Editor’s Note: Leonardo Padura Fuentes is the internationally acclaimed author of several novels including the “Havana Quartet”, a series of detective novels featuring Havana police Inspector Mario Conde. The latest installment, available in English, in that series is Havana Red. Havana Red was awarded the Dashiell Hammett prize for detective fiction in Spain in 2004. Adios Hemingway, the next Mario Conde mystery, is due out this month. Padura lives in Havana, Cuba.
PA: Do you favor the detective/crime fiction genre? If so, why?
LP: I remember that back in 1977, when I wrote the first book review that I had published in a magazine, it was a commentary on a crime novel. Since that time, when I was a liberal arts student at the University of Havana and wasn’t even dreaming of being a fiction writer, I was already very close to the crime novel, dark, detectivesque, or whatever you want to call it, but at the same time I was developing my preferences for the approaches of authors such as Hammett and Chandler. ...
PA: Havana Red addresses the very sensitive issue of gay and lesbian and transgendered rights in Cuba. How would you describe attitudes on this subject in Cuba today? Based on your travels and knowledge of other countries, how do attitudes in Cuba compare to international sentiments on this matter?
LP: Fortunately, in today’s Cuba the problem of homosexuality has stopped being a social “illness” and has remained only as a problem of a family nature, being that the Cuban family, by tradition, is very machista and homosexuality has always been badly regarded. But even so, many families accept it as something normal, even though it’s not exactly celebrated. Gays and lesbians always had full civil rights in Cuba....
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/3091/1/158/
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