The Havana Culture website when not promoting Cuban rum carries a few interesting cultural titbits such as this video interview with Leonardo Padura Fuentes -- the Cuban crime fiction writer.
Leonardo Padura Fuentes is the most widely known author working in Cuba today. He has written movie scripts, two books of short stories and a series of detective novels translated into 10 languages at last count. His political essays serve as teaching aides for university courses around the world.
I love Padura Fuentes fiction and his The four seasons/ Havanna Quartet is an observant window into contemporary Cuba and the outlook of his generation, born after 1959. I highly recommend the read for an insight into the contradictions of the present Cuban experience.
His writing is a seductive mix of outlooks which mesh together and try , you could almost say they compete with one another, to come to some sort of political resolution -- even though the novels don't seem to be "political " in the ideological sense we may expect. But the stories house an ongoing dialogue that moves back and forth through time in order to give the present a substance that may give it tolerable meaning. Padura's characters may be alienated but their estrangement has neither a meaning nor etiology that can be identified in the way we may engage with our own disaffections.
So if you want to begin to understand Cuba today -- maybe in the crime fiction of Leonardo Padura Fuentes is where you can start.
LEONARDO PADURA / Leonardo Padura's interview
