By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Apr 2 2002 (IPS)

Writing in Cuba implies risks and challenges that instead of being obstacles can turn into true stimuli for creativity, says Leonardo Padura, one of the most widely read local novelists in this socialist-run country.

“When the writer finds himself faced with the decision about what he can and cannot say, about what one can or cannot reflect on, it is artistic resources that save him,” Padura told IPS.

Author of numerous essays, short stories and novels, Padura achieved with literature what was nearly impossible for him to do as a reporter for ‘Juventud Rebelde’, the newspaper of the Communist Youth and the second leading daily in Cuba.

In each of his four crime novels of the 1990s, the writer uses the plot formula to “question reality”.

The readers have to realise “that I don’t attempt to fool them into entering a social context, one that is vital and human, much more complex, specifically that of contemporary Cuba,” he said.

Appearing in the stories are corruption, oppression against homosexuals and intellectuals, double standards, social exclusion and drugs, as well as “the necessity to find a space for reflection about a world that is very closed.”

The themes taken up in his writing are unusual in this country with its socialist government, where all the communications media and publishing houses are controlled by the state.

“Pasado perfecto” (Past Perfect), “Vientos de cuaresma” (Winds of Lent), “Máscaras” (Masks) and “Paisaje de otoño” (Autumn Landscape), written between 1990 and 1997, carved a path for the high expectations caused by the release in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, of Padura’s latest work, “La novela de mi vida” (The Novel of My Life).

Some 70 copies of the Dominican edition were sold in Havana after the book won the International Prize for the Novel, granted by the ‘Casa de Teatro’, a cultural institution based in the Dominican Republic.

Those few copies, while the reading public awaits the novel’s publication in Cuba, announced for later this year, are passing from hand to hand, and are even being rented, by those who just cannot wait to read the new Padura book.

“It is an ambitious novel, the most ambitious that Padura has written and one of the most challenging and complex that a Cuban writer has attempted,” commented essayist Jorge Luis Arcos.

“La novela de mi vida”, described as a “complex project” by the author himself, is centred on José María Heredia (1803-1839), a man who was born in Cuba by chance and who hardly lived on the island, but is considered the first Cuban poet.

In parallel, the reader follows the drama of the last years of the life of one of Heredia’s children and the ups and downs of a group of friends that, reaching the end of the 20th century, is engaged in an obsessive search for the poet’s “lost papers”.

Among them is Fernando Terry, who opted for exile after being pushed out of his job as a professor at the University of Havana for having knowledge about the plans of a friend who intended to emigrate from the country illegally.

Terry returns to Havana for a temporary visit to look for the papers that never appear. However, says Padura, “he will find other truths, other certainties about his own life and the life of the country of the last 200 years.”

The novel is a reflection about the formation of the Cuban identity and about exile, friendship, betrayal and power, both in the times of Heredia and of Terry.

Using the 19th century is one of the artistic resources that Padura has “had the luck to turn to” in his effort to delve in the most profound and conflictive side of today’s Cuban reality.

In contrast, “direct political discourse is quite frequent in the contemporary Cuban novel written outside of Cuba,” often distanced from true literary pretensions, commented the author.

The result of the “freedom” enjoyed by novelists in exile has been, in many cases, “a novel exactly like those written in the country in the 1970s, but from the opposite political viewpoint.”

While in that era, following the triumph of the Fidel Castro-led revolution, “they wrote novels of revolutionary reaffirmation, now it is a novel of reaffirmation of opposition,” he added.

Of course each case is unique, but in Padura’s opinion it cannot be denied that the existence of a population in exile for more than four decades has been one of the characteristic traits of Cuban literature, art and life.

“The Cuban family is a divided family, and its sentiments have been utilised in function of one set of politics or another, by one reality or another. We writers either try to reflect that reality or we have to live it,” stated Padura.

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