I read the final page of Like Dust in the Wind (Como polvo en el viento) on the floor of a train station, just outside Buenos Aires. I called my best friend from college, who was probably having lunch in his apartment in Madrid. We hadn’t seen each other in two years—maybe a little longer. The last time had been at his house in Havana not far from the U.S. Embassy, where he told me he was planning to leave the country.
”I just finished the book,” I told him through tears. “It’s us. The Clan is us.”
Published in 2020, Like Dust in the Wind is the 14th novel by Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, winner of the Princess of Asturias Award for Literature in 2015. Born in 1955, four years before the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, Padura is best known for creating Mario Conde—an alcoholic, chain-smoking, disillusioned detective who always wanted to be a writer. Through Conde, Padura has spent decades documenting Cuban reality, especially the fate of his own generation: those raised on the promise of radical change. But Like Dust in the Wind is not about Mario Conde. It is about that generation—and the unfinished destiny of Cuba itself.
In the final hours of 1989, every member of The Clan, a patchwork of friends who met as teenagers during their high school years, had gathered in Fontanar, a neighborhood on the outskirts of Havana, in the house Clara had inherited from her parents, waiting for a new decade to begin. In twenty days, Clara Chape Doñate would turn 30. Just days later, at Havana’s Karl Marx Theater, Fidel Castro would utter the words that would come to define an entire era: “the Special Period in Time of Peace.”
The Berlin Wall had already fallen, and the Soviet Union was beginning to resemble a mutant corpse. More than 9,000 kilometers from Moscow, the death of the Cuban government’s most important ally was already being felt. Scarcity began to seep into the streets—electricity, food, medicine, everything. Even utopia itself seemed to vanish. As Pedura writes,
But Like Dust in the Wind is not about Mario Conde. It is about that generation—and the unfinished destiny of Cuba itself.
“Where did you get all this stuff, Clara? The blanket, the napkins, the dessert bowls… And these awful cups! Is all of this stolen?” her friend Elisa asks. Her belly is already giving away three months of pregnancy.
“From the neighbors,” Clara replies. “A few of them work at the airport. They steal everything—even the fuel from the planes.“
Darío, Clara’s husband, a respected surgeon and loyal member of the Cuban Communist Party, enters the scene alongside their two sons, Ramsés and Marcos, ages eight and six. Bernardo, Elisa’s partner, is already there, as are Horacio, Irving and Joel, a gay couple, and Fabio and Liuba, both architects.
Together they make up The Clan, a portrait of post-revolutionary Cuba—still deeply marked by contradictions of class, race, and sex. The last to join the group would be Guesty—Horacio’s girlfriend—and Walter, the painter, whose death would set in motion a chain of events that would change all of their lives forever.
With Clara’s house as its epicenter, The Clan reunites again and again. Through conversations, reunions, departures, and silences, Padura reconstructs, decade by decade, the history of a country more mythologized than truly observed, or even understood. From the 1970s onward, readers witness the transformations—some life-giving, others lethal—of both people and nation.
Across two decades, we see almost everything: celebration, pleasure, irreverence, even humor. But we also witness what was never supposed to exist in the society of Che Guevara’s “New Man”: corruption, influence peddling, the rise of an elite, and defining moments such as the Ochoa Affair in 1989, which ended with the execution of Major General Arnaldo Ochoa on charges of drug trafficking and high treason.
But above all, Padura leaves us with men and women worn down but never fully broken, who look you in the eye and say:
“I’m leaving. I have to leave.“
One by one, driven by personal circumstances, national upheaval, and global events, the characters leave their island behind. The destinations multiply: Madrid, Paris, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Miami, New York, San Juan. Even the second generation—embodied by Ramsés and Marcos—will eventually follow the same path. Only Bernardo and Clara remain in Cuba. Some return to visit; others are never seen again. Some manage to build good lives. Others, not so much. Life “abroad”—shaped by imperial globalization, capitalism’s highest stage—turns out to be far harsher than many had imagined.
Through conversations, reunions, departures, and silences, Padura reconstructs, decade by decade, the history of a country more mythologized than truly observed, or even understood.
The story reconnects with the present in 2016. By chance or by fate, Marcos—Clara and Darío’s son—and Adela, a young Cuban American woman, meet in Miami and fall in love. One day, Marcos shows her a photograph taken the last time The Clan gathered in his childhood home. To Adela’s astonishment, among those faces is one impossible to ignore: her mother’s.
And so, Padura links two generations of Cubans—on and off the island—building a turbulent story that transcends national borders, where memory, identity, and diaspora intertwine beneath the pulse of the detective fiction he commands so well.
“I tried to sketch a chronicle of the causes and consequences of my generation’s diaspora, and of the generation that could have been my children and grandchildren,” Padura told El País in 2020.
There is a great deal of Padura in this novel—above all in Clara: the one who never left. The one who fights, day and night, against a visceral skepticism. She in Fontanar, in a house slowly losing its luster; he in Mantilla, perhaps with fewer cracks to hold together.
Toward the end of the novel, Clara, holding Bernardo’s ashes, says:
“One part of Bernardo will be absorbed by the soil of this island and fused with it forever; the other, like the rivers of life, will flow into the sea and travel the world. Until the final victory.“
***
Sitting on the floor of a grimy train station in Buenos Aires, crying into a transatlantic phone call, I understood that Padura’s Clan and mine were not so different. They endured the Special Period; we are its children. They lived through the collapse of the socialist bloc; we came of age under the long shadow of global neoliberalism and, later, Donald Trump’s oil sanctions.
My own “Clan,” forged within the walls of the Havana University’s School of Communication, also dreamed—and dreamed hard. Karl Marx once wrote that human beings do not revolve around an illusory sun but around themselves. We grew up believing, in one way or another, that it was still possible to change the course of things. And yet today, I can count on one hand how many still remain in Cuba. The rest have been carried across Europe and North and South America. It seems that in contemporary Cuba, the story of a group of friends slowly scattered across the world keeps repeating itself.
Cuba: a country where its children learn to say goodbye before they even learn to dream.
“Dust in the wind—
all they are is dust in the wind.“
Daniella “Ella” Fernández (La Habana, Cuba, 1995) is a journalist, photographer, and filmmaker based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her work explores feminism, migration, environment, and social movements across Latin America and the Caribbean.