Leonardo Padura: "In Cuba, we have no choice but to incorporate misery into our lives and remain silent."

Minutes before the telephone interview, the journalist receives a message: "Just in case, I'll also give you my wife's number. With communications in Cuba, you never know..." The heat is stifling in Havana, and while talking, Leonardo Padura (Havana, 69) mentions that they're installing a solar panel in his house. The bill is $4,000, a sum beyond the reach of most. Aware that each resident finds their own way to survive the island's endless blackouts, the author snorts, "Not everyone can afford this," at the beginning of this interview, the first that the 2015 Princess of Asturias Award winner has given to discuss his new book, Morir en la arena (Morning in the Sand, Tusquets), on sale on the 28th.

The novel deals with the life of Rodolfo, a Cuban marked by the war in Angola and, above all, by the murder of his father at the hands of his brother, Geni. Now retired, Rodolfo reunites with his sister-in-law, Nora, a former love from his youth, at the same time as he receives news of the imminent release of his brother, who is terminally ill and destined to return to the family home. In just one week of tense waiting, old grudges, buried secrets, and the memory of the crime that destroyed the family resurface. The arrival of his daughter offers Rodolfo a final lifeline in a plot that spans fifty years of a country's history. "This novel attempts to chronicle the current state of a generation in Cuba. I was very worried about whether what I was going to reflect would be too local. But on a universal level, I think we are living in a time of great frustration, very difficult for everyone ." The novel begins with a brutally simple image: a character steps in cat droppings in the shadows. “It sums up a lot,” laughs the Cuban writer, who pauses to reflect on the gaze of those who, like him, grew up alongside the Cuban revolution: “Men and women who studied, worked, sacrificed, repeated slogans, even fought in the Angolan war, and yet, as time goes by, the first thing they feel is that they're stepping into shit again.” That generation is left with a present marked by paradox: “After years of effort, they find themselves poorer than ever, living off remittances sent from abroad.” For Padura, what's happening in Cuba is a reflection of a broader trend: the rollback of social security policies, which is hitting everywhere, although it's felt particularly harshly on the island.

Reality and fiction

Morir en la arena is presented as based on real events, although the author clarifies that it is a fiction based on real life. The starting point is a parricide that occurred in Havana, an event close to the author's heart: "It happened in a family close to mine. I knew those involved in the story," confesses the father of detective Mario Conde . From that case, Padura revisits the central conflict, but emphasizes that the characters "have a different character." "The best story you can be told, when you write it, sometimes doesn't work. The processes of reality and dramatic processes have a different order. I rewrite reality to achieve a dramatic ending, because in the end, it's fiction that decides how you organize a plot."

In his work, he doesn't seek to provide definitive answers, but rather to pose enigmas. "There are questions that aren't resolved in the plot, which function as hooks," he warns. As he did in Goodbye Hemingway , where we never learn who killed the FBI agents, or in Like Dust in the Wind , in which Walter falls from a 21st-floor apartment without the reader being clear about whether it was an accident or suicide, Padura once again challenges his audience: " As Cortázar said , I'm looking for a male reader, a co-participant, not a female [who doesn't want problems, but solutions, as Cortázar said]... Although these things can't be said anymore!" Padura laughs.

At the center of the novel is Raymundo Fumero, character and narrator, an intellectual who writes and, with his words, attempts to put the puzzle of events together. “I felt it as a vindication of the intellectual,” explains the author, aware that this figure has a long and eventful tradition in Cuba. His character belongs to that generation of 1970s writers hit hard by the so-called Black Decade of Cuban culture, when the erasure of intellectuals left behind a trail of expulsion and oblivion . “Many were pushed aside and died in marginalization, like José Lezama Lima or Virgilio Piñera,” Padura recalls. Hence the frequent repetition of the words fear, dread, and dread in the novel. Fumero embodies the resistance against that legacy: he decides to confront the obstacles and write “the chronicle of this generation's defeat.”

The writer admits that these political mechanisms haven't completely disappeared. "Today they're not as drastic, but they exist. There's a very easy form of censorship: saying there's no paper, and that your book can't be printed. Which, by the way, is true," he jokes. In his case, he confesses, he has been fortunate enough to escape these limitations thanks to his connection with the Tusquets publishing house since the 1990s: "That has allowed me the opportunity to write freely, more so than those who write for publishers linked to Cuba." Today, his books are published in 32 languages ​​and circulate thanks to that connection with Spain: "I finish the book, press a key, and in two seconds it's in Barcelona. I'm very lucky."

From exile to reggaeton

Among the novel's most powerful symbols are Aitana and Violeta, the brothers' daughters, characters who embody the diaspora. "Both represent the children of my generation," explains Padura, who sought to convey through them the fracture and distance that has marked the lives of so many Cubans . The novel, he asserts, is "full of symbols, also of winks with which the reader identifies." One of the most obvious is the wall that separates the two protagonists' houses, a physical boundary that reflects the siblings' intimate division. With these images, Padura weaves a collective portrait: "All of this helps me create that Cuban universe of recent decades and continues to the present. And to attempt to chronicle what contemporary life in the country has been like."

This journalist interviewed Padura in 2018. At the time, the writer was concerned about reggaeton , which, he said, had reached a clear degradation in Cuba. Has the situation changed? “It's terrible. Now reggaeton has a Cuban form, called repartimiento . It has advanced in popular taste in the same proportion as it has advanced in the scatological, sexist, vulgar, and aggressive aspects,” he says, sarcastically. “It's a plague, spread everywhere,” and warns that its success has become the soundtrack to a deeper crisis. “ I'm thinking about a platform to talk about its consequences . Because this is the result of a series of social, economic, and political degradations in the country,” he reflects. This degradation, he explains, has its roots in the so-called Special Period of the 1990s, when the economy collapsed and social upheavals began that still reverberate today. Culturally, with the emergence of aggressive music and expressions; Economically, with the fracture of an increasingly unequal social fabric, "with small private businesses that enrich a few while the majority are impoverished." "What used to be the ration book, today only gives you a little rice, sugar, and little else," he notes. Added to this are the blackouts, which in some areas last up to 20 hours a day . "One day like this, and another, and another... We have no choice but to incorporate all this misery into our lives, and in many cases, remain silent." In a context of enforced silence, any protest can be costly. Padura recalls the demonstrations of July 2021, when hundreds of people were convicted: "They were exemplary sentences; for breaking a window, ten years in prison. People suffer and remain silent, because the other thing..." The writer sarcastically repeats a phrase heard on the street that sums it all up: "If food is so difficult on the street, imagine in jail..."

Before saying goodbye, Padura schedules a meeting for another seven years. How does he imagine Cuba and the world then? “I don't know. The present is so depressed that something necessarily has to happen, a great change, I don't know if for better or worse,” he admits. The doubt about the future not only affects his country: on the island it is visceral and dramatic, but it is also felt on a global scale, marked by “ the rise of the most xenophobic and nationalist right-wing movements .” In a world driven by technology toward an uncertain future, Padura says goodbye and returns to the unbearable heat of Havana with a skeptical gesture: “I fear we are headed toward a big question mark.”