The Cuban journalist, screenwriter and writer Leonard Padura He assures that his native country and where he lives, Cuba, is his “food” and that the inspiration for all his books comes from there.
In an interview with the agency EFE before presenting his latest novel, like dust in the windthe writer explains that he wants to write about Cuba, its conflicts, realities, dreams, disappointments and what people think and live “in the Cuban language.”
“My language is Cuban despite the fact that this is also a common language that communicates to all Ibero-Americans, but I write in Cuban and Cuba is my food,” he says of his inspiration for writing novels.
Padura (Havana, 1955), known for his detective novels Mario Conde and winner of the Princess of Asturias Award for Letters in 2015 –with which he became the first Cuban recipient of this award–, affirms that releasing a novel in the middle of a pandemic had a “positive” element.
The author of the famous novel The man who loved the dogs (2009) explains that, despite not being able to travel and being confined, he was able to offer many more interviews and presentations through digital platforms, something that «worked quite well».
And it is that Padura published in mid-2020 like dust in the windwhich he himself defines as a Cuban diaspora that has to do with the permanence of his compatriots on the island, with the feeling of belonging and the importance of friendship.
«It is a choral novel where there are several important characters, some of them with more prominence, and three of them women; it was a challenge to work with three people in feminine », she points out, and details that this work covers 25 years of the history of his generation.
Although he has pointed out that it is a “contemporary” novel that begins in 1989 and ends in 2016, in some way he also qualifies it as historical since it chronicles, analyzes and reflects on the destiny of a generation of Cubans, his.
like dust in the wind tells the story of a group of friends who have survived a fate of exile and dispersion, traveling through South Florida, the Northwest of the United States, Madrid, Barcelona, France, Buenos Aires, Puerto Rico, more than half the world with some characters who always leave and return to Cuba.
About the book The writing of Leonardo Padurawhich the Cervantes Institute published in 2021 within its collection of critical studies and academic research, Padura assured that it is “very important” that an institution of that level in Spain has published it and that it opens a collection with this book, which is already announced that he will have a second.
«It is a book that I am reading little by little because I am surprised by the analyzes that studies make of my work, that sometimes you discover things that you did not imagine you had done and that sometimes you did not even intend to do. and there they are,” he explains.
