Havana, spring 2016. After five decades of American blockade and stubborn antagonism, the Cuban capital is preparing for the “historic” visit of US President Barack Obama and for the equally historic Rolling Stones concert.
At a time when the city is in turmoil, in a Cuba “which gets rid of its frustrations by nurturing forgetfulness”, a former senior official is found dead in his apartment with a few fingers missing and his genitals severed.
This man, Reynaldo Quevedo, known as the Abominable, had for years persecuted, supposedly in the name of ideological purity, artists, writers and homosexuals, each time finding a way to enrich himself at their expense. A second murder, committed in similar circumstances, will quickly be added.
The latest novel by Cuban Leonardo Padura, Tropical hurricanesis the 10e of the detective series through which the writer has been weaving since 1991 a living chronicle of contemporary Cuban society. It is the most detective and perhaps also the darkest.
An attentive witness to the social changes affecting the largest island in the Antilles, Leonardo Padura takes an uncompromising look at Cuban reality. And the writer has never hesitated to tackle certain national taboos head-on in his work: social inequalities, crime or racism.
His lifelong hero, a former policeman who became a book dealer, as much out of love for literature as out of necessity, a history buff and “hungry for memories”, Mario Conde – who prefers, let it be said, the Beatles – accepts a well-paid job as an anonymous security guard in a new tourist bar. At the same time, he will collaborate in the investigation of this double murder to be of service to a police officer friend, overwhelmed ahead of the preparations for Obama’s visit.
Despite the illusions of freedom sweeping through the country, Conde has the impression that his world is turning upside down: Tamara, his wife, is preparing to leave Cuba to spend some time in Italy with her son. Will she come back? His best friend, Conejo, has been in Miami for two years. Old friends die. Times are hard.
But Conde, who has dreamed of being a writer for a long time, has also decided to start writing a novel. Archives he found plunge us into Havana in 1910, when two factions of powerful pimps will clash.
The two stories, 2016 and 1910, will thus alternate. And if Padura doesn’t make anything explicit, we sense that writing is for his protagonist a form of escape from reality, in which he feels more and more like an alien — and “poor and old and pessimistic.”
A story of theft and concealment of works of art, a bit like in The transparency of time (Métailié, 2019), but this time seasoned with influence peddling and direct denunciation of the abuses of a privileged class of the Cuban communist regime.
Tropical hurricanes is slow and perhaps too long. But we do not necessarily read the “detective” novels of Leonardo Padura, considered out of category by many and the best Cuban writer of his generation, to find the codes of the genre without alterations.
We also read it to take a trip to Cuba, take the pulse of the country, adopt a different rhythm.