Havana Red by
Leonardo Padura
pbk out April 05
(Bitter Lemon Press)
at £8.99
Havana Red, originally published under the more pertinent if less commercial
title of Masks, is the third of four novels featuring Leonardo Padura's macho
police detective Lieutenant Mario Conde .(A later novel, Adiós Hemingway,
with Conde now a private eye, was published by Canongate in February.)
Padura was the single most widely read author in Cuba in 2004, and is a
pivotal figure on the Cuban crime fiction scene. For he represents a break
from those ideologically correct crime writers encouraged in Cuba since the
1968 revolution (and which accounts for the strength of the genre .)
Conde is something of a hard-boiled anti-hero (Dashiell
Hammett is a key influence– in spirit that is, not in style); in the author's own
words, he is "a solitary guy, gloomy, sceptical, pensive, a heavy drinker." But
he is also, as Padura adds in an author's note, "a metaphor, not a policeman,
and his life, quite simply, unfolds in the possible space that is literature."
Clearly what you are about to read is far from a conventional detective story.
In Havana Red, Conde, temporarily under suspension, is sent into the
Havana Woods to investigate the bloody death of Alexis Arayán Rodríguez,
Havana transvestite and son of Cuba's UNICEF representative. The murder
has taken place on August 6th, a date of some significance on the Catholic
calendar; the corpse is wearing an antiquated red evening dress, the costume
of Electra Garrigó, a key figure in real-life Cuban drama. The trail quickly
leads to Alberto Marqués, a retired writer and theatre director – and a leading
personality in Havana's homosexual underground. Initially antagonistic, the
avowedly heterosexual Conde nevertheless finds himself drawn to this
shadowy world and, as he pursues his investigation, he begins to find some
parallels between this milieu and the wider society of which he is an
increasingly disillusioned if acquiescent member.
Padura is here exploring, from a position in the present, Cuba's recent
history, notably the 1970's repression of homosexuals. Marqués is, in fact,
based on Virgilio Piñera, author of Electra Garrigó and a victim of the period.
At the same time Padura gives us a fascinating picture of the sexual, political
and religious contradictions that exist within Cuba today. It is, however, quite
often a book that requires not a little effort by the reader. Whilst
Padura includes much earthy humour and the occasional lubricious sex scene
or cookery lesson, there are many passages, often from Marqués's point of
view, in high literary mode brimming with a huge variety of cultural allusions.
It's a heady brew then, and with many rewards for the persistent reader.
Havana Red by
Leonardo Padura
