the ruling party’s stated political and cultural values. Republican repression isn’t aimed only at gay people. It targets scientists who insist that 'creationism' isn’t science, religious leaders who demand the separation of church and state, actors and singers who oppose war, school teachers who stand up for adequate school funding, health care professionals who want to protect the reproductive rights of women, college professors who insist on the freedom to teach, civil rights leaders who demand protections of civil rights, liberals who call for saving vanishing civil liberties, labor unions who struggle to protect working people, and more.

In the end, Havana Red is about the transformation of an individual as mirrored in the uneven, difficult and uncertain transformation of a society into a more open and inclusive democracy that can make real the claims and objectives of the ideology on which that society is based.

Get this book and look for Adios, Hemingway by Padura as well.



Havana Red By Leonardo Padura Fuentes London, Bitter Lemon Press, 2005.



--Joel Wendland can be reached at jwendland@politicalaffairs.net.