A few months ago, the Spanish Embassy in Havana arranged a party to celebrate the state of literature in Cuba. The event, held in the Palacio Velasco Sarra, a neocolonial building at the edge of the Old City, was a study in caution. Fidel Castro had shut down the Embassy’s cultural center in 2003, fearing that it was cultivating subversion, and it had just begun to reinstate its programs. The Ambassador described the evening as part of “the classic diplomatic work we needed to adapt to the Cuban reality.”
The highlight was a talk by Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a short, dark, solid-looking man with a beard fading to white and the inscrutable look of a canny country priest. Padura is an unusual figure in contemporary Cuba: a novelist, a journalist, and a social critic who has skirted punishment by the ruling Communist Party. He is best known as the author of a half-dozen detective novels, which have gathered a passionate following both on and off the island. Padura isn’t a dissident, in the way of Solzhenitsyn, but neither is he just an entertainer. For Cuba’s intellectuals, and for its professional class, a new Padura book is as much a document as a novel, a way of understanding Cuban reality. Although he speaks carefully in public, in private he will acknowledge, “People think that what I say is a measure of what can or can’t be said in Cuba.” Last year, he was awarded the country’s National Literature Prize, a tribute both to his literary achievement and to his political agility.
The Embassy event had drawn three hundred expectant listeners—and, according to one diplomat in the audience, a handful of government minders. Padura spoke mostly about the discipline of being a writer, and when he approached the issue of censorship he did a careful two-step. “There is no current policy of what should or should not be published,” he told the crowd. “I believe enough space has been achieved for almost everything to be published in Cuba.” But he also suggested that there were consequences to decades of rigid control: “I think the Cuban reader has grown unaware of what his own countrymen are writing, of what Cuban authors are publishing right now in the world.” . . .
