Havana that Mario Conde loves, the detective of the marginal neighborhoods created by Cuban writer Leonardo Padura

November 16, 2019

I have a writer friend who loves when I tell him the things that happen to me in this, my crazy life, with its crazy reality -as Cuban singer Pancho Céspedes says, and by the way, he's also my friend and he was inspired by me to make his song "Vida loca", and it really turned out beautifully.

That writer and I have known each other for a very long time.

Back in the early 1970s we were study companions in the pre-university school in La Víbora, here in Havana, and for about thirty years he's been writing novels with stories about those crazy things that happened to me when I was a criminal investigation police officer -until I got fed up with it- and the things that have happened to me since I've been buying and selling old books, because you have to make a living somehow.

That writer, by the way, is named Leonardo Padura, although that's not that important.

The first novel he wrote about me is titled "Pasado perfecto", and it has to do with some people that we both knew when we studied at that blessed Pre in La Víbora and then he's published about eight more (Máscaras, Adiós, Hemingway, La transparencia del tiempo, that's the latest one), in which he makes me the protagonist (thanks, Leo) and says some things about me that he shouldn't have said and others that move me that he revealed.

Of the ones I like most: that thing about me being a sentimental bastard. Because it's true. I am.

If I bring up my novelist friend it's because I'm a sentimental person who now intends to speak about Havana and he has written that I always repeat this definition: the color of Havana is blue, its smell is that of the sea and of the gas that seeps through the streets of the old city and its sound, that of the indestructible American cars from the 1950s and of a bolero -lately a reggaeton.

And that's not bad at all, I think, to start saying something about a city that another friend (I have many friends), playwright Alberto Marqués (alias of Virgilio Piñera), assures is one of the few in the world with a soul, and with the soul worn on its sleeve. A place with magic, he said.

For those of us, like me, who were born in Havana and have lived in it for each one of the years -more and more years- of our lives and have seen the city grow and languish, transform and stagnate, always feeling it as a place of our own that at times becomes foreign to us, the exercise of reflecting on and understanding our city can become quite an arduous effort for us.

Because sometimes proximity clouds our vision and perceptions, and belonging stuffs us full of prejudices (there are good and bad ones) determined to hinder the definition.

I was born in a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city, a rather working-class neighborhood, but because of the distance that separates it from the urban centers, it has always made us say "I'm going to Havana" when we moved to those nerve centers where the most elegant and iconic buildings tend to be, the most emblematic plazas, the streets through which the most illustrious Cubans and the most famous visitors traveled.

The city of tourist postcards: commercial Havana of Reina and Galiano; the most typical of Spanish fortresses, the Paseo del Prado and the symbolic Malecón; elegant, modern and nighttime Havana of La Rampa, that stretch today somewhat decadent of 23rd Street, in the central neighborhood of El Vedado, where we spent many hours of our youth, when we had so many dreams and hopes…