They are a doctor, veterinarian, computer engineer or doctor in physics. Young and educated, they form what they call the “Clan”. A group of very close friends who often meet at Clara’s, who owns a large house in the Fontanar neighborhood of Havana.
One day in 1990, the suspicious death of one of their friends, Walter, who threw himself from the top of a building in central Havana, will have the effect of a slow and silent explosion that will explode the group, which will disperse – in Argentina, the United States, Puerto Rico or Spain.
In 2016, when Clara’s youngest son Marcos, recently exiled to Miami, sees a group photograph taken on his mother’s birthday in January 1990 that recently appeared on Facebook, a lot of nostalgia and buried secrets will resurface. .
With Dust in the wind, a complex crossover that spans from 1990 to 2016, Cuban novelist Leonardo Padura (Death of a Chinese in Havana, The man who loved dogs) directly addresses the “Special Period”, a Castroist euphemism that was used to designate the terrible economic crisis that followed the collapse of the Soviet Empire, the Cuban regime having been left to its own devices, deprived of aid Moscow financial institution.
Years of chaos, rampant blackouts, layoffs, scarcity of food and essentials. Years of hunger and resourcefulness during which those who could – or had to – are often gone.
Left aboard makeshift rafts or by plane, accumulating all the savings of their loved ones and provided with a false invitation to a conference in Spain. Gone before going mad, driven by something stronger than the feeling of belonging or being uprooted, much stronger than family or friends: the desire to live without fear.
Despite this, the author of Dust in the wind – a direct reference to the famous 1977 song by the group Kansas, Dust in the Wind-, they may have traded one evil for another by joining cohorts of broken beings abroad, “nourished by emotional memory and the sweet illusion of a dream of return”, aging far from their loved ones . Each of them carrying their weight of loneliness.
As in many of his books – let’s think about What wanted to happen or to The transparency of time (Métailié, 2016 and 2019) -, the writer born in 1955 in Havana, in the district of Mantilla where he still lives, delivers here with nuance the portrait of a “romantic and sacrificed” generation, moral victim of bankruptcy of the revolution. Here, those who have left the island often carry an impossible gap, well hidden behind their material success. ” We are and at the same time we are not, ”one of the characters will say.
With this thirteenth novel, crossed by tropical melancholy and rocked by the heartbreaking melody of exile, and in which we can also see similarities with the film Return to Ithaca (2014) co-written with director Laurent Cantet, Leonardo Padura, the creator of detective Mario Condé and the most widely read Cuban writer in the world, gives the best of himself. A social and intimate novel of great magnitude.