[NYTr] Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura Fuentes on the search for solutions

[All the News That Doesn't Fit]

Progreso Weekly - Nov 8, 2007
http://progreso-weekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=226&Itemid=1

Dateline Havana

"Participate in the search for solutions"

Says the award-winning Cuban writer Leonardo Padura Fuentes

By Manuel Alberto Ramy

It might have been a scheduled meeting, because we have been friends
for a long time, but we met by chance. Leonardo Padura, the famous and
indispensable Cuban novelist, and his wife, Lucía López Coll,
journalist and editor -- a woman whose sweetness, talent and discretion
have contributed to her husband's success -- were leaving the building
where my wife works, just as I entered it. And, since we were near a
coffee shop, we decided to go for a cup of coffee and a chat. 

The topic was unavoidable: the meetings being held by the various
artists' associations in the National Union of Writers and Artists of
Cuba (UNEAC) prior to its seventh Congress. 

About that exchange of opinions we reached a common conclusion: there
has been a bit of everything, from the viewpoints of those who see the
meetings as a form of labor vindication (which is not their purpose)
and who, from the highest levels of culture, have cast a long look at
the nation's reality.

But we also agreed that both positions are not contradictory. Rather,
they are two flight charts: one (a short one) that goes from the
specific to the general, and another that does the opposite. No doubt,
the latter is the important one because it contributes more to the
great national debate and can provide the answers to the specific needs
of society, to whatever "affects us all, as citizens."

Padura, 52, his beard neatly trimmed, speaks precisely, using the exact
words to define what he thinks, as well as what he describes in his
novels. His eyes often have a tinge of sadness. It occurs to me that
the eyes Mario Conde, the famous investigator in Padura's police
novels, would also reveal the same. But there are also sparks of hope
and illusion, as if Padura were saving his most popular character from
an existential crisis.

Perhaps a Cuban writer cannot enjoy (like Padura does) so many national
and international awards, especially the devotion of his readers,
without reflecting in his eyes -- and his works -- both sadness and
hope, an urgency to make a collective dream come true.

A dog races past our sidewalk table, and the image prompts me to ask
about Padura's next novel, whose working title is "The Man who Loved
Dogs." In the novel, Padura tackles the life of Ramón Mercader, the man
accused of Trotsky's assassination -- a crime Mercader never admitted
-- and who, after serving a long sentence in Mexico, died in Cuba.
Mercader used to stroll through these very streets in the Miramar
district of Havana with his dogs, two elegant Russian wolfhounds.

"I don't have much to go. It should be ready by next year," he answers,
with the exhilaration of the long-distance runner when he arrives at
the finish. On the trail of Trotsky and Mercader, Padura has toured
cities and towns in Europe and Mexico and invaded the inner world of
the key characters. It may have been the most painstaking and delicate
research task of his life.

Although Trotsky's ideas are, to a degree, revived in the debates that
circulate through the Internet and outside, our conversation returns to
its origin, the UNEAC Congress that will be held next April. I ask
Padura: "What topics are fit for debate, and what is the role of
culture at this very exceptional period of our nation's life?"

As quickly as Mario Conde draws his pistol, Padura answers: "As soon as
I get home, I'll send them to you in an e-mail." I arrive home, open my
mail, and share with you the opinions of Leonardo Padura Fuentes, whose
core novel (in my opinion) is not one of his police stories but "The
Novel of My Life."

"The country's reality demands from Cuban artists an absolute
responsibility not only over their present but also over the possible
future. It seems to me indispensable that the next UNEAC congress leave
out of its debates the provincial and the labor-related issues --
though they affect us, true enough -- and look beyond what worries us
at present as creators, and reflect on what involves us all, as
citizens. The situations on which the current Cuban society and the
outlook for its future are developing are particularly complex, and the
vision of the Cuban intelligentsia must actively participate in a
debate as transcendental as the one that demands its present today,
here.

"The sharp ethical, social and economic conflicts that the Cuban
society today faces, as a result of a complex evolution that has been
perniciously affected by long years of economic crisis, require an open
and essentially sincere analysis that -- in a forum such as the
Congress -- will identify origins and seek solutions and alternatives.

"Problems such as the moral erosion that is seen in broad sectors of
the population, the quality of education and public health, the real
projection that the mass media must have in a society that undergoes
objective and subjective changes, the relationship between the daily
life and the political discourse, the worrisome emigration of young
people with a high degree of cultural and professional preparation are
not only affecting the country's present but also will decide its
future. The opinions of artists as representatives of society must be
heard today with more responsibility than ever.

"All this, however, should not and must not alienate the problems that
are typical of creation, the commercialization of art works and the
artists' social lives. Except that, in my opinion, we need to relate
those issues with those of the very society of which they are part. The
possibility of obtaining a home or buying a computer or access to the
Internet should not be seen as labor-related problems but as the result
of decisions that affect society as a whole and, beyond that, its own
development.

"I therefore think that a great responsibility rests in our hands and
that the Congress can and should acknowledge those concerns and, to the
extent of its ability, participate in the search for solutions."

Note: Leonardo Padura Fuentes received the UNEAC Prize for Best Novel
of 1993; the Café Gijón Prize for Best Novel of 1995 in Spain; the
Insular America Prize for Best Novel of 2003 in France; and has
received the Cuban Critics Award on six occasions.

[Manuel Alberto Ramy is Havana bureau chief of Radio Progreso
Alternativa and editor of Progreso Semanal, the Spanish-language
version of Progreso Weekly. ]