Leonardo Padura: ‘The greatest deceit of the 20th Century was Stalinism’
By Ana Mendoza
Segovia (Spain), Sept. 27 –(EFE)– Cuban writer Leonardo Padura has just published a novel, perhaps “the most ambitious” of his works, about the assassination of Russian politician Leon Trotsky, “the last great theoretician of Marxism,” whose death in 1940 marked “a point of no return” in the failure of the socialist utopia.
“The greatest deceit of the 20th Century was Stalinism. Stalin practiced murder as a state policy” and managed to hide from the world the fact that “hundreds of thousands of people in Siberia and the Arctic Circle were dying of hunger and cold,” Padura said in an interview with Efe.
Padura traveled to Segovia (center of Spain) to launch at the Hay Festival his book “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” published by Tusquets.
The fruit of arduous research, the novel reconstructs the motives that led Spaniard Ramón Mercader to kill Trotsky (1879-1940) in Mexico when the controversial politician “no longer had any power.” His death was “the assassination of intelligence.”
“Trotsky, along with Lenin, had drafted the theory of revolution, and his death symbolizes the end of the possibility of achieving an utopia in the 20th Century,” asserts Padura, who lives in Cuba.
The writer believes that today “some of the values [of the socialist utopia] should be rescued” and that task “should be done in a way that is not as deceitful and murky as it was in the old Soviet Union.”
However, it should be a utopia that “is based on the possibility of a real democracy.”
And what should be done for Cuba to evolve toward democracy? This writer, famous for his series of police novels starring detective Mario Conde, which have earned him prestigious awards, insists that his country’s main problem is the economy. “Any change must go through finding a solution for that question.”
As long as the economic system is not modified, he warns, “no change is feasible. And what is feasible and dangerous is the occurrence of demonstrations of social explosion in Cuba, because there are marginalized sectors that are reaching situations close to the limit.”
Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency of the United States “has not changed the essentials” of relations with Cuba. “The embargo continues to function as before, and that’s too heavy a burden for the Cuban economy.”
Still, Obama “has removed the problem of Cuba from the front burner” and that is “very important, because he has reduced a pressure that existed forever and was used very well by the Cuban government: the threat of an imperialist invasion.”
He has also removed the spotlight “from the right-wing diehards in Miami,” who are, according to Padura, “the beneficiaries of the embargo against Cuba.”
The novelist turns the failure of the socialist utopia into the centerpiece of his new book, although he utilizes a novel-like history and dramatic resources to develop his reflections.
http://espanol.news.yahoo.com/s/27092009/54/n-entertain-leonardo-padura-quot-mayor-enga.html
