Countercultural discourse
Usted es la culpable*
Lorenzo Lunar
Almuzara • 2006 •139 pagine
Javier Sánchez Zapatero
Traduzione: Giuseppina La Ciura
Thanks to authors such as Leonardo
Padura, Amir Valle or Lorenzo Lunar, Cuban crime writing has in
the last few years been experiencing exceptional development, becoming
one of the most effective cultural tools available to Caribbean
society for analysing its present situation critically. In Lunar's
case this x-ray of the island's present is structured through novels
which do not take place in Havana , unlike those by his fellow-writers,
but in the utterly unknown Santa Clara , a small town where the
Cuban people's needs and problems are displayed far more forcefully
than in the capital. In one of its deprived neighbourhoods works
Leo Martín, the police officer created by Lunar who
is also the main character in Que en vez de infierno
encuentres gloria (May you find glory
instead of hell) and La vida
es un tango (Life is a tango). As
in the first instalments of the saga, Usted es
la culpable (You are the guilty woman)
preserves a unity of space, which means that places and characters – such
as Chago el Buey or Manolito el Buey - can be integrated into its
plot, places and characters that are already known to authors (readers?)
familiar with the series about sector police chief Leo Martín.
In this rundown environment, forced
to live through the miseries caused by the Exceptional Period imposed
by the Castro regime, death is a daily occurrence, as is stated
in the novel's first sentence and repeated several times later
so that it becomes one of its leitmotifs. The appearance of the
corpse of Panchita, a pimp dedicated to sexploitation in the tourist
centre of Varadero, shows this to be true. Charged with investigating
the murder, Leo Martín will have to encounter
the sordid world frequented by the dead man. Through various interrogations,
the hero continues to set out a vision of the Cuban world that is
quite different from the one traditionally provided by the island's
official communication media, which leads him to question, in a sceptical
disillusioned reflection, the usefulness of his work and the meaning
of values like love or friendship in a world dominated by moral rottenness
and corruption.
The novel, which is written with the
usual dynamism and the particular rhythm of Lorenzo Lunar's work,
is composed, like classic crime novels, with the continuous presence
of dialogue. The effect of the dialogue structure on the book's
development is increased since interrogation is the method by which
Martín arrives at the truth of the
case. Through several personal interviews with informers, tricksters
and especially prostitutes, the hero succeeds in finding solution
to the murder. The dependence on dialogue means that in certain passages
the novel seems like a mere enumeration of personal snippets, as
if there were no other way of describing the neighbourhood's - and
by extension Cuba's - alienation than through the direct style and
confessions of the book's characters. Despite those little drawbacks
the novel succeeds in its aim of giving an up-to-date snapshot of
the island's society and establishing itself as a countercultural
discourse against the typical Castrist official speak.
* You are
the guilty woman
