the cuban writer Leonard Padura He has just published what is for him his “most Havana” novel, entitled decent peoplein which the island capital it is “almost one more character” who ceases to be a passive entity to become an active one, through the critical and disenchanted gaze of the author.
“Poets, in general, belong to a language, to a culture, but novelists have a much more intimate relationship with spaces, and the city is the favorite,” says Padura (Havana, 1955) in an interview with EFE on his way through Zaragoza, on a trip to Spain to promote his literary novelty.
While he writes, he takes the opportunity to reflect on whether that city belongs to him or “at times” it rejects him, although he admits that he feels very strongly rooted: “Cuba feeds me as a writer, with its conflicts, with its problems, with its contradictions, and that It’s my place,” he says.
“Perhaps if I leave Cuba I will have some material advantages, but I would not have that dense and close context that is the Cuban reality,” he clarifies. In a context of migratory crisis, the narrator finds himself among “that very rare species of people who live in the same house in which he was born.”
Once again, the 2015 Princess of Asturias Award for Letters has used the figure of his famous character, the detective Mario Conde, to “be able to interpret and reflect the Cuban reality”, in a book that places in 2016, a moment of ” euphoria, spirit of change and hope” that is known as the ‘Cuban Thaw’, in the heat of the visit of then US President Barack Obama, the Rolling Stones concert or the Chanel parade.
“There is a very important contemporary process when it was announced that Cuba and the United States were beginning to talk to reestablish diplomatic relations that were resumed in 2015 and had a very important moment with Obama’s visit a year later. There was that euphoria that many things could happen, but if the historical events that followed had not happened and Obama’s policy with respect to Cuba had been maintained, many things might have changed,” he says about the change in direction he experienced. the Island with the arrival of Donald Trump to the White House and the effects of the pandemic in a country, like Cuba, highly dependent on tourism.
The result is “the current situation of shortages, shortages, lack of practically everything, added to a process of brutal inflation,” says the writer about the current situation in his country.
Padura develops the ninth book of the Mario Conde saga with a plot that is interwoven with another criminal investigation at the beginning of the 20th century, in the years after independence, when the Cuban capital experienced great growth – it was then that the emblematic Malecón– and aspired to be “the Nice of America”.
His intention was to make a novel “as comprehensive as possible.” “I wanted to see how a historical moment and a present could see themselves in a mirror and reflect certain similarities, despite all the changes that time brings, of course,” he adds.
But decent people It is also for him, without neglecting his social aspect, his most detective novel, in which he breaks his tendency to resolve the plots “with a single dead person”, although, as always, with the investigator Mario Conde at the heart.
A character who throughout his literary life has been “a decent person”, as his creator defends, despite also inhabiting “a world where there is an increasing loss of ethical values and respect for the rights of others.”
«We have seen in Spain, in Cuba and in half the world amazing levels of corruption, abuses of power, influence peddling… We are living in a world in which the rogues, the indecent, roam their respects. But I think so, that there are still decent people like Mario Conde », he concludes hopefully.
