Minutes before the telephone interview, the journalist receives a message: “Just in case, my wife’s number also passes you. With communications in Cuba you never know …”. The heat is suffocating in Havana and, while conversing, Leonardo Padura (Havana, 69 years old) comments that at home they are installing a battery with solar panels. The invoice is 4,000 dollars, an unattainable sum for the majority. Aware that each neighbor seeks in their way how to survive the endless blackouts of the island, the author snack Sand (Tusquets), for sale next day 28.
The novel deals with Rodolfo’s life, a Cuban marked by the War of Angola and, above all, by his father’s murder at the hands of his brother Geni. Already retired, Rodolfo meets his sister -in -law Nora, ancient youth love, while receiving the news of the imminent release of his brother, a terminal ill and destined to return to the family home. In just a week of tense, old grudges, buried secrets and the memory of the crime that destroyed the family. The arrival of his daughter offers a last support to Rodolfo in a plot that travels fifty years in the history of a country. “This novel tries to make the chronicle of the current state of a generation of Cuba. I had a lot of concern about whether what I was going to reflect was going to be too local. But at the universal level, I think we lived a moment of great frustration, very fucked up for everyone.” The novel starts with a brutal image in its simplicity: a character steps on a cat excrement in the gloom. “Summarizes a lot,” laughs the Cuban writer, who stops in the gaze of those who, like him, grew together with the Cuban revolution: “Men and women who studied, worked, sacrificed, repeated slogans, even fought in the War of Angola and, however, over time, the first thing they feel is that they step on shit.” That generation today has a present marked by the paradox: “After years of effort, they are discovered poorer than ever, living from remittances sent from abroad.” For Padura, what happens in Cuba is a reflection of a broader trend: the setback of social security policies, which hits everywhere, although on the island you feel particularly crudeness.
Reality and fiction
Sand It is presented as based on real events, although the writer clarifies that it is a fiction with roots in life. The starting point is a parricide that occurred in Havana, an event close to the author himself: “It happened in a family close to mine. I met those involved in history,” confesses the father of Detective Mario Conde. In that case, Padura takes up the central conflict, but stresses that the characters “have another character.” “The best story they can tell you, when you write it, sometimes it does not work. The processes of reality and dramatic processes have different order. I rewrite reality to achieve a dramatic end, because in the end it is fiction that decides how you organize a plot.”
In his work he does not seek to give definitive answers, but to raise enigmas. “There are issues that are not resolved in the plot, which function as hooks,” he warns. As he did in Goodbye Hemingwaywhere you never get to know who killed the FBI agents, or in Like dust in the windin which Walter rushes from an 21st floor without the reader being clear if it was an accident or suicide, Padura again challenges his audience: “As Cortázar said, I look for a male reader, partner, not female (who does not want problems, but solutions, Cortázar said) … although these things can no longer be said!”
In the center of the novel is Raymundo Fumero, character and narrator, intellectual who writes and who, with his words, tries to order the puzzle of events. “I felt it as a claim of the intellectual,” explains the author, aware that this figure has a long and rugged tradition in Cuba. His character enrolls in that generation of writers of the seventies beaten fully by the call Black decade of Cuban culture, when the cancellation of intellectuals left behind a trail of expulsion and oblivion. “Many were separated and died in marginalization, such as José Lezama Lima or Virgilio Piñera,” says Padura. Hence, in the novel the words fear, dread, fear are repeated. Fumero embodies resistance against that legacy: he decides to face obstacles and write “the chronicle of the defeat of this generation.”
The writer admits that these political mechanisms have not completely disappeared. “Today they are not so drastic, but there are. There is a very easy way of censorship: to say that there is no paper, and that your book cannot be printed. That, in addition, it is true,” he jokes. In his case, he confesses, he has been fortunate to escape these limitations thanks to his link with the Tusquets label since the 1990s: “That has allowed me the possibility of writing freely, rather than those who write with editorials linked to Cuba.” Today, his books are published in 32 languages and circulate thanks to that connection with Spain: “I finish the book, squeeze a key and in two seconds it is in Barcelona. I am very lucky.”
From exile to reggaeton
Among the most powerful symbols of the novel are Aitana and Violeta, the daughters of the two brothers, characters that embody the diaspora. “Both represent the children of my generation,” explains Padura, who wanted to dump in them the fracture and distance that has marked the life of so many Cubans. The novel, he says, is “full of symbols, also of winks with which the reader identifies.” One of the most obvious is the wall that separates the two houses from the protagonists, a physical border that reflects the intimate division of the two brothers. With these images, Padura is weaving a collective portrait: “All this helps me to create that Cuban universe of the last decades and continues to the present. And make the attempt to create a chronicle of what has been the contemporary life of the country.”
This journalist interviewed Padura in 2018. At that time, the writer was worried about reggaeton, who, he said, in Cuba had reached an obvious degradation. Has the panorama changed? “It is terrible. Now the reggaeton has a Cuban modality, which is called department. He has advanced in the popular taste in the same proportion that has advanced in the eschatological, sexist, foul and aggressive, ”says, sly.“ It is a pest, disseminated by anywhere ”, and warns that his success has made him the soundtrack of a deeper crisis.“ I am thinking of a tribune to talk about its consequences. Because this is the result of a series of social, economic and political degradations in the country, ”he reflects. That degradation, he explains, has its roots in the so -called special period of the nineties, when the economy collapsed and began the social seizures that still reverberate today. Cultural They enrich a few while most get impoverished. ” Protest can be paid. For breaking a crystal, ten years in jail. People suffer and shut up, because the other… ”. The writer repeats with sneer a phrase heard in the street that summarizes everything:“ If on the street the food is so difficult, imagine in jail… ”.
Before saying goodbye, Padura Agenda an appointment for another seven years. How do you imagine Cuba and the world? “I don’t know. The present is so depressed that there must necessarily be something that happens, a big change, I don’t know if for better or worse,” he admits. The doubt about El Porvenir not only affects his country: on the island it is visceral and dramatic, but on a global scale it is also perceived, marked by “the rise of the most xenophobic and nationalist rights.” In a world pushed by technology towards an uncertain future, Padura says goodbye and returns to the unbearable heat of Havana with a gesture of skepticism: “I fear that we are committed to a large question sign.”