Introduction

Máscaras (Havana Red in English translation) belongs to

Leonardo Padura’s quadrilogy called “Havana Quartet”, which

began with Pasado Perfecto (Past Perfect) in 1991. Máscaras is the

third of Padura’s detective novels featuring Detective

Lieutenant Mario Conde, a thoroughly Cuban yet also

archetypal hard-boiled detective.

In various interviews Padura mentions his clear

aspirations for the Conde novels: they had to be very Cuban

and they should have a literary sensibility. And, although

Padura has expressed an aversion to “obvious political

intentions,” (Political Affairs 2006) which he believes are

“almost typical of social realism,” (Political Affairs

2006) the novel can be read as a summarized history of

Cuba’s worst homophobic moment during the revolution. The

story tells of a very hot summer day, August 6, 1989,

Church Transfiguration Day, when Alexis Arayán – Faustino

Arayan’s son, Cuba's latest UNICEF representative– is found

dead in Havana Park “transfigured” as Electra Garrigó, a

Cuban version of the Greek Tragedy. The murder is assigned

to Mario (El) Conde, who had been relegated to desk duty

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after his public ‘punch-up’ with Lieutenant Fabricio three

months earlier.

Conde is no ordinary detective. In fact, he is a

frustrated writer and it is his liking for fiction that

leads him to develop certain theories based more on

intuition than on concrete evidence. At the beginning of

the novel, Conde is presented as a rather nostalgic

character, unsure of whether he's chosen the right path,

comparing his life to what became of his childhood buddies

and remembering what good times they used to have. But the

past cannot be recaptured: one of the first scenes has him

wanting to join a baseball game with some youngsters, but

he realizes quickly enough that it is not his place, mainly

because he is now a policeman, a member of a repressive

force and he is no longer comfortable among those he once

considered “his” people. As he explains later in the novel,

his own neighbourhood: “ha cambiado, transformado,

travestido” (216) (has been changed, transformed,

transvestite), indeed, masked.

The investigation leads Conde to two very different

Cuban households: the house of the privileged Arayán, and

2

that of the renowned but disgraced artist and playwright

Alberto Marqués. Marqués has been a victim of the

homophobic Cuban system promoted by the Cuban Revolution

and has suffered humiliation and repression for more than

fourteen years. Thus, he feels bitter and resentful toward

the Cuban regime. Having been a good friend of Alexis,

Marqués is one of the first people to be interrogated by

(El) Conde. During the interrogation, he clearly explains

that Alexis was not a transvestite. In fact, as Marqués

explains, Alexis was a very inhibited sort of person who

bore a great sense of guilt because of his homosexuality.

After a series of adventures, we are made aware of the fact

that, ironically, the murderer was his own father, Faustino

Arayán, who, just prior to his anticipated attendance at a

Human Rights Conference in Brussels, killed his son out of

homophobia and also to silence him after he discovered

something obscure about his past. Faustino’s secret goes

back to 1959, when he forged some documents so as to make

it appear that he had always belonged to the urban

revolution. Based on such a lie, Faustino enjoyed a

position of privilege, which resulted in him being

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appointed as Cuban ambassador. Therefore, nothing is as

what it appears to be, and the novel is fraught with lies

and secrets, masks that Conde will try to unveil through

his investigation.

The novel clearly represents Havana society at the end

of the 80’s. Needless to say that this was a crucial moment

when the Soviet Union was at the point of dissolution, and

Cuba, then dependent on Soviet economic and military power,

entered into a period of hardship known by the euphemistic

term of Periodo Especial. But, the history told in Máscaras is

not history with a capital ‘H’, but the history of the

average resident of the city. There is a lot about the

hardships of life: the shortages (including quality cigars

and coffee), corruption, as well as some of the repression:

the atrocities committed by the Military Units during the

60`s and 70`s (UMAP), the 1971 crack-down, in which Marqués

was involved, and the Mariel exodus and its horrors.

It is known that, in Cuba, leaders have delivered

homophobic discourses as part of their nation-building

strategies. Usually, these historical and political

discourses have been influenced by war, and through its

4

practice, Cuban sexual and gender stereotypes have been

reinforced and channelled. Thus, Cuban history has been

constructed upon the principle of the exclusion of certain

social groups, mainly homosexuals and women; a patriarchal,

andocentric and homophobic history aimed to protect the

predominant ideology. Moreover, gays were regarded as

monsters, deformed and weird people, “locas” and

“pajarones” in Cuban vernacular and, therefore, subjects to

be repressed and unfit figures for the revolutionary

movement. This situation became even worse with the

communist government, as homosexuality was regarded as

subversive not only in the sense that it did not comply

with the masculine aggressiveness imposed by the system,

but also because it was thought to belong to a specific

social class, a decadent bourgeois phenomenon that had to

be eradicated.

In the novel, Alberto Marqués, the playwright, refers

to the discrimination against gays and he, himself, becomes

a symbol and symptom of the phenomenon. Alberto is a great

writer and an interesting figure whom Cuban officialdom had

censored due to his “ideological deviations”. His “sins”

5

include not only homosexuality, but also, and more

importantly, his defiant attitude toward the system and the

way in which artists and writers were treated during the

most repressive decade of the revolution. Alberto is

defined in the novel as:

Alberto Marqués: homosexual de vasta experiencia depredadora,apático politico y desviado ideológico, ser conflictive yprovocador , extranjerizante, hermético, culterano, posibleconsumidor de marihuana y otras drogas, protector de mariconesdescarriados, hombre de dudosa filiación filosófica, lleno deprejuicios pequeño burgueses y clasistas, anotados yclasificados con la indudable ayuda de un moscovita manual detécnicas y procedimientos del realismo socialista… (41)

[Highly experienced predator, politically apathetic andideologically devious, a trouble maker and provoker whosocialized with foreigners, an elitist, secretive, a possibleuser of marijuana and other drugs, a protector of stray faggots,a man of dubious philosophical affiliation, full of petitbourgeois and class prejudices, noted and classified by theundeniable assistance of the Moscow manual of techniques andprocedures of socialist realism…]

This character closely mirrors the Cuban playwright

Virgilio Piñera (1912-1979), and although Piñera died in

1979, Padura takes poetic licence to keep Piñera’s theories

alive through the character of El Marqués. Marqués bears

many similarities to Piñera, including his effeminate

behaviour and sexual habits. In addition, Marqués, like

Piñera, believes that theatre was as real as life. It is

the place where reality can be portrayed. On the other

hand, the novel’s intertextuality includes the Cuban

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Tragedy Electra Garrigó, by Piñera, in which, the fictional

character also shares its authorship..

But, for Padura, detective fiction is the genre that

provides an ideal format in which to voice direct and

indirect political critique, as hard-boiled detectives

“frequently proceed from the interrogation of suspects to

the interrogation of society.” (Christian 2001:1) This

interrogation usually leads to a confession that is moving

away from mere problem-solving, which is arguably a central

motif in any detective fiction regardless of the cultural

context of any given novel.

In addition, according to Christian: “In its broadest

sense, the term ‘post-colonial’ encompasses the members of

any group — be it national, tribal, ethnic, or otherwise —

which has been marginalized or oppressed and is struggling

to assert itself.” (2001: 2) This could, of course, include

women or homosexuals or perhaps even teachers of that

academically marginalized sub-genre, detective fiction.

Therefore, post-colonial detective fiction is in itself not

only marginalized and “othered” in relation to “literary”

fiction, but also in relation to the perceived “centre” of

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the genre in the English world, the “free world”. On the

other hand, the key concept argued by Christian seems to be

that post-colonial literature is written by members of

marginalized groups struggling against cultural hegemony

and neo-colonialism.” (2001: 3) In this light, we are

dealing here with triple marginalization. Padura is a post-

colonial writer, a “marginalized Habanero”, (which, to some

degree, allows for his unique position to revision the

imaginary of Havana as he lived in the suburbs all his

life) who has created a sympathetic post-colonial

detective, indigenous to Cuba, and willing to unmask

internal societal contradictions through his particular

view of society. Conde’s struggle is clearly against the

Cuban establishment and he wonders whether he belongs in such

a heavily controlled system, where everybody is screened and

identified:

lo sabían todo, absolutamente todo, incluso lo que ocurreíntimamente… (…) pero no te das cuenta de que lo saben todo? Lojodido es eso, Conde, uno siente de pronto que está viviendo enuna urna transparente o en un tubo de ensayo, no se, y que loven cagar, mear y hasta sacarse los mocos… “(127) ”… De verdadque eso si da miedo… A veces le dan ganas a uno de irse para laluna. (128)

They knew everything, absolutely everything, including intimateevents (…) but don’t you realize that they know everything?That’s how screwed up it is, Conde, one suddenly feels that oneis living in a transparent urn or in a test tube, I don’t know,

8

they see you defecating, urinating and even blowing your nose(…) This is really scary…. At times it makes you feel as if youwant to go to the moon

But, above all, Padura cubanizes the gumshoe (crime

fiction) and regards the genre as a way of being able to

give representation to the underbelly of Havana and its

repressed “dark side”. As Padura explains: “One of the

virtues of this genre is that one can utilize it in any way

one wishes,” and continues: “The ‘dark’ novel can take one

directly to the darkest corners of a reality, of a society,

while always maintaining something that is very important

to me: the possibility of communicating with readers. That

is why I like the police-type novel so much – I call my

novels ‘false crime novels’, because the crime novel

structure is only a pretext to get to other places.”

(Political Affairs: 2006)

Those other places are areas hidden from the

proscribed gaze of the Cuban state, with its mandate to

imagine and represent a socialist paradise. So one can

infer that Padura, aside from personal taste, has also

chosen to work in this seemingly formulaic genre because,

like science fiction, the formulas are masks which allow

social critique to go under the radar of state censorship,

9

the censor of the individual artist which pushes him to

work within authorized socialist realism, or even further,

to retreat into silence.

Padura’s Máscaras : A Generic Transformation

Transmutation is the basis of detective fiction as it

involves the transformation or representation of a serious

action, usually a murder, into narrative. And, if, on the

one hand, detective fiction allows for the transfiguration

of crime, a transfiguration that could very well lead to

political redemption, on the other hand, it helps to make

sense of an increasingly confusing world by uncovering

hidden causal connections through rational enquiry.

Moreover, more than any genre, detective fiction

emphasizes the related view of reading as a quest for

meaning. (Cawelti 1976) Indeed, Conde himself will be

undertaking a reading and learning process, which will

allow him to understand the world around him and, thus,

recognize the politics of exclusion rampant in his

country. As Tzvetan Todorov argues in his article “The

Typology of Detective Fiction” (1966), detective stories

10

are by definition narratives about reading. In Máscaras

this is certainly true as the reader is invited to discover

and make sense of the world depicted in the novel at the

same time as its leading character. And it is by reading

that El Conde becomes aware not only of the “obscure” world

of homosexuality but also of the reality around him. 1 In

this way, the novel allows the reader to be not only a

consumer but also a producer of the text. (Barthes 1974)

This is why the hardboiled detective novel is a powerful

ideological tool and certainly one of the reasons for its

appropriation on political grounds by Padura.2

Cuban appropriation of the “hardboiled” genre

In Mario Conde, Padura has created, in his own words,

“a man who is a bit disenchanted, sceptical, who defends

himself through irony, and who has great loyalties and

great phobias.” (Political Affairs 2006) His

1 The theories applied in the book El Rostro y la máscara, written by El Recio―borrowed by El Conde during one of his interviews with El Marqués―,are closely linked to the ones expressed by Severo Sarduy in his bookLa simulación (1982).2 Hammett’s involvement with the communist party only serves toreinforce such a reading. The political agendas, either overt orcovert, that are evident in hardboiled fiction range from the mereright wing paranoia and misogyny of Mickey Spillane to theincreasingly reformist liberal agenda of Ross Macdonald.

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disenchantment produces an alienation that makes him a

typical hard-boiled detective, as he engages in “a version

of the quest, aimed both at searching for the truth and

attempting to eradicate evil.” (Grella 104) But the

alienation of Padura’s Conde is not really class-based,

like that of Sam Spade or Marlowe, but rather is specific

to a Cuban context. He has lived in the same Havana

neighbourhood his entire life, and is deeply rooted in many

Cuban cultural norms. Yet he is alienated, all the same,

from many aspects of contemporary Cuba, especially

political authoritarianism and the groupthink and

internalised self-censorship that it produces. Not

surprisingly, Padura notes that “for Cuban orthodoxy

[Conde] was a very politically incorrect sort of guy.”

(Political Affairs 2006) Conde’s criticism of groupthink

and censorship on the part of the Cuban state and its

adherents is undoubtedly a major reason for his perceived

“political incorrectness.” Perhaps it also has something to

do with his abiding and often-expressed love for the

popular culture of the United States.3

3 References to American music are a virtual soundtrack in Padura’s novels, celebrated frequently by Conde and his paraplegic best friend Flaco.

12

But, moreover, Padura follows Chandler’s dictum,

expressed in “The Simple Art of Murder,” that “In

everything that can be called art there is a quality of

redemption.” (Chandler 1944). The need for redemption in

Cuban society, stripped of its specifically religious

meaning, but still based on language derived from the

religious imagination, is at the center of Máscaras. There

is no redemption without “recognition” and/or an

understanding of the world behind the mask.

If great literary art could rise above genre limits,

as “the formula does not matter, what matters is what you

do with the formula; that is to say, it is a matter of

style,” (Macshare 1976: 64) one can see that, while

Chandler and Hammett employed an American street vernacular

in the service of an updated secular humanist ethic, Padura

employs a Cuban vernacular style in which celebration and

critique are intermingled. The hard-boiled genre and its

film noir counterpart developed a stylized masculine code

of conduct and employ a street-wise, witty vernacular which

is widely recognized as having been heavily influenced by

Ernest Hemingway’s hard bitten post-World War I heroes.

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This clear “masculinization” of the language helps to

solidify a sense of a tough, shell-like exterior,4 a

masculine identity characterized by the suppression of any

affects. However, most literary detectives have a hard

appearance ― a mask or, as Christopher Brue (2005) argues,

a “cultural fantasy”, that was extended to everyday life―

but a romantic and more idealistic interior. This

disjunctive between the outer, hyper-masculine mask, and

the inner, more feminised imagination is present in

Padura`s Conde, who experiences a strong tension between

his internal and external thought. This tension mainly

arises during his encounters with El Marqués, as both

characters want to maintain extreme positions.

In addition, the clipped, first-person narratives of

Hammett and Chandler are often cynical about the sordid

social world they observe, and only rarely turn inward,

while Padura’s Conde often engages in interior monologues,

and even writes fictional stories within the novel.

Furthermore, in the hardboiled genre, the private eye is

like the scout or the cowboy, he is a loner. As Dennis

4 Greg Forter`s Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the AmericanCrime Novel has developed an interesting argument about the constitutionand dissolution of the hard-boiled male’s shell-like exterior.

14

Porter argues in his article “The private eye” the

investigator is: “a solitary eye, a non-organization

man's eye, like the frontier scout's or the cowboy's; an

eye that trusts no other; an eye that's licensed to

look; and even, by extrapolation, an eye for hire.”

(2003:1) In Padura’s revisioning, Conde is an organization

man to the core, if an often disaffected policeman; and he

is very much a social animal, relying on friends and the

routine of his community life, however much he may

occasionally retreat into solitude.

So, in contrast to the brittle surface of the classic

hard-boiled detective, with his cool observations of a

rather hopeless world, Padura’s style conveys the anxiety

and tension of people under pressure, and the disfigurement

that this pressure produces. It also admires to the

resourcefulness of people making do and finding happiness

while living under conditions of scarcity and indeed

oppression. Moreover, he lives in the ‘pressure cooker’ of

contemporary Havana, which seems to reinforce this sort of

personality split, the hard exterior being itself a mask

15

that reveals what the state and its vigilant observers

demand to see, but conceals a romantic-artistic soul.

In this way, the text also shares the challenges and

struggles of sexual identity mentioned by Susan Hayward in

her book Cinema Studies: Key Concepts (2000). Indeed, Máscaras is

fraught with conflicts of gender and identity, and the

boundaries of sexuality are clearly questioned by its

leading character Mario Conde. The detective’s attitude,

although consistent with the ideology of power, questions

the institutionalized gender divisions. Even Conde’s own

masculinity is threatened as, through his reading and

learning process, he realizes that sexual identity is a

construction, uncovering the crisis of a whole “Cuban

masculinity.” This is why, through the novel, Conde

expresses his progressive alienation from the culturally

permissible parameters of masculine identity, desire and

achievement created by Cuban discourse.

Yet, there are plenty of contradictions taking place

in Máscaras, as Conde appears to have ethical principles

closely linked to the ones constructed by the system, but

he also worries about the meaning of life and death from

16

an existentialist position. In this way, Conde`s

perspective on homosexuality has been based on the

stereotypes constructed by the State. Thus, he regards

transvestites as a “deviation from the norm” and a “defect

of an otherwise wise nature,” and caricature figures that

he defines in a condescending manner, mainly by negation:

“aquella mujer que no lo era” and “una mujer sin los

beneficios de la naturaleza, falsa mujer” and “a versión

limitada de la mujer con la entrada más apetitosa

clausurada por la caprichosa lotería de la naturaleza.”

(35) [That woman who was not a woman”(…) “a woman cursed by

nature, a false woman” (…)“a limited version of a woman

whose most delectable entry was sealed by the capricious

game of nature]. However, after his reading and encounters

with El Marqués, Conde`s sexuality in relation to both men

and women becomes more ambiguous and, in fact, he develops

a growing interest in the subject. This sort of attraction

toward the unknown Cuban transvestite underworld drives him

to accompany El Marqués to a gay party, despite Marques`

warnings about what he will be finding out:

Lo que usted quiere saber no es demasiado agradable, se loadvierto. Es sórdido, alarmante, descarnado y casi siempre,trágico porque es el resultado de la soledad, de la represión

17

eterna, de la burla, la agresión, el desprecio y hasta delmonocultivo y el subdesarrollo (138)

[I warn you, what you want to know is not too pleasant. It issordid, alarming, blatant and almost always, tragic because itis the result of solitude, eternal repression, ranging frommockery, aggression and disdain to monoculture andunderdevelopment]

However, the ambiguous nature of people attending the

transvestite gathering is a good example of deconstruction

of gender limits. In a way, the party implies a queer

vision that questions the very stability of any definition

of sexual, artistic or political identity. And it is

through the characters attending the event that we can

appreciate the heterogeneous Cuban nature breaking away

from the “muscovite” mentality that believed in a possible

homogeneous Cuban: “Alguien con mentalidad moscovita pensó

que la uniformidad era posible en este país tan caliente y

heterodoxo donde nunca ha habido nada puro. (214) [Anyone

with a muscovite mentality thought that uniformity was

possible in such a warm and heterodox country where nothing

had ever been pure]. That evening, El Conde is surprised

at himself when he lights up a cigarette in a very Bogart

manner in order to “aumentar su cotización en aquel mercado

rosa” (140) [to make himself more appealing in such a pink

18

market]. Conde feels wanted by the faggots and enjoys such

a fatal attraction. And, finally, he meets “nalguitas de

gorrión” [140], a very masculine woman with whom he ends up

having anal sex. Therefore, it is at the party that

Padura’s novel offers us a vantage point from which to

critically re-examine Cuban gender preconceptions and

politics and, as Conde states, Marqués’ theories allow him

to think and see subjects through a different light, making

him think: “ya sabes que no resisto a los maricones pero

este tipo es muy distinto…el muy cabrón me ha puesto a

pensar.” (59) [You already know that I cannot resist

homosexuals but this one is very different…the bastard has

given me food for thought.]

Indeed, Conde is able to reflect on and understand

reality during his conversations with Marqués, who brings

forward the repressed story of the nation. This element

shows that our memory can be liberating if it is re-

imagined, if we correct the habit of repressing the

recognition. By re-imagining the past we are taking the

necessary steps toward the transformation of the present

identity and the reconstruction of the politics of

19

inclusion in a more inclusive vision of a future society.

Yet, cultural re-imagining cannot take place without

cultural remembering and literature facilitates this re-

imagining, giving us a historically grounded vision of a

future society, a future in which we learn to avoid

repeating the exclusionary politics of the past. In this

way, fiction advocates for democracy and a new set of

possibilities.

Thus, it seems as if the conventions of detective

fiction provide the only possible means of reconciling the

opposing halves of Conde’s personality, probably indicating

that society can be reconciled as well as changed.

Moreover, the fact that the story deals with the death of a

cross-dressed homosexual allows for a reflection not only

on death itself, but also on the issues of simulation and

reality behind the masks.

Cuba’s Tragedy

No se si notó que todo esto es una Tragedia Griega,en el mejor estilo de Sófocles, llena de equívocos,historias paralelas (...) y personajes que no sonquienes dicen que son, o que ocultan lo que son, ohan cambiado tanto que nadie sabe quiénes son, y enun instante inesperado se reconocen trágicamente(220)

20

[I wonder whether you have noticed that this is a Greek Tragedy, in the best style of Sophocles full of misunderstandings, parallel stories (…) and characters who are not who they say they are, or whohide what they are, or who have changed so much thatnobody knows who they are anymore and suddenly they recognized themselves tragically]

John Cawelti, in his Adventure, Mystery, and Romance,

argues that crime stories have traditionally presented

"religious and moral" themes (54). In twentieth-century

American detective fiction, he goes on to say, “these

themes are frequently developed in stories about detectives

whose personal ethos is in conflict with an immoral and

corrupt society.” (1976: 59) So, in such scenarios, one

expects that the detective, like the Western hero, will by

story’s end, have set wrongs right. Indeed, through his

investigation, the detective needs to restore the social

fabric disrupted by the criminal. (Cawelti 1992) Another

expectation is that detective novels are in some sense

tragedies, and audiences will expect certain emotional

responses common to tragedies: a form of catharsis similar

to redemption.

This is why Padura’s Máscaras can be considered a

tragedy, approximating to the classical definition of that

21

term. Although the vast majority of hard-boiled detective

fiction cannot conform to the definition of being centred

on the downfall of a great person, which is caused by a

conscious confrontation of the character flaw, detective

fiction often does function like a tragedy, in that it

provides a sort of catharsis for the reader.5 In this

sense, the character lives a moment of anagnorisis

(recognition) of his/her fate, which if it does not

precisely purify us, does help us “to see life clearly, and

to understand it as a whole,” as Lauchlan Watt wrote in his

study of Attic and Elizabethan Tragedy (1908: 17). One

could also say that, like Greek tragedy, detective fiction

“show[s] the hidden cords which moved events,” and in some

sense serves as “a school of conduct” that helps “create a

public morality.” (Watt: 16) Both tragedy and detective

fiction are modern embodiments of archetypes found in

classical myths like those of Oedipus. And, like myths,

doubles and labyrinths, the detective story allows for

different interpretations leading to the uncovering of the

5 However, the dictum that tragedy can only depict those with power andhigh status has changed over time. Indeed, there is the modern beliefthat tragedy may also depict ordinary people in domestic surroundings.

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archetype and by extension carries a transmutation of

social meaning.

W.H. Auden's essay, "The Guilty Vicarage," establishes

a parallel between Aristotle's theory of tragedy and

accepted elements of detective fiction. The most important

common elements are: Concealment (the innocent seem guilty

and the guilty seem innocent) and Manifestation (the real

guilt is brought to consciousness). Auden's more formal

diagram for the genre follows: Peaceful state before the

murder, False clues, Solution, Arrest of Murderer and

Peaceful state after arrest.”(1980: 14) Indeed, Padura

implies that everything seemed clean and perfect in that

house (Alexis`house implying Cuba) where suddenly, a

tragedy took place. However, we are led to understand that

in Cuba this peaceful state is just an appearance (in the

same way as in Arayan`s house where things are not what

they seem) and therefore, the above theory cannot be

closely linked to the text.

Other critics have argued for a “rebirth of tragedy”

in a way that seems most applicable to detective fiction in

general and to the one practiced by Padura in particular.

23

For instance, Howard Barker argued that in contemporary

theatre, “You emerge from tragedy equipped against lies.”

(1989:13) This is certainly part of the function of

“detective tragedy,” as Padura has developed it in a Cuban

context. Furthermore, we can note that Ross Macdonald, from

the 1960s on, consciously strove to adapt Aristotle's

theory of tragedy to the detective novel. Macdonald’s

detective, Lew Archer, is conceived “as peripatetic

chorus,” and “in place of fate or the will of the gods,

Macdonald substitutes family psychology as the inexorable

force of the story, impelling it toward its tragic end.”

(Sharp 2003)

Updating and translating this process of generic

transformation, Padura seems to have substituted the decree

from God in classical tragedy not only by a dysfunctional

family psychology, including Alexis’ homophobic father, but

also by the will of the system that shaped the individual’s

fate through policies and practices. There is no doubt

that, in Máscaras, Padura is disclosing the divided Cuban

family, a family whose feelings are set apart. But, above

all, he is portraying the Cuban State as the “inexorable

24

force” of the story that impels the characters towards

different variants of a tragic fate. Therefore, the text

implies that it is not until man faces the tragic that he

liberates himself from it and obtains purification and

redemption. Alexis’ “sacrifice” is at the level of his

“homosexual sins” and, having faced the tragic, he

liberates himself, obtaining purification and redemption.

But, Faustino Arayán’s son death goes beyond individual

interests and, in planning and performing his own

assassination, he attempts the transformation of society

and, thus, his transfiguration achieved real transcendence.

This is why, although the victim, Alexis is also the hero

of the novel, who, unable to have authority over his own

life, is glorified after his death. Therefore, in Máscaras

it is not the socialist masculine “new man” but the

effeminate man and transfigured transvestite, the

‘repressed other’, who brings about social change for Cuba.

As Conde explains: ‘Ese cabrón estaba loco y se

transfiguró para entrar en su propio calvario.” [This

bastard was crazy and he transformed himself in order to

endure his own suffering.]

25

Transfiguration and The return of the Repressed Other

By uncovering the dirty realities behind the beautiful

façade, Padura is also showing a different Havana, the

other, marginal city where crime, disorder and excess lurk

beneath the controlled revolutionary discipline. Conde’s

frustration is derived from the fact that he is aware that

the city is changing and, worse, deteriorating due to its

incoming signs of progress. Padura`s city is far from the

monumental Havana exposed by Carpentier, somehow engaging

in the process of the demystification of Havana and its

imaginary. Indeed, Padura confronts questions of hegemony

and fragmentation by presenting a city that is not

homogeneous, readable, with precise distribution of urban

functions and based on the transcendental discourse about

national identity that used to ignore marginality. It is,

somehow, the epitaph of the “new man” who is watching

impotent, the conversion of the city, plagued by crime and

sexual transgressions. This is why Conde needs to reconnect

himself to be able to uncover various signs of hidden

contemporary Cuba that cannot be interpreted through

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hegemonic codes, be it the imposed norms of the Cuban

state, or of “standard” narratives. In this way, Alexis`

transformation is a version of what Lezama Lima once

referred to as the “poetic transfiguration” of elements of

Cuban society that have been “othered” by the imposed norms

of the Cuban State.6 Thus, as much as transfiguration is

achieved through the transformation of the detective

fiction genre, in Máscaras, transfiguration is the core of

the plot and it will be through this transformation that

the “repressed other” achieves redemption. In fact, the

very death of Alexis Arayán calls for the “return of the

repressed” story of the nation, as it is by his

transformation as a transvestite on the same day of

Transfiguration that the Cuban repressed reappears. In

fact, when people are forbidden to discuss their feelings

openly it does not mean that they disappear. On the

contrary, they continually press to re-enter awareness and

be placed into action. And, this forced silence is as

6 The poetics of transfiguration were for Lezama Lima the only way todefine what it meant to be Cuban and to change the reality of the maninhabiting the archipelago and who was obliged to perceive life as aparadise. In fact, Lezama awaits a transfiguration and expresses thisin his work: “We are in the darkness, from which, at any moment we canreceive the Holy Spirit and become transfigured.” (1970:105)

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unhealthy for the individual as it is for the society as a

whole.

In this light, one can argue that many of the more

serious problems in our culture have been exacerbated by

the inability to discuss ideas that are unacceptable to the

prevailing politically correct wisdom. In this way, Alexis’

transformation implies the becoming of an individual being

and, by showing his most repressed desires he enters into

conflict with the collective: “ese travesti no se vistió

para exhibirse ni para salir a cazar, Manolo. Estaba

buscando algo más dificil de encontrar. La paz, tal vez. O

la venganza, qué se yo.” (90) [that transvestite did not

dress up looking for attention nor to chat people up,

Manolo. He was searching for something much more difficult

to find. It could be peace, revenge. I do not know] Alexis

abandons his “I”, breaking the rules and the symbolic

order, provoking and shocking. The external transfiguration

then becomes both internal and social. And, as we have

seen, his transfiguration gains transcendence, as Stephens

notes: “Transfiguration could lead to political redemption

often as a blood sacrifice which atones for the sins of

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exclusion and sets a moral tone necessary for the enactment

of inclusive democracy.” (2002: 95) However, while this

would explain how the “othered” groups react to their

marginalization through masking, as Marqués explains, “una

máscara blanca es ahora su propio rostro” (225) [a white

mask has become my own face], the mask is also seen as the

inner self, portraying the very essence of “Cubanidad” of

which Piñera was the prophet and exponent. Therefore,

Alexis’ transfiguration shows emotional, aesthetic,

ideological and political complexities and his death

becomes a metaphor of the repressed coming back to redeem

the nation. In fact, Alexis` transfiguration is directed to

Marxist-socialist models, which repressed the genuine Cuban

baroque expression and identity, regarded as “dangerous”

due to its symbolic elements and its possible different

readings.

Conclusion

The traditional detective story depicts civil society

as a regime of doubt and confusion, corruption and crime.

This is certainly true in Máscaras, where Conde does not

understand his own world and must constantly search for a

29

reality, which, ultimately, is nowhere to be found.

However, his confusion only reveals his interrogation to

Cuban society and calls for a socio-political

transfiguration of life, to replace silence and repression

by a more free existence.

Furthermore, Máscaras can be seen as a Mea Culpa,

denouncing the homophobic abuses perpetrated by the Cuban

revolution. However, some critics have argued that the

novel does not uproot the essential and natural character

of the genders and, therefore, it becomes very difficult to

arrive at emancipator political positions, insofar as the

socially constructed differences in human sexuality are

concerned. Indeed, As Bejel would argue: “if there is still

vacillation between whether the genders are stable

categories endowed by “wise nature” or whether they are

social constructs produced by repressive discourse, it is

difficult to deconstruct homophobic prejudices and their

sustaining structures.”(2001: 177)

Yet, in Máscaras, Padura is attempting to create a

dialogue with the official homophobic discourse and to open

up a different line of thought. It is only by unmasking

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repression and recognizing the dark corners of reality that

one can make a certain form of life coherent and possible. In

this way, Padura is forcing a necessary way for change; a

change performed by the repressed other.

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