Posted on Sun, Jan. 15, 2006
BOOKS
Crime (stories) growing in Cuba
By ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ
efernandez@MiamiHerald.com
BOOKS
Crime (stories) growing in Cuba
By ENRIQUE FERNANDEZ
efernandez@MiamiHerald.com
In Cuba, the specter of state censorship haunts literature, creating ''self-censorship'' because writers don't want to test the limits of expression. There's one notable exception: Crime fiction, which has provided a safety valve for exploration of Cuban society's -- and by extension the system's -- underside.
The genre has pushed its limits, both aesthetically and politically, in the Mario Conde series of Leonardo Padura, Cuba's best known and most popular crime writer. And it has also crossed the language barrier, with bilingual authors in and out of Cuba who pen their books in English and enjoy a broader market than writers who depend on the vicissitudes of translation.
In her 2004 book on Cuban and Mexican crime fiction, Crimes Against the State Crimes Against Persons (University of Minnesota Press, $19.95), Persephone Braham identifies the genre as neopoliciacos. The Spanish policiaco, like the French policier, is the name for what in English goes by ''detective'' fiction. The difference is telling. Where the English and American genre stresses the private investigator (Sherlock Holmes), Latin countries focus on the policeman (Inspector Maigret), reflecting societies that privilege the individual or the state, respectively. Of course, the attitudes converge in the figure of the maverick cop (Dirty Harry), an important anti-hero role model for societies like Cuba, and to some extent Mexico, that are or have been run by one-party governments intolerant of dissent.
Policiacos from the early years of the Cuban Revolution, according to Braham, were naively schematic, with the policía as the good revolutionary battling the dastardly plots of exiles and the CIA. But two forces pushed the genre in a different direction.
One was the institutionalization of state-approved Marxist aesthetics -- summed up in the infamous phrase ''within the Revolution everything, against the Revolution nothing.'' Another was disillusionment with the utopianism of a Revolution that revealed its repressive side as well as growing corruption.
TOLERANCE SCALE
Nothing is that simple, however, for the Cuban system has moved back and forth in its tolerance of dissenting artistic voices -- witness the popularity in Cuba of critical songwriters like Carlos Valera or critical films like Strawberry and Chocolate. But in the new Cuban crime fiction, the island's writers fashioned a genre in which they could explore forbidden or at least slippery territory.
For one, even if the hero is a state-employed cop, he (and in the macho culture of both the Revolution and the genre, as Braham shows in her dissection of the genre, it's always a he) is likely to be an outsider, a lone wolf.
For another, the very nature of the investigator's job leads him to the underbelly of society. Thus, the plot of a neopoliciaco uncovers official corruption, crime-based economies, underground lifestyles -- subjects difficult to explore without fear of censorship in other kinds of fiction.
These traits are certainly true of the Mario Conde novels penned by Padura. Conde is a classic maverick cop, although, surprisingly, he is fastidiously ethical and abhors violence. He drinks too much, has trouble hanging onto a steady relationship, and parties with friends who are marginalized from Cuba's state-saturated society; tellingly, his best friend is a crippled veteran of the war in Angola, a Cuban version of a Vietnam vet.
In such company and among the people he encounters in his investigations, it is not uncommon to hear comments harshly critical of the Cuban system. Padura avoids using Conde as his mouthpiece for such criticism and puts the words in the mouths of anti-social types. However, Conde is not above mouthing revolutionary slogans sarcastically -- as most everyone in Cuba does. And his investigations lead him to places where individuals have suffered under the system's boot.
Nowhere is this exposé more revealing than in what is likely the best and trickiest -- for a writer inside Cuba -- novel in the Conde series, Havana Red (Bitter Lemon Press, $13.95). As Braham points out in great detail, machismo is rampant in Cuban culture and to a large extent institutionalized by the Revolution. Conde is no exception; he is an outspoken homophobe.
Which is why he is a perfect foil for the gay world he will encounter as he investigates the case of a young homosexual murdered while wearing a red dress. The leads take him to the home of a flamboyant playwright, who, in turn, introduces Conde to Havana's gay underground. Here, Conde not only questions his homophobia but faces his own sexual ambiguities as he picks up a woman at a gay party but is uncertain as to her (or is it his?) gender.
Most importantly, though, Havana Red opens the Pandora's Box of how the Revolution treated some of Cuba's most talented writers because they were homosexual. The flashy playwright embodies the qualities of Cuba's greatest playwright, Virgilio Piñera, who was treated harshly by the Revolution's macho leadership, a treatment that Conde learns was even more of a crime, albeit a cultural one, than the violent ones he investigates.
And the reader learns that Conde himself has a literary vocation thwarted early on by the Revolution's aesthetic tunnel vision. In Havana Red, Padura lays open the great cultural wound of Castro's Cuba: its poisonous mix of homophobia and artistic repression that has crippled one of the greatest cultural fountains of the Americas.
Nothing is that simple, however, for the Cuban system has moved back and forth in its tolerance of dissenting artistic voices -- witness the popularity in Cuba of critical songwriters like Carlos Valera or critical films like Strawberry and Chocolate. But in the new Cuban crime fiction, the island's writers fashioned a genre in which they could explore forbidden or at least slippery territory.
For one, even if the hero is a state-employed cop, he (and in the macho culture of both the Revolution and the genre, as Braham shows in her dissection of the genre, it's always a he) is likely to be an outsider, a lone wolf.
For another, the very nature of the investigator's job leads him to the underbelly of society. Thus, the plot of a neopoliciaco uncovers official corruption, crime-based economies, underground lifestyles -- subjects difficult to explore without fear of censorship in other kinds of fiction.
These traits are certainly true of the Mario Conde novels penned by Padura. Conde is a classic maverick cop, although, surprisingly, he is fastidiously ethical and abhors violence. He drinks too much, has trouble hanging onto a steady relationship, and parties with friends who are marginalized from Cuba's state-saturated society; tellingly, his best friend is a crippled veteran of the war in Angola, a Cuban version of a Vietnam vet.
In such company and among the people he encounters in his investigations, it is not uncommon to hear comments harshly critical of the Cuban system. Padura avoids using Conde as his mouthpiece for such criticism and puts the words in the mouths of anti-social types. However, Conde is not above mouthing revolutionary slogans sarcastically -- as most everyone in Cuba does. And his investigations lead him to places where individuals have suffered under the system's boot.
Nowhere is this exposé more revealing than in what is likely the best and trickiest -- for a writer inside Cuba -- novel in the Conde series, Havana Red (Bitter Lemon Press, $13.95). As Braham points out in great detail, machismo is rampant in Cuban culture and to a large extent institutionalized by the Revolution. Conde is no exception; he is an outspoken homophobe.
Which is why he is a perfect foil for the gay world he will encounter as he investigates the case of a young homosexual murdered while wearing a red dress. The leads take him to the home of a flamboyant playwright, who, in turn, introduces Conde to Havana's gay underground. Here, Conde not only questions his homophobia but faces his own sexual ambiguities as he picks up a woman at a gay party but is uncertain as to her (or is it his?) gender.
Most importantly, though, Havana Red opens the Pandora's Box of how the Revolution treated some of Cuba's most talented writers because they were homosexual. The flashy playwright embodies the qualities of Cuba's greatest playwright, Virgilio Piñera, who was treated harshly by the Revolution's macho leadership, a treatment that Conde learns was even more of a crime, albeit a cultural one, than the violent ones he investigates.
And the reader learns that Conde himself has a literary vocation thwarted early on by the Revolution's aesthetic tunnel vision. In Havana Red, Padura lays open the great cultural wound of Castro's Cuba: its poisonous mix of homophobia and artistic repression that has crippled one of the greatest cultural fountains of the Americas.
UNDERGROUND GUY
In his more recent novel, La neblina del ayer (Tusquets, $21.95) Padura's hero has moved further away from the system and deeper into the world of culture. He has dropped out of the force and become an old-book merchant, which makes him a member of the underground private-enterprise economy.
Of course, there is a crime and his cop instincts drive him to investigate it, turning him into that most non-socialist beast, a private eye. The anti-system comments run freely within its pages and one feels writer and character have run out of what little sympathy they had left for the Revolution.
This feeling is common to most neopoliciaco writers, according to one who left the island and writes crime books where Castro himself is not just criticized but ridiculed. José Latour is exiled in Canada and during a visit to the Miami Book Fair International in November, he would not name writers but merely said ``most of them would like to get out.''
An economist by training, Latour worked for the government as an analyst, a job that, along with his English-language skills (he was educated in a Havana bilingual school and traveled extensively throughout the United States in his youth), allowed him to see how the Cuban system was doomed to fail. ''I was reading The Economist and The Harvard Review and knew about Cuba's economic troubles even before the ministers,'' he said.
Latour does not visit the aesthetic minefield that Padura explores. Instead, in his latest novel, Comrades in Miami (Grove Press, $23), he dwells on precisely the Cuban system's lack of economic viability. A young married couple, successful within the system and the wife even respected by Castro himself, comes to the same conclusions Latour did in his days as an analyst. Cuba is doomed.
They plan an elaborate economic scam and escape, and they play a cat-and-mouse game with Cuban and American authorities. Latour's type of crime novel has been called ''Cuban noir,'' and like the Hollywood films that moniker invokes, his plot leads to mayhem rather than to the neat solution of a crime.
It was his international success that allowed Latour the economic freedom -- he kept his royalties in Canadian banks -- to defect, something Latour insists the Cuban government knew he'd do but allowed because the system would rather be rid of its enemies, even if it means letting them be exiled.
That success was partially due to the same bilingualism that made him see the Cuban economy under the light of American and British analyses. Latour writes in English. ''The neopoliciaco is too local, it does not have a big market,'' said Latour, who claimed having seen ''a roomful of unread Spanish-language manuscripts'' in an American publishing house.
Arnaldo Correa is a different case. He lives in Cuba, although like Latour he also writes in English. His Spy's Fate (Akashic Books, $14.95) is a fast-moving thriller, practically an action-movie screenplay, that also explores official corruption and the moves of American and Cuban intelligence.
Although outside Cuba he has been identified as a brave critic of the system, Correa focuses more on plot than exposing social malaise, going nowhere near the cultural territory of Padura or the outright send-ups of Latour. However, the very nature of the neopoliciaco, Cuban noir, or whatever one wants to call Cuban crime fiction, leads to the dark side, where important figures in the supposedly selfless socialist society are driven by greed and a lust for power to indulge in chicanery and crime.
And, like all neopoliciacos, Spy's Fate features a lone-wolf hero, apparently apolitical -- his motivation for taking sudden action that alienates him from the Cuban system is the need to protect his family -- but caught, like a John le Carré character, in the crossfire of counterespionage. In that world, ideology matters little and it's every man for himself.
In his more recent novel, La neblina del ayer (Tusquets, $21.95) Padura's hero has moved further away from the system and deeper into the world of culture. He has dropped out of the force and become an old-book merchant, which makes him a member of the underground private-enterprise economy.
Of course, there is a crime and his cop instincts drive him to investigate it, turning him into that most non-socialist beast, a private eye. The anti-system comments run freely within its pages and one feels writer and character have run out of what little sympathy they had left for the Revolution.
This feeling is common to most neopoliciaco writers, according to one who left the island and writes crime books where Castro himself is not just criticized but ridiculed. José Latour is exiled in Canada and during a visit to the Miami Book Fair International in November, he would not name writers but merely said ``most of them would like to get out.''
An economist by training, Latour worked for the government as an analyst, a job that, along with his English-language skills (he was educated in a Havana bilingual school and traveled extensively throughout the United States in his youth), allowed him to see how the Cuban system was doomed to fail. ''I was reading The Economist and The Harvard Review and knew about Cuba's economic troubles even before the ministers,'' he said.
Latour does not visit the aesthetic minefield that Padura explores. Instead, in his latest novel, Comrades in Miami (Grove Press, $23), he dwells on precisely the Cuban system's lack of economic viability. A young married couple, successful within the system and the wife even respected by Castro himself, comes to the same conclusions Latour did in his days as an analyst. Cuba is doomed.
They plan an elaborate economic scam and escape, and they play a cat-and-mouse game with Cuban and American authorities. Latour's type of crime novel has been called ''Cuban noir,'' and like the Hollywood films that moniker invokes, his plot leads to mayhem rather than to the neat solution of a crime.
It was his international success that allowed Latour the economic freedom -- he kept his royalties in Canadian banks -- to defect, something Latour insists the Cuban government knew he'd do but allowed because the system would rather be rid of its enemies, even if it means letting them be exiled.
That success was partially due to the same bilingualism that made him see the Cuban economy under the light of American and British analyses. Latour writes in English. ''The neopoliciaco is too local, it does not have a big market,'' said Latour, who claimed having seen ''a roomful of unread Spanish-language manuscripts'' in an American publishing house.
Arnaldo Correa is a different case. He lives in Cuba, although like Latour he also writes in English. His Spy's Fate (Akashic Books, $14.95) is a fast-moving thriller, practically an action-movie screenplay, that also explores official corruption and the moves of American and Cuban intelligence.
Although outside Cuba he has been identified as a brave critic of the system, Correa focuses more on plot than exposing social malaise, going nowhere near the cultural territory of Padura or the outright send-ups of Latour. However, the very nature of the neopoliciaco, Cuban noir, or whatever one wants to call Cuban crime fiction, leads to the dark side, where important figures in the supposedly selfless socialist society are driven by greed and a lust for power to indulge in chicanery and crime.
And, like all neopoliciacos, Spy's Fate features a lone-wolf hero, apparently apolitical -- his motivation for taking sudden action that alienates him from the Cuban system is the need to protect his family -- but caught, like a John le Carré character, in the crossfire of counterespionage. In that world, ideology matters little and it's every man for himself.
LOVE BECKONS
In the end, Carlos Manuel, an agent of consummate skill who, pursued by both Cubans and Americans on and off the island, chooses to make a life outside. His motivation is personal and affective -- he has fallen in love. But such individualistic motivation is not supposed to be what moves the New Man of Cuban socialism.
Non-Cuban crime writers have set novels in the island. Clearly, though, Cuban writers have the edge on realism -- Padura's characters speak and act in ways that Cubans can recognize as totally authentic. However, language and the limitations of what even this elastic genre can accommodate in a state-run system make for an uncertain future for the neopoliciacos.
In the meantime, these books, fanciful as their plots may be, are a realistic window for peering into a society reeling with contradictions and with a future as uncertain as the genre it has spawned.
In the end, Carlos Manuel, an agent of consummate skill who, pursued by both Cubans and Americans on and off the island, chooses to make a life outside. His motivation is personal and affective -- he has fallen in love. But such individualistic motivation is not supposed to be what moves the New Man of Cuban socialism.
Non-Cuban crime writers have set novels in the island. Clearly, though, Cuban writers have the edge on realism -- Padura's characters speak and act in ways that Cubans can recognize as totally authentic. However, language and the limitations of what even this elastic genre can accommodate in a state-run system make for an uncertain future for the neopoliciacos.
In the meantime, these books, fanciful as their plots may be, are a realistic window for peering into a society reeling with contradictions and with a future as uncertain as the genre it has spawned.
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