La Habana As a Site of Disenchantment in the Work of Leonardo Padura Fuentes

Provided by the author(s) and NUI Galway in accordance with publisher policies. Please cite the published version when available. Title La Habana as a site of disenchantment in the work of Leonardo Padura Fuentes Author(s) Gallagher, Eilis Publication Date 2013-09-27 Item record http://hdl.handle.net/10379/4445 Downloaded 2021-09-28T21:12:07Z Some rights reserved. For more information, please see the item record link above. La Habana as a Site of Disenchantment in the Work of Leonardo Padura Fuentes Éilis Gallagher Academic Supervisors: Dr. Kate Quinn Prof. Bill Richardson Dr. Lorraine Kelly Dr. Mel Boland School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures Department of Spanish National University of Ireland, Galway September 2013 Table of Contents Acknowledgements Summary of the Contents Introduction 1 Chapter One The Disenchanted City of Leonardo Padura’s Las cuatro estaciones Introduction 10 1.1. Crime Fiction in Cuba: From Propaganda to Denuncia 12 1.2. Memories of La Habana; Use of Memory in Pasado perfecto and Vientos de cuaresma 15 1.3. The Heretic City; Representations of La Habana in Máscaras 24 1.4. Representations of La Habana in Paisaje de otoño 38 Chapter Two La novela de mi vida; History and Disenchantment repeated Introduction 49 2.1. José Maria Heredia: Historical Background and Legacies 50 2.2. Inventing Cuban National Identity 58 2.3. Historical Fiction and Inaccuracy 68 Chapter Three Generational Disenchantment and la doble moral in La neblina del ayer Introduction 79 3.1. Habana’s Generational Divide; The Disenchanted and the Dollar Generations 80 3.2. Drugs and Mafias in La Habana: The Past Echoes in the Present 91 3.3. Mapping Changes in La Habana; The labyrinth Between the Imagined Pre-revolutionary City and Post-Special Period Reality 101 Chapter Four Debunking the socialist dream: El hombre que amaba a los perros Introduction 114 4.1. An Historical and Generational Journey to Disenchantment 116 4.2. Ramón Mercader: The disenchanted villain/victim 128 4.3. The Fall of the Perverted Utopia 135 Conclusion 145 Bibliography 150 Acknowledgements Firstly, I would like to thank my primary supervisor, Dr. Kate Quinn, for her encouragement and support throughout this process, without which I would never have completed this thesis. Secondly, I would like to thank the members of my Graduate Research Committee, Prof. Bill Richardson, Dr. Lorraine Kelly and Dr. Mel Boland for their words of advice. I would also like to acknowledge Prof. Bill Richardson and the Spanish Department at NUI Galway for giving me the opportunity to teach Spanish which has always been my main motivation for working towards a PhD. Thirdly, I would like to thank my mother, brothers and sisters for their support. I owe a special thanks to my good friend Jennie and the girls in 206 who helped make this project a lot more enjoyable. I also owe endless gratitude to my partner Isaac for his love and support and also to my son Miguel. Finally I would like to dedicate this thesis to my mother Margaret and to the memory of my father, Michael. Summary of the Contents This thesis establishes that disenchantment in the city of La Habana is a recurring theme in the narrative of Cuban author Leonardo Padura Fuentes. It involves a close reading of seven novels written and published between 1991 and 2009. Based chronologically on the publication of each of the seven novels analysed, each Chapter evaluates how the author represents a different contributing factor or factors to the disenchantment of the city of La Habana in his novels. Disenchantment in this thesis refers to the state of disillusion and disappointment felt by the inhabitants of the city of La Habana with the Cuban Revolution. His historical fiction shows a similar concern with political disenchantment. Disenchantment is most strongly felt by Padura’s own generation; those who were born in the 1950s and educated solely by the Revolution. Although there have been several studies published on the detective fiction of Padura, to my knowledge no extensive study has yet been carried out which is specific to the theme of disenchantment and the city in the work of Padura, thereby making this thesis an original contribution to knowledge. Introduction Introduction The central aim of this thesis is to show that disenchantment in the city of La Habana is central to the work of Cuban author Leonardo Padura. This study, which will involve a close reading of seven novels by Padura written between the years 1991 and 2009, aims to illustrate how disenchantment takes various forms in his narrative and how his novels can be read as a means to understanding the city of La Habana as a site of disenchantment. In order to clarify the aim of this thesis, I will offer a definition of disenchantment as it is applied in this work. Disenchantment in this thesis refers to the state of disillusion and disappointment felt by the inhabitants of the city of La Habana with the Cuban Revolution, as illustrated by Padura in his fiction. It implies that a feeling of optimism and belief in the revolutionary process once existed but has since been converted to a sense of loss, dissatisfaction and disbelief in the system. I will argue that this feeling of disenchantment exists as a central theme in Padura’s novelistic representation of La Habana in his novels. This sense of disenchantment is most strongly felt by Leonardo Padura’s generation; those who were born in the 1950s and educated solely by the Revolution. Born in La Habana in 1955, Padura is of the first generation of Cubans to be educated fully by the Revolution. He worked initially as an investigative journalist for a literary magazine called El Caimán Barbudo. However, Padura’s willingness to write about topics the authorities would rather keep out of the press did not go unnoticed and he was sent to work for another magazine Juventud Rebelde, where he would be under stricter watch (Pérez González 2012: 15). His first work of fiction, Fiebre de caballos, was a romantic novel, written in 1984. He continued to work in journalism and published his second novel Pasado perfecto, the first novel of the Mario Conde series Las cuatro estaciones in 1991. Bound by the ties of censorship, Padura was limited in his factual writings, as to how he could reflect in his work his vision of Cuba and La Habana. Pérez González points out that Padura opted as a journalist for a more cautious strategy for addressing Cuba’s problems as a journalist 1 Introduction by writing about episodes and characters from the past.1 While it is arguable that Padura maintains this strategy of focusing on the past to shed light on Cuba’s present in his fiction, he always includes a present day protagonist in his narratives which serves to comment on Cuba’s current reality. From the time of Castro’s famous speech in 1961 “Palabras a los intelectuales” in which he declared “Dentro de la Revolución todo; fuera de la Revolución nada”, it was clear that only art that supported the Revolution would be tolerated. However, censorship was not severely tightened until the 1970s, which led to the exile of many Cuban intellectuals. This period, known as “el quinquenio gris”, coincides with the emergence of the Cuban style of socialist crime fiction. It is also a period that Padura returns to repeatedly in his fiction and is one which plays a formative influence in his depiction of the development of a sense of disenchantment. This style of socialist crime fiction was promoted by the Cuban authorities as a propaganda tool which served to extol socialism over the evils of capitalism.2 Padura, who openly criticised the limitations of the Cuban crime novel in his essay “Modernidad y posmodernidad: La novela policial en Iberoamérica”, writes ‘‘En lo esencial, sin embargo, se trabajó sobre una retórica que se repetía de obra en obra y sobre un modelo que difícilmente permetía las innovaciones genéricas e, incluso, la profundización artística de los contenidos o la problemataización veraz de los personajes” (Padura 1999: 48). Padura was one of the first Cuban writers to subvert Cuban socialist crime fiction. Rather than extol the Revolution, Padura’s novels highlight its errors. In an interview with Magdalena López in 2006, Padura explains his motives for writing crime fiction: “[es] una novela que enseguida te conecta con lo peor de la sociedad. Te coloca inmediatamente en su lado oscuro. En el caso de mis novelas, donde lo reflexivo tiene mayor peso argumental, creo que el género permite la reflexión social e histórica” (López 2007: 166). While a number of critics have written on Leonardo Padura, few have looked specifically at disenchantment and even those who do, have only done so in a very limited manner. Most literary critics who have published work on Padura have 1 For more on journalism under Castro see Juan Orlando Pérez González “Revolution Is Such a Beautiful Word! Literary Journalism in Castro’s Cuba”. 2 Critics such as Simpson (1990), Braham (2004) and Wilkinson (2006) have examined this fiction. 2 Introduction focused on the Mario Conde series, particularly in relation to the genre of crime fiction. Stephen Wilkinson in Detective Fiction in Cuban Society and Culture, which traces the development of the detective novel in Cuba, dedicates three of ten Chapters to Padura’s Conde series. Employing theories by Lukacs and Sartre, Wilkinson focuses on el Conde’s preoccupation with existence and self identity. He also carries out a postmodern reading of the series, referring to theories by Lyotard. Wilkinson devotes one Chapter to sexual and political intolerance through a comparative study of Padura’s Máscaras and the film Fresa y chocolate (1993: Gutiérrez Alea and Tabío).

Load more