Leonardo Padura: "I have to say what I want from Cuba without limiting myself, the years go by and things do not improve"

A cyclone hits the reader again on the pages of Decent People (Tusquets), a new installment of the adventures of Mario Conde, the former policeman who will never stop being a policeman through the work and grace of his father, Leonardo Padura (Havana, 1955) that attends La Vanguardia in Madrid without any sign of a storm with tropical hurricane Danielle approaching the European coasts.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
07 September 2022 Wednesday 07:47
11 Reads
Leonardo Padura: "I have to say what I want from Cuba without limiting myself, the years go by and things do not improve"

A cyclone hits the reader again on the pages of Decent People (Tusquets), a new installment of the adventures of Mario Conde, the former policeman who will never stop being a policeman through the work and grace of his father, Leonardo Padura (Havana, 1955) that attends La Vanguardia in Madrid without any sign of a storm with tropical hurricane Danielle approaching the European coasts. "Wherever I go, I bring the hurricane," he laughs.

The novel is set in 2016, the years of the Cuban lights, the thaw, the visit of Barack Obama, the Rolling Stones concert, the Chanel parade... Also in 1910 when the city wanted to be The Nice of the Caribbean. What is now? “The Caribbean theme park of socialism that could have been”. That and this were two mirages. Padura is especially critical of the Castro regime in this work and literary, it is far above the first installments of the series: it is very rich, deeper. The author has set the bar high...

Did he seek his Mario Conde world record with such innovation?

Look, when I published The Man Who Loved Dogs 13 years ago, many people told me that I had reached my maximum. And I told them, it's fine, but I'll never lack ambition in the next attempts and I've tried to do it. In Herejes, in the Transparency of time, with a story, that of the Catalan black virgin, who does not really know what she is doing in a contemporary Cuban crime novel. Then Dust in the Wind and now Decent People. The essence is that if you settle for writing what you know how to write and how you know how to write, you can do well, you don't have that challenge, that challenge. Every year I could deliver a Conde novel like the ones I wrote in the nineties, which was what I was capable of writing. And they were going to sell more or less well. But I think I have to challenge myself and make it difficult for myself, and incidentally for the reader, an aesthetic difficulty, a challenge. I wanted to talk a lot about Havana, which is transforming, which is slipping away from my understanding, about how history can essentially repeat itself over and over again in 1910 and 2016.

What remains of that Obama-Rolling cyclone on the island? Was it a mirage?

It helped people regain hope, that life could be better, that one could find satisfactions that had long since disappeared... that life could be better. The hurricane vanished, those things that we thought possible and that were not and that are becoming more evident now, in these years that are being very critical. Since the Trump years began, the bloc has begun to get complicated, it has become more intense, the embargo has tightened, almost all direct flights have disappeared, and the pandemic has come that has sharpened the island's relationship with the world. The situation now is critical, people are emigrating from Cuba and those who live there have great difficulties in obtaining essential services, with galloping inflation, with the feeling that you are not enough for anything.

Does it sound like the Special Period?

The other day I read on the networks that a high-level Cuban doctor with two specialties, with I don't know how many master's degrees, that her salary had been reduced to 49 dollars a month. A pack of cigarettes is worth one fifty.

Conde is the most decent Cuban in history in a country where Picaresque is supreme law, that's why he remains poor.

It has to be decent and stay that way. From the first novels she has the mission of judging and evaluating the truth. If you're going to run into crooks, opportunists, and brazens, he can't be all those things to have a moral high ground. That makes him live in very elementary conditions. Actually, he doesn't need much to live and it's easier to defend that ethical attitude. He needs some cigarettes and a few shots of rum and something to eat, he sorts it out. He needs his friends, yes. He lives in a very low level of possibilities like most Cubans.

Count is little Quixote?

Yeah, it's a bit quixotic. He belongs to a class of very prestigious crime novel character. He is the grandson of Philip Marlowe and the grandson of Pepe Carvallo. Characters that are very close to reality.

In this work the criticism of the Castro regime is more steely than ever. In general, it was always latent and current, but here much more.

There are several elements in that critical look that I think are more in the context, in the sense that it is a novel of tremendous disenchantment, of lost illusions. Of course there are explicit allusions, because I feel more and more that I have to say what I want to say about Cuba without limiting myself. The years go by, things do not improve, people's lives are increasingly complicated and like all systems in the world, the Cuban tries to rewrite history, it ends up saying what is favorable and erasing what is not. I have a mission with Cuban memory and reality and I try to fulfill it. In Decent People there is a look that sees that what was promised has been little and poorly fulfilled. And people need to express it. I'm not interested in doing it in overtly political, black and white terms.

Does Lucía, his wife, continue to harass him in the first readings of the drafts?

(Laughter) She's a ruthless reader. She read this one and she let me go: “You said many years ago that certain novels were not going to be published in Cuba. And this is the one that they are not going to publish for you.” Let's see: now we publish it here in Spain and we'll see there.

Many of the villains in his novels die many times in the beginning, without having time to hate them. Here, Reynaldo Quevedo. In other deliveries Rafael Morin or Miguel Forcade…

What I am aware of is that the villain in my work is not a black boy who enters through the window and steals a tape recorder or a fan. They are leaders, ministers, ambassadors, company directors or cultural officials, who have been part of the Cuban political establishment.

During the pandemic he was unable to leave Cuba. Now that you can, do you see the rest of the world as a planet?

Only at the beginning, at a certain moment. What happens is that a good part of my work takes place outside the island, like promotion, I publish in 31 languages. Now I'm going to France, then Argentina, Chile, Uruguay...

Wow, he's on tour more than the Stones!

(Laughter) I don't have that feeling of going to another planet, but to work I have to be in Cuba, always the most productive times, my environment, my garden, my noise...

He talks about how this is his most police and Havana novel. Why?

More police, at least for a quantitative question. There are many corpses when there is usually only one. Here are five or six counting the dead of the past and those of the present. There is more violence and the crimes are quite bloody. And the most Havana because it occurs in two moments of effervescence, very equivocal, of apparent growth and flourishing. And I say that it is the most Havanan and I don't know if it was necessary. Vázquez Montalbán said that poets are from the language and novelists from the cities.

If the Havana of 1910 aspired to be the Nice of the Caribbean, what is the Havana of 2022?

The Caribbean theme park of socialism that could have been, and that is less and less.

Now that this typhoon of the Scandinavian crime novel seems to have calmed down a bit, it has revealed the good and the not so good. You had criticized the phenomenon a little.

There has been behind a commercial campaign very well organized and very generous with the writers. That is unimaginable in the Ibero-American world. The Scandinavian governments financially supported translations, publishing promotion was spectacular. Each writer was the best and there are three or four who are: Henning Mankell, Arnaldur Indridasson, the Icelander... not much else. I was recently in France and at the Gare du Nord and there were 15 screens advertising a novel by Camilla Läckberg, who is a horribly bad writer. But putting her book on the screen for I don't know how long, that costs money... Tell the Spanish government or (laughs, he can't pronounce Cuban) to do a promotion like that.

When we interviewed him for Like Dust in the Wind, he explained that when he was about to finish a novel, he felt like he was going to die. How do you feel when a work begins?

That is a moment that I don't know when it will come. Sometimes I start writing and I have eight or ten or fifteen pages and it is then… there is a body and a possibility of development that I never know where it will end up, nor who is the murderer of the dead person, I discover that.

What question would you like to be asked that you never get asked?

They've asked me everything, but at least you didn't ask me the one I don't like to be asked, which is “What do you think is going to happen in Cuba?” (Laughter). And I know what the hell will happen. I once wrote an article titled “I would like to be Paul Auster”. They interviewed him and only asked him about literature, movies and baseball. And he gave me a fit of envy. I thought: this bastard is asked about what I like. As a Cuban, I have no choice but to talk about Cuba.