Leonardo Padura

Leonardo Padura (born 1955 in Havana, Cuba) - prominent Cuban novelist, journalist, and screenwriter. He authored a series featuring Detective Mario Conde operating in Cuba. He is widely credited with renovating Cuban crime fiction in the 1990s, after the Soviet collapse gutted the island’s economy, by writing morally complex, ironic novels where “even the police are savagely policed” — using genre fiction to portray corruption, repression, hypocrisy, and daily hardship in Cuba more honestly than earlier state-sanctioned literature had allowed. He chose to stay in Cuba through the hardest years of the 1990s rather than emigrate, and continues to live and write there.

Padura, Leonardo, (Heretics [hc, Farrar & Giroux, 2017]) 978-0374168858 [pb, Bitter Lemon Press, 2017] 978-1908524782 [In 1939, the ship Saint Louis sails from Hamburg into Havana’s port carrying 937 Jewish refugees seeking asylum from the Nazi regime. Nine-year-old Daniel Kaminsky watches from the docks as the passengers — including his own mother, father, and sister — become caught up in Cuban political corruption. (He had been sent ahead earlier, to live with an uncle.) The Kaminsky family is pinned to a fragile hope: a small Rembrandt portrait of Christ that they believe can help save them. But six days later the ship is forced back out of the harbor with the family still aboard, sent back toward the horrors unfolding in Europe, and the Kaminskys — along with their priceless heirloom — vanish. Almost seventy years later, the Rembrandt resurfaces at a London auction house, prompting Daniel’s son to travel to Cuba to trace what happened to his family’s lost painting. He hires down-on-his-luck ex-cop turned rare-book dealer Mario Conde to help him unravel it. Conde is Padura’s long-time protagonist, worn down, torn between numbing himself with routine, friends, and drink, and a restless mind that keeps chasing bigger questions. Hired to trace the painting and, in a related thread, a missing girl in present-day Havana, Conde ties together the novel’s many threads of history, religion, politics, and philosophy in his search for the missing Rembrandt and the missing girl, moving across generations and locations — from 1939 Havana to the present day, and back to seventeenth-century Poland and the Netherlands to trace the Jewish diaspora.

The novel also flashes back to Rembrandt’s own studio in Amsterdam, weaving in the story of the painting’s creation and its journey through the hands of people — including Jewish subjects and associates — caught between religious conviction and worldly pressures.

The title reflects the book’s true subject, not one heresy but many: the story of people forced to choose between the tenets of their faith and the realities of the world, between their personal desires and the demands of their times. One reviewer summarized it as populated by “heretics” of many sorts — religious, artistic, political and social. The novel folds in a present-day subplot about Havana’s “Emo” youth subculture, kids who cut themselves off from society and self-harm, giving Padura another lens on rebellion and nonconformity.

The core crime in the book is the 1939 turning-away of the Saint Louis, an act of state and bureaucratic corruption that condemns the Kaminsky family to the Holocaust. Cuban officials extract bribes, break promises, and send refugees back to Europe knowing what likely awaits them. Padura frames anti-Semitism itself as the crime, and the theft of the Rembrandt (and the family’s disappearance) as its direct downstream consequence.

Mario Conde is not Jewish — he’s a lapsed-everything Havana ex-cop — so when he’s pulled into the Kaminsky family’s story, Padura uses him as a vehicle for the reader’s own outsider perspective on Jewish history and diaspora. The “crime” he’s solving requires him to learn Jewish history (Amsterdam, Poland, the diaspora) rather than bring it with him, which lets Padura do more explaining and mourning of that history than a Jewish

Padura pushed back against reading the book as narrowly “a Jewish novel,” saying he wanted it to be a reflection that went beyond a perspective locked into a single context and became as universal as the issues of freedom, free will, and heresy are — using Jewish historical experience (persecution, exile, religious dissent) as the sharpest available lens for a broader argument he’s also making about Cuba: dissent from the Revolution, disillusionment, and the cost of nonconformity under any orthodoxy. – Claude]