Antonio Mercero, Agustín Martínez and Jorge Díaz look out from the balcony of their room at the Nacional de Cuba hotel, the same one where Ava Gardner, Walt Disney, Churchill and Rita Hayworth slept one day. They contemplate the Malecón and the sea, which is gradually returning to calm after a sudden tropical storm. The image invites you to reflect on life and how little by little everything falls into place. They never imagined that they would travel there as authors or that there would be several Cubans who would be interested in their new book, including the president himself. Nor that Carmen Mola would take them that far.
“When we started all this we were content with publishing. But the project, which began as a diversion, advanced faster than anyone could dream,” Mercero told La Vanguardia while finishing a cigarette just after touring some parts of the city where the novel was set. , such as the Cathedral Square, the Plaza de Armas or a sugar estate that could well be the sugar mill described in its pages. Today his fifth book, Hell, arrives in bookstores, the second from Planeta and which has nothing to do with the police cases of Inspector Elena Blanco.
The scriptwriters return to the historical thriller that gave them so much joy with The Beast, Planeta award included, and they move again to 19th century Madrid to witness the army uprising against Queen Isabel II. An event that leads its protagonists, Leonor and Mauro, to flee to colonial Cuba, a country full of contrasts in which slavery was one of the main economic drivers.
“The majority were African, although there was a short period in which villagers from Galicia and Asturias were recruited as wage settlers. They were promised work and a better life on the island but many ended up as slaves. Luckily the scandal was soon uncovered. The same thing happened with the Chinese, but they chose suicide and never integrated,” says Díaz. So much so that in the current streets of Havana there is no trace of Asians, apart from some tourists, although there is evidence of the passage of their ancestors through the island thanks to the large arch that gives entrance to the old Chinatown.
Walking through the Cuban capital is an invitation to travel to the past. The few foreign visitors who do so – tourism has not recovered since the pandemic – leave their phones aside due to the lack of Wi-Fi and only take them out to photograph the old cars, which in addition to giving color to the streets make the city smells of gasoline. The old mansions, luxurious at the time and decadent today, also feature in most portraits. “They have not erased their colonial past. Nor have they destroyed any of the four statues of Columbus, Isabel II or Ferdinand VII, which they keep in museums and which are scarce in Spain,” Mercero recalls shortly before entering the Palace of the Captains General, where some of the luxurious carriages or chitrines that walked through the streets of Havana at that time.
Mola's story also encourages the reader to delve into a more cultural and theatrical Havana, since its protagonist is a suripanta, a woman who acted as a showgirl on the stages of the Spanish capital. “In the novel we wrote a chorus that Leonor sings and that is real. It was like the Aserejé of the moment. Each and every one of the works we cite also exist. The Madrid buffos were the origin of the novel and the character of Francisco Arderius, who we rescued, blew us away, because this businessman brought his show to Cuba. Now the Spanish actresses who are successful go to Hollywood but before they came to Havana,” say Antonio and Agustín.
Beyond the cultural notes, the novel does not lack another of the characteristic hallmarks of the Carmen Mola brand: bloody recreations. “It wouldn't be the same without the gore side. In all novels we try to explore violence and in this one I think we go further. At first this extreme violence was a casual thing but we felt so good that that's why we continued," explains Díaz.
The authors are inspired by “a historical ancestral rite carried out by a landowner who had a cotton plantation in New Orleans. When we document ourselves we end up extracting oil and we see that reality is often stranger than fiction. Then, we share what we find and have extensive meetings to see how we kill the characters,” says Martínez, who considers himself the cruel one of the group. “Antonio is the romantic and Jorge Díaz is the one who provides the historical tone.”
From history they also rescue the maroons, those slaves who managed to escape from the sugar mills and took refuge in the mountains. “They escaped but not with the intention of making any revolution, but to be free, although that led them to hide and live for decades alone,” says Martínez. Creating a new identity was not an option since, if they were discovered, they would end up murdered by the ranchers, a type of bounty hunter. An action that they carried out without consideration as long as it was not discovered that a slave could achieve freedom. “If that spread, many could do the same,” says Díaz.
Many of these persecuted men promoted the independence of the island years later. “We were attracted to that parallelism between the revolutions that were taking place in Cuba to end slavery and the system and Spain to overthrow the monarchy. Although this also invited us to think about whether or not violence is necessary to make this world more just. What we can say is that the historical novel has one very beautiful thing and that is that, in reality, it can be read like the present. It shows us that nothing has changed. The salaried settlers are now the immigrants that you take to work in an exploited place or the young women from another country who are trafficked and turned into prostitutes to pay off an unfathomable debt. The era changes but the essence remains,” Mercero laments.
The three authors have once again demonstrated that they are comfortable with the past. With the future, however, they prefer to be cautious and not reveal anything about the new story they are writing or with which publisher it will be published, Planeta or Alfaguara, the label with which it all started until they won the award of one million euros. "We must go step by step. It would be premature to say anything about it and for now we are going to maintain this promiscuity,” says Mercero. “Maybe we don't sell and neither of us wants us,” Díaz agrees with a laugh. Time will tell, although, for the moment, more than two million readers are loyal to them.
