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Leonardo Padura in conversation with Róbinson Úsuga Henao

Medellín 2023, 

Leonardo Padura (Cuba) presents the book Personas decentes (Decent People), the latest novel in the saga featuring his well-known character, the detective Mario Conde. The murder of a former Cuban hierarch dedicated to the repression of artists in pursuit of ideological purity, at a time of maximum social and political effervescence in Cuba with the visit of Barack Obama in 2016, is the starting point for this thriller with which Padura portrays one of the most sinister pages in the history of the Cuban revolution. The abysmal differences between the Castro elite and the rest of the population, spiced by political corruption and the use of sex work as a means of livelihood on the island, make up this novel in which many crimes, some physical and others historical and spiritual, are recounted. Róbinson Úsuga Henao will talk to the author, considered to be one of the renovators of the police genre in Spanish.