Leonardo Padura (Cuba)

Leonardo Padura is a Cuban writer born in Havana in 1955. He is known as an independent intellectual who combines in his works a sense of popular culture with a scholar’s critical perspective on society, introducing existential, philosophical, and historical dimensions. Padura is currently the most internationally renowned and translated Cuban writer, having received numerous international awards. Although he also holds Spanish citizenship and travels the world promoting his work, he has, unlike many of his contemporaries, remained loyal to his homeland, making him one of the very few writers who have stayed in Cuba.

The love for his homeland is undoubtedly one of the defining features of Padura’s work: his descriptions of Cuba, scarred by communist rhetoric and repression, and the decadent allure of Havana are undeniable charms in his books. “His anchor was so firmly in place that it wasn’t worth pondering; it was simply hopelessly fixed in his physiological need to belong somewhere,” he says through his fictional character Mario Conde.

Padura’s international fame has primarily come from his series of novels featuring the protagonist, Mario Conde, a police detective who represents a disillusioned generation of Cubans. The writer himself has described this series as a kind of chronicle of Cuban life: the ten books published over several decades provide a realistic portrayal of the changes Cuba has undergone since the late 1980s, when the economic crisis following the collapse of the Soviet Union loomed, up to the significant 2016 visit of Barack Obama to Cuba. The protagonist also looks back at his youth in the 1960s, a period marked by communist rhetoric that would be familiar to an Estonian reader.

Padura himself has called his novels “fake crime novels,” as he places greater emphasis on the atmosphere and the characters than on the murder mystery: “I have had a very conscious desire to use certain crime novel techniques to write novels that are existential, philosophical, historical, and above all, social in nature,” he affirms. In addition to the Conde series, Padura has written about the Cuban exile, Lev Trotsky’s assassin Ramón Mercader, as well as novellas and essays.

In Estonian, the first four books of the Mario Conde series, translated by Maarja Paesalu and published by Toledo, have been released. These novels, set in 1989, include “Laitmatu minevik” (“Havana Blue”), “Havanna tuuled” (“Havana Golds”), “Maskiball” (“Havana Red”), and “Sügismaastik” (“Havana Black”). The series, forming a full year cycle, is known as “Four Seasons” or “The Havana Quartet.”