“I’m historical, philosophical, psychological, anthropological and shit-eating.”
Mario Conde, in his own words, is worse than ever. It is 2016 and it seems that new winds are blowing over Cuba: Barack Obama visits the island, the Rolling Stones are going to give a historic concert… But Conde, the most famous creation of the Cuban writer Leonardo Padura (Havana, 1955) has the solid certainty that That party will soon be cancelled.
Like those premonitions that the ex-policeman-turned-old-bookseller feels just below the left nipple when he’s investigating a case, Conde knew what he was talking about.
“Decent Persons” is Padura’s latest novel, and the tenth starring Conde, the character who has allowed him to narrate the Cuban reality of the last decades, with Havana as a backdrop and a great protagonist of his stories.
Two stories are intertwined in it, one that takes place in 1910, in a Cuba that has just emerged from the War of Independence and that anxiously awaits the passage of Halley’s comet, and another in 2016, when Cubans are waiting for another hurricane, the one they trust will finally bring fresh air to the island.
“People want it, need it, almost beg for it, and wait, trusting or mistrusting it. Tired of so much history, in need of hope and spaces. Air, air is needed…”.
Padura is currently involved with his wife, Lucía López Coll, in the possibility of adapting to the cinema “The man who loved dogs”, his successful novel about the assassination of León Trotski at the hands of Ramón Mercader, which has been translated into numerous languages, but he assures that this year he will start writing again. “With or without a Count, but another novel, for sure”.
BBC Mundo spoke with him within the framework of the Hay Festival Cartagena de Indias, which is held from January 26 to 29.
Mario Conde is skeptical and a party pooper like few times. In the end he was right.
Look, he was absolutely right because Mario Conde has an advantage in this novel and that is because its author has seen what happened in the years following that peculiar moment, that hopeful spring of 2016.
Businesses began to prosper, restaurants, hostels, workshops opened, money moved, American tourists came, Cubans went to the United States, they obtained visas with some ease… There was mobility, a whirlwind in society. And the relationship between the two countries was much more dynamic than at any time in the last 60 years.
It was a situation that really came out of what we had experienced before, and that gave us hope that things could change. Unfortunately, a few months later, all this disappeared.
First, the Cuban government began to tighten some of the screws that had come loose. Control was being lost, but Donald Trump came to do them a favor to stop all this situation of coexistence that was being experienced.
Then comes a policy of total closure, the embassy in Havana was practically closed.
In addition, the pandemic came, with all that it meant, and in response to all this process of disenchantment and pessimism, a great migratory wave has occurred, to the point that what has happened, the number of Cubans that exceeds a quarter million that have left Cuba in the last year, It is the biggest migratory crisis that Cuba has had since the Revolution.
It is a bleeding that does not stop, because people no longer trust that things can improve in a social sense, in a general sense, and they are looking for individual solutions for their needs.
Money is good, but control is better. And money may be missing, many times it has been, but control has not, says Conde in the book.
Yes, in socialist systems, control is a reality, a practice that is systemic.
In recent years, events have occurred such as these demonstrations that took place on July 11 two years ago, in which many people took to the streets, and many were arrested and have been prosecuted and sentenced with fairly high sentences.
They are sentences that have often had a more exemplary character, in the sense of saying “if this happens again, look what happened to those who already did it.”
And that’s a way to stay in control.
Trump created a mood between those on the outside and those on the inside, which has also added to this slightly unhealthy environment that exists.
Everything goes through fundamentalist solutions: you are with me or you are against me; there are no third ways, you are mine, or you are contrary, you work with me or you work against me.
One of the central themes of your novels is the disappointment of the promises of the New Man in Cuba. Mayno Count and Cuba overcome more disappointments?
I hope that things in Cuba improve, because the option of exile is not the one that can direct the country. It is a personal solution.
But many things have to change.
I think we should have a much more aggressive attitude and, although the word is quite hackneyed, used and even devalued, we should have a revolutionary attitude, because the revolution can change things, it is to turn things around.
Many things would have to be changed, starting with the economy, and that, in some way, will also have an influence on politics and society.
In the book you reflect on what it means to be decent. There are characters who seem decent and are not, and others labeled as indecent who have an upright position. How does one stay decent when he is surrounded by injustice?
It’s a bit of a tricky question to answer.
Decency, as you know, is that attitude of people, initially of an ethical nature, but with a social effect of good behavior, good relationship with others, honesty, seriousness, fair play.
Conde has always been decent. But in the part of the novel that takes place in the past, there is the character of Arturo Saborit, who is a decent person who at a certain moment crosses a border that puts him in territories of illegality, of perversion.
I wanted to establish a game with these characters, with these codes, but there are others for whom this ethical behavior is also important, including a group that has been highly questioned as to its decency, which is the world of prostitutes.
And that was very evident in that time of 1910, after the War of Independence, with a city that began to grow economically, but that did not give space to women.
There had been a war, many men had died, they needed to support themselves financially and prostitution was the only space left for many.
How can we judge a person who sells his labor power as just another worker? It seems normal to us that someone sells him cutting cane or working in a mine, but not that someone sells him because the only thing he has is his body.
That was a reflection that I wanted to have, to look at prostitution, both that of 1910 and that of 2016, not with a compassionate gaze, but with an understanding gaze.
In the book there are also several characters, intellectuals and artists, who suffer ostracism from the State, each with a different ending. “Assassinate a reputation” you call it. Have you ever felt that?
Look, since the end of the 60s, and throughout the 70s in a very strong way, there was a process of dogmatization of Cuban cultural policy. Those who did not meet certain parameters were excluded. And among those parameters there were issues of a sexual, religious, political nature…
This process was so deep and so unfortunate that two of the great Cuban artists of the 20th century, José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, died in that ostracism, one in 1976 and the other in 1978. They were not published again, they were not published. He spoke of them again, they did not travel again, they were completely marginalized and stigmatized during those years.
This policy slowly began to change in the 1980s, and in the 1990s there was a break between the Cuban institutions and the artists because the crisis of the 1990s came and there was no way to exercise that same control because they did not have the economic possibilities of producing the artwork.
I think that any Cuban creator of these years has felt the steam of that cultural policy in which you begin to learn that there are limits that you cannot transgress because they can punish you.
I am fortunate that I really began to write professionally and consecutively in the 1990s, and that very soon I began to publish with a Spanish publisher, Tusquets. My works go directly from my computer to the computer of my editors in Barcelona. In other words, it does not go through the filter of a Cuban editor, who works in a Cuban publishing house, who belongs to the system of the State or the Cuban Government.
Because when the writer has to carry out his work through a Cuban institution, he generally assumes an attitude of self-censorship. And I believe that self-censorship is one of the most unfortunate intellectual processes to which an artist can be subjected, because you assume the role of executioners.
Self-censorship has been one of the ballasts that has marked Cuban cultural production in recent years. And it has also caused that when certain artists leave Cuba, they go to the opposite extreme and politicize their work in the opposite direction, in the sense of criticizing, condemning, reviewing what has happened in Cuba, but with a very political perspective. . And sometimes that swallows up the very artistic function of a creation, of a literary work.
Have you ever had to self-censor?
Yes, I believe and reviewing this work that Lucía and I are doing now on “The Man Who Loved Dogs”, I myself sometimes wonder, well, how was I able to say things that I say in that novel.
I believe that for many years I have been saying what I need to say, and I try to ensure that this political element is not at a first level.
The Cuban political structure is known, the political changes that may or may not have occurred are also known. Focusing on it, I think, is not what allows us to give a different reflection on society, but what human behavior and the situations in which people see themselves are shown in that reality. And I think I’ve had the chance to do it as freely as possible.
I always consider that there are limits, and this is very difficult to say, but very necessary. They are fundamentally ethical limits, with which one has to have a decent attitude like Mario Conde’s.
At one point in the book, Mario Conde invites his wife and friends to eat and says: “we are going to feel like people”. Someas of the people that BBC Mundo has interviewed in this latest migratory wave say that they are leaving Cuba because they do not live there, they survive.
Yes. I do not stop observing what is happening around me, because I feed on that more than on my own life experience.
In a novel I create 20 characters who may have a few drops of my blood, but the rest is blood that I have drunk from those around me. We are a bit like vampires, or even worse, ticks that feed on other people’s blood in order to create our literature.
I think that while pockets of wealth have been created in Cuba, the stain of widespread poverty has been spreading.
And there are people who for years, years, years, do not eat in a restaurant or do not have vacations on a beach. And today there are people in Cuba who smoke and they have to do it with chopped tobacco and pages from telephone directories, because they don’t have enough money to buy cigarettes.
And that extends over the days, the weeks, the months, the years. People who have worked 40 years, re They receive a pension of $2,500 pesos ($104 dollars), in a country where that pack of cigarettes is worth $200 pesos, that is, almost 10% of a pension.
Life is very complicated and, in the case of Conde, with his attitude, with his irresponsibility of his economic sense, because as soon as he has some money he tells Tamara, “let’s feel like people and try to enjoy an afternoon.”
This is a small chapter that I think is the one I like the most of the entire book, that trip that Conde takes with his friends to that world of happiness, where everything works, you eat well, you drink well, good music is heard, you are in a nice place, people love each other. And he knows that it is a transitory state, that it is a tiny space, but he tries to enjoy it deeply.
I think it’s a pretty common attitude on the island. Sometimes one wonders how it is possible that in Cuba people throw so many parties, that they consume so much music and if they can try to drink that day the rum or the beer or whatever appears.
And it is that people need to be in that state of happiness for a while.
whatand youAre you skeptical like Conde or do you maintain the optimism that things will get better at some point?
Look, I am optimistic on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. On Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays I am pessimistic and on Sundays I rest. There are days when I think it’s possible and days when I feel like it’s impossible. And that makes me feel, when I think it is possible, with some optimism, when I feel that it is impossible, with a lot of pessimism.
I believe that many things need to change for us to begin to establish a feeling of optimism towards the future.
Right now, Cuban society is experiencing a very complex moment, with many shortcomings. And although the official propaganda talks about all the efforts made by the state government to improve things, we don’t see the results.
And we have been tired of hearing promises for a long time.
There is an attitude of which I already speak from my novel “La neblina del ayer”, which is from 2005, where Conde talks to his friends about historical fatigue, that we are already tired of living for so long in history and we want to live in history. normal.
That cost me criticism from fundamentalists who said: well, but the normality of Latin America is misery, exploitation, dictatorship, I don’t know what. And I say: no, it is that we have lived so much, so much, so much in History, that we now need to get out of History and enter into a coherence that we have not managed to achieve.
And I hope things change because I tell you, most people continue to live in Cuba. 2.4% of the population has left, 97.6% remain in Cuba and hopefully these people can live better, hopefully.
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