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Padura Fuentes speaks on his detective, Cuba and nostalgia |
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| 12/12/2009 |
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Last night, director Gabriele Salvatores presented the Raymond Chandler Award to Cuban writer Leonardo Padura Fuentes. Yesterday morning, the man behind literary detective Mario Conde met with the Courmayeur public, in a Q&A conducted by Valerio Calzolaio and Sebastiano Triulzi. Below are excerpts of some of Padura Fuentes’ thoughts on Conde, Cuba, literature’s role, relations with the US and nostalgia, edited by Daniela Basso and Rosa Polacco, whose lengthy interview with the Cuban writer appears in the Festival catalogue.
Mario Conde expresses what I myself feel about my relationship to life, the spirit, society. But he does it from the perspective of a literary character, and that perspective tends to be much more dramatic [than mine], just like in a novel. Conde also has a rather obsessive relationship with the past, like I do. I think that a country without a past is extremely impoverished, but the past is a sum and a juxtaposition of reality, from which the truth should not be excluded for political and personal purposes. Both Conde and I see in the past the foundations of the present, the reasons for how we were and how we are, and why we’ve arrived at a certain current situation.
In all [the Conde] stories, the past is a weight he must carry and against which he must fight. For me, the past is also a source for investigating the Cuban identity, its characteristics as a cultural entity and a specific historical entity. That’s why I think it’s impossible to lock away memory, or to weed out the past: a country’s memory and past don’t belong to a single person but a nation, and the nation is above all of us. And where we try to bury the past, or memory, we will hear their cries, because they have a capacity to resist that transcends generations and suppression.
Cuba is a strange country, it’s like a kaleidoscope, a country with too many superimposed realities. A country without one single reality but with many diverse realities, sometimes even opposing ones. Often, Cuba’s seeming immobility is seen by Europe as a restraint, while from most Latin American perspectives it’s seen as a symbol of resistance and constancy. Certainly, both perspectives are right, depending on their interests and their political positions. But remember, I said “seeming immobility,” because even this must be evaluated: is Cuba moving or still? The way I see it, Cuba is moving and not moving at the same time. Today, for example, there is almost nothing left of the Cuba of 1989 or of last year. But what little there is left is decisive, as it involves the political system created by Fidel and inherited by Raúl. From the 1990s through today, Cuban society has undergone an infinite number of transformations, and the current society has little to do with the society that Fidel wanted to create.
There is administrative corruption in Cuba, prostitution, the black market, an uneven distribution of wealth, etc.; there also exist two currencies, independent workers, an opening in the commercial sector and an acceptance of art that didn’t exist before. And there exist youths who are often indifferent to social projects and who seek individual solutions, often outside the country. Despite that, I believe that Cuba hasn’t moved as much as it should, especially with regard to its economic structure, and I believe this jeopardizes the very stability and future of the country.
Literature has a social role and must fulfill its role as literature, in the same way that journalism must fulfill its journalistic function. It might happen that these two functions overlap and it works, but when literature tries to appropriate journalism’s role it risks being too anchored in the immediate, the ephemeral and thus losing its vitality. What is important in all of this is that when a reflection upon reality, be it literary or journalistic, aspires to become a social project, it runs risks, which the writer must assume. The truth is always inconvenient, always harsh, always dangerous. The problem lies in understanding whether the truth of the writer or journalist can be sustained.
If you believe it can, if you believe in what you sustain, and further believe that that truth must be spoken or shown, then you must commit to doing it, as well as assume the risks. Literature cannot replace journalism, because they have different but concomitant roles. Cuban fiction of the last 20 years has also sought to report the news, because journalism, which must make too many compromises, didn’t want to do it (in Cuba almost everything is “official” except, for example, the blogs the exist today thanks to the Internet). The result is that a part of fiction has been left behind, along with that reality that seeks to reflect, because art must work more on the permanent than the circumstantial. The latter, however, is the primary source of journalism.
With regard to the cultural relations between Cuba and the United States, Hemingway is a very special chapter, because he’s famous, he’s as big a legend in Cuba as he in his own country. His work was very much followed in Cuba, he was very strongly influenced by various Cuban writers and this is in some way proof of the cultural proximity between two countries that are geographically close and share ties in music, sport (baseball is the best example), history and even a political antagonism of 50 years, which in some ways has irradiated throughout the world. I hope that that which draws us closer, which identifies us as a culture and identity, can sooner or later get the upper hand over politics, hostilities, the anxiety of domination; and can be seen on the level of a very strong cultural and historical community that exists between both countries.
Nostalgia is one of the purest and most pleasant emotions: because it can connect us to the past in a subtle way, without remorse, yet it can sometimes be aggressive and oppressive. “Desencanto” is more related to man’s relationship to his surroundings, to the people and realities around him, and in my literature there is a lot of “desencanto” (like in the great majority of Cuban literature of the last two decades), because we have experienced a “desencanto.” Exile is a like a curse that has persecuted us since we became Cubans, that is, for two centuries. Exile marked the life of José María Heredia and that entire literary generation: padre Varela (who is awaiting beatification from the Vatican), Domingo del Monte, Cirilo Villaverde (the first Cuban novelist), José Antonio Saco, as well as José Martí, the greatest of Cubans, who suffered exile. There are two million Cubans who live in exile, even part of my own family is in exile. Exile is always painful, it marks people and countries, how could I have written about Cuba and Cubans if I hadn’t faced nostalgia, the “desencanto” of exile?
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