Leonardo Padura: "I have been tempted by exile, but I need Cuba to write"

September 16, 2020

Culture
Leonardo Padura: "I've had the temptation of exile, but I need Cuba to write"
He narrates the lives of a group of friends, most of whom abandon the island
MARCOS MÍGUEZ
enrique clemente
13/09/2020 10:49 h

Leonardo Padura (Havana, 1955) has written the great novel of Cuban exile, Like Dust in the Wind (Tusquets), in which he masterfully narrates, with a complex structure and great psychological depth, the lives of a group of friends, called The Clan, that survives over time despite dispersion, because most of them leave their country. The author responds from his home in the Cuban capital.

-In your novel you make a bitter, realistic and nostalgic portrait of your generation. Is anything left standing of those ideals that the characters represent?

-There remain loyalty, friendship, complicity, fraternity. Even the rejection of betrayal, deception, fear persists… I think many things can be circumstantial, dictated by the political circumstances of a moment or a stage, but if what should be permanent is lost then the defeat is definitive, total. That's why one of the characters, somewhat ironically but very seriously, says several times: "We go from defeat to defeat, until final victory"… Fortunately, there are those things that have not been lost and that for me are essential, as they are in my ethical and even genetic code. I was educated in a home where the concepts of fraternity, from my Freemason father, and solidarity, from my Catholic mother, were sustained vital practice, and in my case and in that of several of my friends, here or there, we have saved them from the tsunami.

-Is the novel about a collective failure, that of the revolution?

-The failure of many members of a generation can have many readings, and that is what I intend to say in a novel in which political readings will come to the foreground, but in the text they are submerged, in favor of those permanent and essential things I spoke of before. Political readings are more direct, easier, more reactive and in the long run more circumstantial. Existential, human, generational readings can be, which is what I intend, more visceral and, in essence, more illustrative of what the weight and passage of history means for individuals, like me, like my characters, like my generation.

-You have said that even leaving Cuba, Cubans don't really leave. Is it so difficult to let go of Cuba?

-It's always difficult to let go of what is one's own. We Cubans know it, the Galicians know it. People don't emigrate because they want to, in most cases, but because they have to do it for different reasons and a part of their life is left behind. Cuba has magnetic powers, like many other places in the world, and Cubans live with those magnets on our shoulders.

-Have you never felt the need to go into exile?

-I've had the temptation, like many people. In those years of the 1990s when everything was lacking here in Cuba, I thought about it, like many others. But I weighed what I had, what I could have and what I needed to have, and necessity won. I need Cuba to do what I do, write. Perhaps abroad I would have better material conditions, I could have bought another car, I'm still driving my faithful 1997 Subaru, because a new car in Cuba can cost a quarter of a million dollars… You understand correctly, a quarter of a million dollars or euros, but what I'm almost certain of is that I would not have written what I have written. And that for me is what matters. And that's why I pay a price: that in Cuba they don't promote me, that they barely interview me, or that outside Cuba they say I'm an official and a bad writer and they attack me for anything I say or do. Meanwhile, here, in my same old house, with my same old wife and my old car… I write.

-Is this the novel that has cost you the most to write?

-The great difficulty had to do with the structure, which is not linear, but spiral, accumulative, which meant having special attention with each fact narrated, placing it in its space and time, and the ways of conceiving characters that I tried not to be schematic, not to be representative, but, above all, human. And the enormous difficulty was working with female protagonist characters. In the novel there are three: Adela, Elisa and Clara. All three different. All three complicated. All three with mysteries… and those women truly made me sweat trying to understand them.

-Did you plan the novel or did you improvise? Did you reread, as you always do, some chapter of "Conversation in the Cathedral"?

-This time I didn't reread the beginning of Conversation… I reread it completely! But I also reread Carpentier, Vázquez Montalbán, Franzen, Auster… because all the help is necessary in a process like writing a novel so complex in its dramatic and structural approach. The method in the first version was simple: I knew what was going to happen in chapter 2 and I wrote the first one. Then that 2 that I more or less knew. Although later I discovered things as important as certain hidden desires of some characters, and I looked into the void… From there I advanced step by step until a possible ending that was not the definitive one. And I began to rewrite everything. I rewrote it all I don't know how many times, until I felt I couldn't anymore, that I couldn't bear that novel anymore and… the end.

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César Coca

"Cuba is neither the hell that some say nor the paradise that others sell, and therefore it should resemble purgatory more."

"Cuba is neither the hell that some say nor the paradise that others sell, and therefore it should resemble purgatory more. Here it's possible to live with a certain normality within the peculiarity of a society like Cuba's," affirms the author of The Man Who Loved Dogs.

-In "Like Dust in the Wind," Darío goes from being addicted to Castroism to Catalan sovereigntism. Is it a way of bringing together two types of political fanaticism?

-It's possible. But I didn't see it from that perspective. With Darío and his political options I wanted to see the need to believe in something, which in his case occurs by osmosis, by mimesis. He believes in what he thinks he should believe, what is correct and necessary to believe, like many people I know, who are easily influenced and fickle, who one day militate in God's camp and the next in the Devil's, and in both they march with flags and shout at others. Rather, a fanaticism of convenience. And in his case this is aggravated by his need to be another person, by the urgency of not returning to where he came from.

-What has Trump's presidency meant for Cuba following the opening that Obama represented, with which the book ends?

-To go back to what we already knew, to the same old thing: tension, confrontation, hatred, verbal and even physical aggression. What fanatics like! We are at one of the lowest points in relations between the two countries. Trump has increased embargo controls and measures, has encouraged hatred. But none of that is strange. Trump has divided Americans in a way that can be very dangerous, he is at war with half the world, he speaks badly even of the German government. So if he has also affected Cuba, well, it's in his DNA. "Now there is more tension on the island over access to food or soap than over the coronavirus"

Leonardo Padura is getting through confinement "okay." "I haven't gotten sick, no one in my immediate circle has gotten sick, we have enough supplies to survive, some run out, others appear, we solve it as we say around here, I haven't lacked for work, I have the idea for a new novel in mind, but not being able to spend more time with friends, or go to the beach, or travel and then relax for a few days is complicated," he notes. "Sometimes I feel that some friends are getting further and further away and that they're starting to get lost in the distance and that affects me," concludes the author of the series of novels featuring detective Mario Conde.

-What do you attribute to such a low incidence of the pandemic in Cuba compared to other countries?

-On the health front, we're not doing badly. Being an island certainly helps. But having closed borders is complicated, especially for a country that depends so much on tourism. What is evident is that the Cuban health system has worked well. Now we are very worried about a rebound, strict confinement measures are being ordered for Havana, and we have about 50 cases a day and fewer than ten deaths in August and comparatively with other countries these are ridiculous numbers.

-You say that the world we're heading towards will resemble the one Huxley portrays in "Brave New World." How will the pandemic change us?

-It's already affecting us in health, economic, social, family ways. How much we will change will be known in the future. What worries me a bit is that we've handed over many powers to the powers and later it's very difficult to recover what we've lent under the pressure of fear.

-How do you see the current situation in Cuba and its future evolution?

-Very complicated. The evolution depends a lot on how this situation caused by the health crisis and the global economic crisis is managed, with an impact on Cuba, but potentiated by internal economic problems and the increasing pressure of the embargo. Now on the island there is more tension over access to the most necessary consumer goods, from food to soaps, than over the coronavirus. The Government is proposing economic openings, greater circulation and use of foreign currency, monetary and exchange rate unification, increased exports. Strategies to emerge as unharmed as possible from a process that is already difficult for the daily life of a country that has lived in crisis for decades.