Leonardo Padura: "All the reasons to leave Cuba are valid and all the reasons to stay are also valid"

January 29, 2021

# English Translation

2021 started out "complicated" for Leonardo Padura. He says his car broke down and that "in Cuba that's something very serious."

It's not that breakdown, however, that the renowned Cuban writer laments most, who recently added the prestigious Carlos Fuentes Medal to his collection of literary awards.

"The pandemic has cancelled trips, meetings with readers, and the public presentation of my latest novel," he says over the phone, with a note of resignation.

Like Dust in the Wind (Tusquets, 2020), the novel he's referring to, deals with one of his "obsessions": the drama of Cuban exile.

He tells it through El Clan, a group of friends fractured during the Special Period crisis, when in the early 1990s Cuba was left without economic support from abroad following the collapse of Soviet socialism.

Leonardo Padura is one of the most award-winning contemporary Latin American authors in recent years and in 2015 won the Princess of Asturias Prize for Literature.

His work has been translated into multiple languages and his series of novels about the famous fictional detective Mario Conde has also been adapted for television with the Netflix series Four Seasons in Havana.

In this interview prior to the digital edition of the Hay Colombia 2021 festival, Padura speaks with BBC Mundo about his latest literary creation, but he also doesn't bite his tongue when talking about politics, Cuban polarization, and one of the most delicate economic moments in the country's history.

In Like Dust in the Wind you address the theme of exile, of how many Cubans in exile support measures that strangle the island, even if they end up affecting ordinary citizens and not just the government.

Look, that's a topic that the Spanish writer Manuel Vázquez Montalbán (popularly known as the author of the Pepe Carvalho detective series) once explained to me—a man with tremendous political clarity whose absence has become very evident in recent years.

Among the many characters in his new novel, Padura identifies with the one who ends up staying in Cuba, resisting, and with the one who emigrates to Spain but can never feel like anything other than Cuban.

Manolo used to tell me that you have to have the capacity to distinguish between the people of Cuba and the government of Cuba. But I believe many people don't have that capacity. They only express themselves through reactions and desires, without considering that their resentments also affect the other side of the issue.

The truth is that lately I'm quite skeptical about the need for true reconciliation among Cubans and trying to turn certain pages of history.

I always say there can't be forgetting, but there should be forgiveness. If not, Cuba will never be the country that most Cubans would like it to be.

There are many extremist and fundamentalist attacks from one side and the other. The Cuban issue has become very polarized between those who live outside and inside.

That polarization may serve certain interests or spheres of power, but it affects most Cubans, including those who live outside Cuba but maintain their families within and don't hate their country.

But there are people who, upon leaving Cuba, even without a political motive, radicalize when they're outside. That doesn't lead down a good path.

I don't consider myself neutral, I barely try to be balanced, fair, and maintain a stance: I'm a writer, with a civic responsibility and, through my literature, even through my journalism, I've given all possible opinions about Cuban reality, which is the reality in which I live, write, and participate though without having political affiliations or activism.

In my novels I try to tell truths, which are surely not absolute, of course, but they are truths and they are not neutral.

For expressing those opinions, when my books are published in Cuba (and so far they've all been published), they don't receive promotion, and there have been cases where their circulation has even been stopped.

Here the media don't promote the recognitions I've received in these years, and as I've come to know, I'm in the category of the "limited" in state media, which I don't quite understand, but it means what it says: I'm limited.

And as an example of that "limitation" serves the fact that recently I was awarded the Carlos Fuentes Medal in Mexico, which is supposed to place a writer and Cuban literature at a level that very few writers have been at, and not even a small space of information was given in Cuba to the presentation of that prize.

In any case, the most important thing for me is to write what I write and say what I say in my novels and in the hundreds of interviews I do each year. I don't have to please anyone, and I'm aware that I pay a price for this inside and outside Cuba.

I try not to become fanatical with any position. If something is well done, I recognize it. If something is bad, the same. I have no personal conflict and reality is not black or white.

When you reveal the nuances, all you're doing is being faithful to a reality that is much more complex than certain slogans.

Writers, and especially novelists, have obsessions. Exile is one of them because for me it's been a very close experience, although I've never been exiled for cultural, personal, or professional reasons.

Exile is a process that my generation has suffered greatly from. And it's that, as one of the characters in my novel says, "all reasons for leaving Cuba are valid and all reasons for staying are too." It's important to understand any of the reasons others have.

That's something that in the case of exile is fundamental.

Experience has shown me how painful exile is, because in Cuba's case many of those decisions were made without going back; they were definitive exits from the country. It's been very dramatic.

Twenty years ago, in The Novel of My Life, I addressed exile from a historical perspective, but in this new novel I address it from the contemporaneity and the drama with which exile has marked my generation.

I needed to reflect on it again, and that's why I set out to tell the story of a group of friends who preserve their friendship across the distance, offering a possible panorama of what the trauma of exile means for many close people who are no longer in the country.

Look, a while ago we calculated how many people from our university group were left in Cuba. Practically half of my class has left.

By the way, among those who left, many were the most militant (pro-government) and those who harassed us for not having enough "combativeness" and things like that.

The novelist has to learn to interpret the behaviors, attitudes, and decisions of many people so that, through that knowledge, he can create characters.

When speaking of people from my generation I have the advantage of knowing the historical and psychological context.

I've had much contact with people outside the country and I've encountered all possible attitudes, responses, and behaviors: those who leave and renounce everything and those who never heal from nostalgia.

When I go to other historical moments and work with real characters, the exercise is much more difficult.

Getting into the head of León Trotsky or Ramón Mercader in The Man Who Loved Dogs was very complicated, even to the point that I had written an entire part of the novel with Trotsky in the first person and had to rewrite it because I had barely been able to enter into the shell of such a complex character as him.

One must try to find points of contact, between knowledge and experience, to be able to create characters.

With the detective Mario Conde (his most famous and recurring character), for example, I already have an accomplished and refined exercise. His reactions and attitudes are easy for me to interpret, and they even appropriate personal memories and my memory.

In Like Dust in the Wind, with so many characters and individual characteristics, I had to make an additional effort to achieve that coherence and give them plausibility.

In literature it's impossible to reach reality by reproducing it; rather, a plausible reflection of it must be created.

We'll never copy reality from any artistic manifestation, not even through memory or history. Subjectivity always influences.

When you take a photo, depending on the angle you place yourself at, the photo comes out different. In the novel, that subjectivity always counts much more.

The characters you created are very different: the one who stays in Cuba, the uprooted one who never forgets, the one who flees without looking back, the one who assumes a new homeland... which of them resembles Leonardo Padura most?

All those characters have things from me and from many people I know. They also have a psychological burden that brings them closer to what I imagined could have been me and how I would have manifested myself.

If I have to choose, I identify more with Clara, the one who stays in Cuba, and with Irving, the one who emigrates to Spain but lives in cultural displacement.

Clara's spirit of resistance identifies me, of permanence and that capacity to receive all of life's blows and continue resisting.

Irving ties me to his attachment to a way of being and doing, of a culture, of a spirituality of feeling that you're from a place and that you'll never be from another.

I have two citizenships, the Cuban one, and I also have a Spanish passport.

When people ask me if I have two nationalities, I always say I'm only Cuban. I've always said it clearly, I'm Cuban by 64 accounts and I'll never be able to be anything else.

Times of crisis provoke critical responses and we're in a very complicated moment in Cuban life.

2020 was a tremendous year, with events that continue to shake us.

The pandemic has made us think about many things, understand some important ones, like man's vulnerability to the world in which he lives. A small molecule can cause the imbalance of all humanity.

Hopefully this allows us to understand the role we have and the space of the world in which we live.

In Cuba, this phenomenon has had well-managed manifestations in the public health sphere, although there have been rebounds with infection peaks not even reached in the most difficult moments of the pandemic.

Furthermore, economic problems and their possible solutions are in full ferment. I feel we're trying to find something that I'm not sure will appear.

That provokes uncertainty. People are on edge. The shortages and psychological pressure of the health situation are affecting people. It's difficult.

I don't know, however, if what's happening now will provoke more exile and fleeing.

It depends a lot on the possibilities of finding a space of accommodation, which Cubans had for 50 years in the U.S., but which is now more complicated since the end of the Obama period, when the policies of welcoming Cubans ended.