Leonardo Padura and the Ruin of Revolutionary Dreams

Abstract

Anthropologist Anna Tsing suggests something that is both exciting and terrifying about human society: ruins and precarity can give rise to meaningful forms of social life. Although Tsing specifically reviews the specific case of life in spaces where there is a clear conjunction between neoliberal capitalism and ecological destruction, his point works to investigate any kind of historical ruin. Leonardo Padura, one of the most important Spanish-language writers of the present, is an example of how the ruins of a collective dream can create the conditions not only for a meaningful social life, but also for literary genius. My point is that his writing is evidence of how the Cuban Revolution, understood as the ruin of an alternative political project to the capitalism of the present, was and remains much more than smoking rubble.