Murder, kidnappings, missing persons, lethal passions: How does socialism deal with these crimes so deeply involved with greed, psychopaths, envy, money, property, in a word, with capitalism?
In the seventies, Cuba embarked on an ambitious effort to promote a literary genre that would be both entertaining and extol revolutionary values: detective and counter-espionage novels. The espionage works usually focused on CIA attempts to infiltrate Cuba and on thwarting acts of sabotage or murder against the Revolution. The villains were often depicted as physically repulsive, their exterior appearance reflecting their inner evil and corruption, a kind of perfect mirroring of counter-revolutionary base and superstructure. The Cuban security forces were depicted as noble, good-looking and able to succeed by depending on the vigilance of Cuban society, either through the neighborhood CDRs (Committees for the Defense of the Revolution) or alert citizens at workplaces. The idea was to show the detection and counter-espionage efforts not solely as the work of an individually brilliant detective or government agent, but as a collective effort of socialist cooperation and excellence.
The first Cuban socialist detective novel is attributed to Ignacio Cárdenas Acuña, whose Enigma para un domingo (An Enigma Made for a Sunday; 1971) sold 60,000 copies, an impressive number at that time. The following year the Ministry of Interior (MININT) announced it would sponsor a yearly award for socialist fiction, in order “to advance government ideology, promote conformity with revolutionary norms, and reinforce the unmasking and suppression of antisocial tendencies.” Despite some notable exceptions like Luis Rogelio Nogueras and Daniel Chavarría, most of the novels were not of high quality. They were popular, however; from 1971 to 1983 between 25% and 40% of all titles published were in the detective-espionage genre, with print runs that varied between 20,000 and 200,000.
In 1988 a young author and critic offered his view of the genre: “The Cuban detective novel of the 70s was apologist, schematic, permeated with ideas of a socialist realism that was all socialist but very little realist.” The name of that critic was Leonardo Padura Fuentes, and he was soon to transform the genre, beginning with a quartet of novels featuring the detective Mario Conde.
Recently, a Spanish-Cuban co-production has filmed the quartet, and it is available for streaming on Netflx. Titled “Four Seasons in Havana,” it recreates all four novels: Pasado perfecto (1991; Havana Blue, 2007); Vientos de cuaresma (1994; Havana Gold, 2008); Máscaras (1997; Havana Red, 2005); and Paisaje de otoño (1998; Havana Black 2006). The Netflix series begins with the second novel, then the first, then continues in sequence. The four segments, roughly 90 minutes each, are directed by a young director from Pamplona, Félix Viscarret; the music is by Spanish composer Mikel Salas; and cinematographer Pedro J. Márquez is from Madrid. Padura did the screenplay in collaboration with his wife, Lucía López Coll, and almost the entire cast is Cuban, with Jorge Perrugoría playing Mario Conde, Carlos Enrique Almirante as Manuel (Conde’s investigative partner), Enrique Molina (as Conde’s boss), Luis Alberto García (as Carlos el Flaco), and Alexis Díaz de Villegas, who played Juan in “Juan of the Dead” (as Conejo, Rabbit).
The series is beautifully shot, with both a noir sensibility but also a feel for the faded elegance of Havana as a city. The acting is mostly top-notch, and it includes a very atmospheric soundtrack that features the beguiling sound of a soaring trumpet that winds through all of the episodes. To its credit, the series barely ever shows any touristy or glitzy part of Havana (no shots of Plaza de la Catedral or Plaza Vieja or fancy night clubs); it generally sticks to the grittier realities of urban Havana, even when shot in El Vedado or Miramar.
True to the novels, we see Conde not as an exemplary socialist hero but as a melancholy, existentialist, and sensitive figure. He is also not the hard-boiled tough guy typical of noir films. He is a wannabe writer given to drink, does not have great fortune in love (he is luckier in terms of sex) and is deeply loyal to a close circle of friends who are Conde’s surrogate family. He is closest to Carlos, aka el Flaco, an Angola vet in a wheelchair, and his mother Josefina, who often cooks for the motley crew. The other members of the “family” are Andrés, a doctor; Conejo (Rabbit), an amateur historian; and Candito el Rojo (played by Mario Guerra), a hustler who thrives on illicit business dealings. In typically male Cuban style, they are hard drinkers and love to talk until they can barely speak; Padura makes these rum-fueled conversations an integral part of the novels, and they provide a kind of sub-text to talk about some of the social ills that plague Cuban society: political conformity, social inequality, corruption, opportunism, homophobia, and la doble moral. While Conde does seem disillusioned with Cuban society and the unfulfilled promises of the Revolution, he is not a cynic, nor is he hostile to the social aims of the government.
Perrugoría’s Conde is done with just the right amount of melancholy and subdued rage at a world that seems ever more perplexing and frustrating. Padura’s unflinching look at Cuban institutions is refracted through Conde’s sensibility. In the first episode, “Vientos de cuaresma,” a 24-year old Cuban schoolteacher by the name of Lissette Núñez Delgado (played by Mariam Hernández) is murdered. At first glance she seems to be a model teacher, member of UJC (Young Communist League), eager to help and work with students. But at the scene of the crime, Conde finds marijuana and meth, and slowly we begin to find a darker side to the teacher, who also sold exam answers to students. To complicate matters, Núñez is sleeping with both the school principal as well as one of her students. Padura has taken on one of the most vaunted institutions of the Revolution, the educational system, albeit indirectly. One corrupt teacher does not invalidate an entire institution. Even so, the teacher’s demise almost invites an explanation that because of her illicit activities she caused her death, and also that certain aspects of the social milieu contributed to her demise. But seen more dispassionately, we see that she is the victim of male rage and narcissism, brought to the fore by confronting her student about his entitlement, immaturity, and male privilege. In the other episodes we see a high-level functionary, a diplomat, and an established government official turned exile that are unmasked as unscrupulous and/or criminal by Conde and his associates.
The mini-series, despite its overall merits, suffers from a kind of timelessness. Does it take place now, or in the early nineties, as do the novels? This is significant because the quartet was written and takes place soon after the Ochoa trial, the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the invasion of Panama and overthrow of Noriega, the Sandinista election loss, and the looming disintegration of the Soviet Union, leading to the Special Period. The series hardly addresses these issues. While all four episodes feature conversations with Conde’s extended “family,” very few of them have the pointed political commentary that similar scenes have in the novel. And finally, most of the young female characters in the four episodes tend to spend more time with their clothes off than on, though there are exceptions. One could say that this reflects Conde’s masculinist world view, but it is annoying in the way it was handled cinematically, more so in that Perrugoría, now fifty-one, is tumbling into the sack with women half his age .
One could argue that all of the novels deal with the issue of la doble moral, that troublesome area of Cuban revolutionary life that exposes the fault lines that traverse public revolutionary conduct and private life with all its desires, longings, fantasies, and dreams. In taking on this challenge, Padura examines the personal dimensions of Cuban life. For example, in the novel Vientos de cuaresma (literally, winds of Lent), Conde, during the course of his investigation, ends up talking to some friquis. He asks them why they are friquis, and one responds: “Because we like it. Everyone is free to be what they want to be, baseball player, cosmonaut, friqui or cop…We don’t ask anything from anyone, we don’t take anything from anyone, and we don’t like it when anyone demands things of us.” Conde then asks “What do you expect out of life,” and one female friqui responds: “Should one expect anything from life? We don’t expect anything from life. Just live it and that’s that.” This telling exchange —absent from the film version— reveals profound generational differences between Conde’s generation (of the early 70s to mid 80s) to that of post-1989. Gone are the political commitments, volunteer labor brigades, internationalist missions (Angola, Ethiopia, Nicaragua), and other aspects of revolutionary fervor, of living a life of self-sacrifice for the societal good. This post-1989 generation has been more interested in personal self-realization and freedom, and is uninterested in politics, exemplified by a graffiti that Conde finds in the men’s bathroom at a high school that reads “¿La pinga tiene ideología?” (Does a cock have ideology?)
Perhaps what is at stake is the question that Agnes Heller posed about the postmodern political condition: “The existential question of modern life can be summed up as follows: how can we transform our contingency into our destiny without resigning freedom, without holding on to the banister of fate? How can we translate the social context into our own context without relapsing into experiments which have proved futile or fatal, into the experiments of social engineering, or of redemptive politics?” Heller’s dilemma (and warning) recall Sartre’s attempt to reconcile individual human agency with the philosophy of Marxism, with perhaps its most exemplary effort being his Critique of Dialectical Reason, whose 1960 edition also included his Search for Method as an introduction. Sartre is one of the ghosts (along with that of Virgilio Piñera) that haunts the third novel of the quartet, Máscaras.
Many have commented on Conde as existentialist character, a man who struggles with the harsh realities of contingency, which is not surprising given that he has to deal with situations that lead to murder. Whether unleashed by anger, revenge, fear, the need to suppress embarrassing information, guilt, hypocrisy, jealousy, greed, humiliation, or wounded pride, these criminal acts create havoc, and wound our sense of normality. Some describe existentialism as “[t]he mournful expression of a world that is fragmented, indifferent, and meaningless.” Merleau-Ponty adds that our reality is a “world [that] is out of joint.” It is this fragmentation, this being out of joint, that Conde faces when he is asked to solve a crime.
Meaning is equally significant, in a moral, personal, and political sense. In a socialist society a murder is never merely an act committed by one person against another, but a crime against society as well. Under socialism, one might have a motive for killing another person (jealousy, greed, opportunism) but according to socialist morality the act is meaningless in that it has no place, it is literally out of bounds. But couldn’t one argue similarly for crime under capitalism? Yes, but under capitalism individual passions (from greed to vengeance) and class-ruled society have to be accepted as the way things are and that those who seek, find, and deliver the culprits over to law enforcement must be seen as serving the interests of the vast majority of citizens. As Ernest Mandel says: “The class nature of the state, property, lawn and justice remains obscured.” And while alienation may reign supreme, its destructive consequences are punished: the criminal is apprehended, justice is attained, and crime does not pay. Under socialism, property is collectively held, economic activity is in the hands of the state, cooperatives or mixed enterprises; education, culture and sports are “public goods”. Killing a schoolteacher goes beyond personal passion to an attack on the educational system. Diverting funds from an enterprise (as is the case in Pasado Perfecto) is not just theft from a company but stealing from the Cuban people and their collective welfare. Trying to dig up a long-buried gold statue and leave Cuba with it (Paisaje de otoño) is not only an act of individual greed but a pillaging of art treasures that diminishes the cultural patrimony of the island.
Padura’s crime fiction plunges us into the world of post-revolutionary heroism and egalitarianism. Both Conde and his partner Manolo make references to either the victims or their survivors in terms of leading a lifestyle that neither one can imagine: ability to travel, smartly decorated apartments or homes, cars, gadgets, computers, and nice works of art hanging on the walls. This is a world where Cuba has had to accommodate to globalization and capitalism, and some have been able to do so quite successfully. But it is also a world where many others are either left behind or left looking through a distorted lens, like Conde’s pet fish Rufino in his tank. This world, no longer that of pre-1989 Cuba, still retains many of the Kafkaesque elements of twentieth century state socialism.
Virgilio Piñera, in his introductory essay to the 1960 anthology of his plays said that Cuban life pre-1959 was as follows: “Yo vivía en una Cuba existencialista por defecto y absurdo por exceso” (I lived in a Cuba existentialist by fault and absurd in its excess). Despite thirty years of revolution, perhaps Padura is suggesting this would be an apt description of Mario Conde’s world to a certain degree, albeit with significant changes.
These issues come to the fore in the third episode of the quartet, Máscaras (Masks). The novel deals with the murder of a young tranvestite, Alexis Arayán, who turns out to be the son of a prominent Cuban diplomat. Conde’s investigation leads him to Albert Marqués, aka el Marqués, an aging gay writer and theater director who had been ostracized in the seventies. No doubt, the figure of Marqués is loosely based on Virgilio Piñera, and the epigraph at the beginning of the novel is a quote from Piñera’s best-known play Electra Garrigó (1943). It is worth quoting:
“Pedagogue: (…) No, there’s no way out of this.
Orestes: There’s always sophistry
Pedagogue: That’s true. In a city as conceited as this, on the basis of feats yet to be performed, monuments never erected, virtues nobody practices, sophistry is the supreme weapon. If any of the wise women tells you she is a prolific writer of tragedies, don’t dare contradict her; if a man declares he is an accomplished critic, encourage him to believe his lie. We have here, and don’t you forget it, a city in which everybody wants to be deceived.”
In Máscaras, Conde must traverse a labyrinth to solve the crime, which leads to the masking and unmasking that occurs throughout the novel. None of this is new to crime fiction, as often its plots, motives, and characters are unmasked by the detection process. It is a well-known trope of the genre that characters are not whom they seem to be, motives are sometimes hidden or misleading (a murder made to look like suicide, a robbery gone wrong, etc.), a person has been living under an assumed name, someone who has faked their own death, and, of course, there are no shortage of characters who lie and deceive others. Every society wears its own masks, and crime fiction just highlights these tendencies or points out its more brutal or murderous extremes.
Padura takes all the rhetoric and prejudices of the period and puts them in a comparison to socialist realist aesthetics and homophobia. Even though Conde admits to being homophobic (he fears that Marqués will try and seduce him when he goes to the bathroom at the director’s house, at a gay soirée he describes himself as a “Macho-Stalinist”), during the course of the novel he develops a grudging respect for Marqués and what he has lived through. However, his aversion to gays does not mean he wants to criminalize their sexuality, or ideas. Despite his macho traits, Conde is still someone who wants to be a writer, and the Marqués (and Piñera by extension) become not only challenges in terms of their sexuality but as models of artistic integrity, and reminders that Conde has not fulfilled his artistic dreams. This tension between hyper-masculinity and being a writer runs throughout the Conde series, especially in the novel Adiós Hemingway (2001; English, 2005) and conjures up a famous quip from Virgilio Piñera, cited by Cabrera Infante: “Real men don’t read books. Literature is for faggots and I am a pure faggot.”
The theme of masking and unmasking is central to the novel, as we discover that a possible suspect, Alberto Marqués, ends up aiding Conde, and liking his role as a kind of sleuth. Of course, the murder victim, even though not a transvestite, had dressed up as a woman the night he was killed; Conde’s writer friend Miki, though a bit cynical, is a hack that adheres to the Party’s cultural policy line; his closer friend Candito (El Rojo) runs an illegal business and deals drugs eventually becomes a Seventh Day Adventist; Poly, the young woman he beds might be a transvestite (but is not, just bisexual); his buddy on the force, el Gordo Contreras, who has been suspended, and a person of total trust, turns out to be corrupt; and Alexis’s father, a Cuban diplomat, turns out to be a fake revolutionary, and the killer as well. The only people who are what they seem is his surrogate family: Skinny Carlos (the Angola vet in a wheelchair) and his mother Josefina, along with Andrés, and Rabbit.
Scholar Persephone Braham writes that transvestism “is thus a challenge to the Revolution because it provokes the inevitable question of whether revolutionary identity itself is only a mask. The notion of the transvestite combines the element of disguise and burlesque with an essential rejection of the self. Mario Conde intuitively makes a connection between transvestism and the reversal of roles that characterize revolution.” One could question this assumption: rejecting essentializing notions of the self does not necessarily mean rejecting all notions of self. What Braham is affirming (and Padura is suggesting) is the self can be constructed and re-constructed or transformed. In the case of revolutionary Cuba an ambitious attempt to fashion a revolutionary self created a hardening (a word with obvious masculinist overtones) set of definitions about what it meant to be a revolutionary, and being queer was not one of them. Masking (transvestism) also implies some notion of appearance and reality, if only to overturn them as well; it strikes at the revolutionary ideal of total transparency, where private and public self are in harmony. While this has been the goal of revolutionary socialism, the ideal goes back to Rousseau.
All detective fiction is an exploration of interpretation or hermeneutics, and Máscaras is no exception. Hermeneutics as applied to literature is the interpretation of signs, a wonderful analogy to how a detective or sleuth interprets clues to unravel the mysteries of a crime. The word comes from the Greek god Hermes, who was the messenger to all the other gods (Elegguá in Cuban santería); but equally significant is that he led souls to the underworld after death. Both these traits are germane to detective fiction and Padura seems to embody them in his Conde series. Padura seems to equate writing and detection, and Conde’s character fervently desires to bring them together in a utopian synthesis of meaning and justice.
Conde’s hermeneutic passion is steeped in memory and as he seeks to solve his cases he is constantly going back to his past, whether his own years in the pre, old girlfriends (like Tamara in Pasado perfecto), the cultural past (Máscaras) or that of his friends when he converses with El Flaco, Andrés, Conejo, and Candito El Rojo. In other Conde novels he goes back to Cuba in the 1950s (Adiós Hemingway), or the 1940s and 1950s (Neblina de ayer). Padura’s nostalgia extends to periods he never lived through (he was born in 1955). The author’s nostalgia or memory is used to gain perspective on Cuba’s revolutionary history, one that he characterizes as “historical exhaustion syndrome.” In Neblina de ayer, Rabbit says the following: “All the time, day in and day out, we’ve been living out our responsibility for this moment in history. They were bent on forcing us to be better. After being so exceptional, so historical, and so transcendent, people get tired and want to be normal. I have a name for that: historical exhaustion.” Rabbitt’s comments seem to echo the comments by the “friquis,” of wanting to be normal, but not necessarily apathetic.
Svetlana Boym’s useful distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia might be helpful in understanding Conde’s world. She says that restorative nostalgia does not see itself as nostalgia but as “truth and tradition,” whereas reflective nostalgia “dwells on the ambivalences of human longing and belonging and does not shy away from the contradictions of modernity.” She adds: “Reflective nostalgia does not follow a single plot but explores inhabiting many places at once and imagining different time zones; it loves details, not symbols. At best, reflective nostalgia can present an ethical and creative challenge, not merely a pretext for midnight melancholias.” Padura’s fiction lands in the category of “reflective nostalgia” in not shying away from the contradictions of modernity (or postmodernity, in inhabiting many places, in its love for details rather than symbols (Máscaras aside). Not surprisingly, the quartet ends with a reference to memory. From the beginning of Paisaje de otoño Conde is anxiously awaiting a hurricane. It finally arrives at the end of the novel, and Conde seems almost grateful that the storm will create a clean slate for him to begin anew as a writer. (At the end of the first episode he took a manuscript and hurled it over a balcony into the Havana night).
The last sentence reminds us of the power and creativity of memory: “Pasado perfecto: yes, that would be the title, he told himself, and another blast reached him from the street, warned the scribbler that the demolition was proceeding apace, but he merely changed the sheet and started a new paragraph, because the end of the world was drawing nigh, but had yet to come, since memories remained.” In this ending that harks back to the first novel of the quartet and the ending of A Hundred Years of Solitude, Padura warns us that endings and beginnings mirror our deepest desires of longing and belonging.
Featured Image: Mario overlooking the Malecón (screenshot from the series).