De la insularidad a la continentalización: el neopolicial cubano de Leonardo Padura

Abstract

This study looks at the story and character development of detective Mario Conde, protagonist of Cuban author Leonardo Padura’s eight crime novels. In the tetralogy that begins with Pasado Perfecto in 1991 and ends with the ambitious last installment entitled Herejes in 2013, Conde acts mostly during what is known as the Cuban “Special Period,” marked by the fall of the Soviet Union, to later land in the first decade of the 21st century. This “Special Period” produced a fracturing of crime fiction in Cuba and, as a result, the officially-supported revolutionary crime fiction that was born in the early 1970s later transformed in the 1990s to become part of the neo-crime genre that the rest of Latin America had been producing since a decade before.Far from the exemplary revolutionary characters of the original genre, Padura’s neo-crime characters not only solve crimes, but also commit them themselves and evade the law. Based on the cases he investigates, Conde moves within this paradoxical behavior while he deconstructs and demystifies the greatest revolutionary discourses and policies.