the cuban writer Leonard Paduraliterary father of detective Mario Conde and Princess of Asturias Award for Letters in 2015, assured this Tuesday that throughout his career he has never had the feeling of escaping from censorship, but rather of looking for it.
“I don’t escape censorship, but I look for it,” he said at a press conference in Las Palmas (Canary Islands), where he is participating in the “Literature from the Islands” meeting at the Maspalomas Summer University.
? ‘The same heart: Literature from the islands’ course with the 2015 Princess of Asturias Award for Letters, Leonardo Padura.
At the entrance you will find a stand of the Primicia Bookstore with its titles.
? https://t.co/xlh6vDx3Gr@AytoSBT @MaLibreria pic.twitter.com/CfHmOywQhJ– UVMaspalomas (@UVMaspalomas) July 11, 2022
According to a report from Ephin the meeting with the press, he addressed the publication of his next novel, “Decent People”, in which he recovers detective Conde, who with this book will hit bookstores at the end of August.
Padura assured that the situation in Cuba is “economically very tense and socially very complicated”, because to the effects of the pandemic on economic assets such as tourism, a series of economic deficiencies “carried over for years” are added.
The writer, who has Cuban and Spanish nationality and resides in Havana, was critical of the “severe trials” of people who demonstrated to protest against the Cuban government just a year ago in various cities on the island.
“I think that the judicial extreme of such high sentences should not have been reached for many of these people. The government had the possibility of having a much more humanistic gesture”, he pointed out, and insisted on the “struggle for survival” that the majority of the people on the island live.
On his decision to stay and write there, he assured that “he needs it” to be able to write. “I have the intention that the themes and manners of Cuban society have an international projection, but always starting from Cuba and returning to Cuba. I need to hear the people in Cuba speak, to be able to know their hopes and frustrations and that is a process that is always underway”, she reflected.
For Padura, the best place to follow these processes of transformation of society and assimilate social changes is his neighborhood in Havana, where he has lived since he was born surrounded by people “who are not even interested or care that he is a writer.” . On why he chose crime fiction as a mode of expression, he said that it seems to him to be a “generous genre” that allows a lot of freedom.
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“I think the most radical political documents that have circulated in Cuba are probably my novels. There has always been a critical look and I have touched on very deep, very complicated issues. I am interested in everything related to the search for utopia, ”she assured.
Regarding the difficulty in finding his novels in Cuba, he believes that it is related, more than with censorship, to the economic situation since, in general, books in his country “circulate little and badly”, “there is a policy of not promotion and non-visibility of my work,” he said, although he does not consider himself politically persecuted, the report points out.
Efe/OnCuba.
