Hammett of Cuba

All of a sudden, Leonardo Paduro Fuentes, perhaps one of Cuba’s most prominent crime writers, is everywhere. His novel ADIOS HEMINGWAY is just out from Canongate, and another one, HAVANA RED, has been released in the UK by Bitter Lemon Press. Stephen Wilkinson interviews the author for SHOTS about his work, political motivation and specific aims:

SW: Could you explain why you took the decision to transform the Cuban detective genre and how you did it?

LP: When I began to write the first novel in the series I did not
propose to change anything. I simply had the intention to write a novel
– and it is important to say that I had the plan to write a ‘novel’,
which would have a detective character. It is important to emphasise
the nature of this ‘character.’ Well, that is to say it would not be a
typical detective novel. In the end it would have the characteristic of
being a detective novel that would not resemble any of the Cuban
detective novels that had been written up to that point. This was my
intention. I wanted to write about a Cuban reality, with an incisive
vision of this reality, from within Cuban reality. I have always
understood literature as having a social function. Perhaps something
that was lacking in Cuban detective writing previously was this social
perspective. We are talking about novels where the most important thing
had been to present a certain political content or where the aim was
simply to tell a spy or detective adventure and nothing else.

The result was that my novel contrasted sharply with what had been done
before and that set a standard for others to follow along a similar
path of social investigation through detective novels. In essence, the
same had been done in Spain by Vazquez Montalban, something similar in
Mexico by Paco Ignacio Taibo II or long before that in the US by
Hammett, Chandler and Chester Himes. The one thing that is for certain
is the path along which the Cuban detective novel was heading led
towards an artistic abyss and I did not wish to throw myself off the
same cliff of insignificance or pure political propaganda. As far as
the literary part goes, I did all I could with the language and
characterisations so that they would be interesting and representative.
I played with structure and the verbal tenses. Above all I tried to
make literature in the best way I knew how.

I’ve got HEMINGWAY in my TBR pile and it’s going to get moved up real soon.