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Private Eyes

A crime novelist navigates Cuba’s shifting reality.

A few months ago, the Spanish Embassy in Havana arranged a party to celebrate the state of literature in Cuba. The event, held in the Palacio Velasco Sarra, a neocolonial building at the edge of the Old City, was a study in caution. Fidel Castro had shut down the Embassy’s cultural center in 2003, fearing that it was cultivating subversion, and it had just begun to reinstate its programs. The Ambassador described the evening as part of “the classic diplomatic work we needed to adapt to the Cuban reality.”

The highlight was a talk by Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a short, dark, solid-looking man with a beard fading to white and the inscrutable look of a canny country priest. Padura is an unusual figure in contemporary Cuba: a novelist, a journalist, and a social critic who has skirted punishment by the ruling Communist Party. He is best known as the author of a half-dozen detective novels, which have gathered a passionate following both on and off the island. Padura isn’t a dissident, in the way of Solzhenitsyn, but neither is he just an entertainer. For Cuba’s intellectuals, and for its professional class, a new Padura book is as much a document as a novel, a way of understanding Cuban reality. Although he speaks carefully in public, in private he will acknowledge, “People think that what I say is a measure of what can or can’t be said in Cuba.” Last year, he was awarded the country’s National Literature Prize, a tribute both to his literary achievement and to his political agility.

The Embassy event had drawn three hundred expectant listeners—and, according to one diplomat in the audience, a handful of government minders. Padura spoke mostly about the discipline of being a writer, and when he approached the issue of censorship he did a careful two-step. “There is no current policy of what should or should not be published,” he told the crowd. “I believe enough space has been achieved for almost everything to be published in Cuba.” But he also suggested that there were consequences to decades of rigid control: “I think the Cuban reader has grown unaware of what his own countrymen are writing, of what Cuban authors are publishing right now in the world.”

Over the decades, Cubans have learned to speak in a form of verbal camouflage, in which key words are amplified by raised eyebrows, widened eyes, pursed lips. Cuba’s most universally understood gesture mimics a man stroking his beard: Fidel, whose name is otherwise not mentioned. During the Castro years, nearly all the writing that criticized the government came from outside the country, from foreigners and, more, from the constant flow of exiles.

Many of Padura’s peers have fled the country. One of them, Eliseo Alberto, escaped in 1990 to Mexico, where he wrote “Dossier Against Myself,” a memoir that revealed that Cuba’s state security apparatus had tried to recruit him to inform on his own father. Others, such as the poet and journalist Raúl Rivero, have been imprisoned for criticizing the government. (Rivero, too, fled after he was released.) Padura has stayed, establishing himself as perhaps the foremost chronicler of the island. “I have retained a special relationship with Cuban reality,” he told me during a recent visit. “I live in a neighborhood in which I know all the codes of existence, which I have mastered over many years.”

At the Embassy, Padura spoke about his most ambitious book, “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” a fictionalized account of Leon Trotsky and his assassin, Ramón Mercader, who lived out his days in Cuba after twenty years in a Mexican prison. For half a century, official Cuba has seen Trotsky as the Soviets did: a traitor rightly consigned to the dustbin of history. Padura’s treatment of Trotsky is highly sympathetic, and his telling of Mercader’s life exposes the hideous legacy of Stalinism, which for decades amounted to a state religion in Cuba. These views are uncontroversial in much of the world, but in Cuba they are radical. The dissident blogger Yoani Sánchez wrote in a review, “There are books—I’m warning you—that open our eyes, such that we can never again sleep in peace.” Onstage, Padura acknowledged that he had frequently suffered from political anxiety: “Every time I finish a novel, I say, ‘This is the one they’re not going to let be published.’ ”

Later, I asked Padura what had worried him about “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” and he said, “Everything worried me.” It was the kind of thing that Padura says often: a signal that he is a critical freethinker, but a respectful one. “I have no militancy, not with the Party, nor with la disidencia,” he told me. “I bury myself in Cuba deeply so that I can express what Cuba is, and I have not left Cuba because I am a Cuban writer and I can’t be anything else.”

In the past two years, President Raúl Castro, who officially succeeded his ailing older brother in 2008, has initiated significant economic reforms. Many Cubans are hoping that a cultural transformation will follow. At the Embassy, Padura was joined by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, the author of the “Dirty Havana Trilogy,” a lurid romp through the city’s seamier quarters; he is admired in Europe and Latin America as “Cuba’s Bukowski,” but is rarely published at home. He told me that intellectuals had seen Padura’s prize as a sign of a new openness. “Everyone has interpreted it as an acknowledgment of an interesting writer—who from the perspective of the crime novel has questioned some aspects of the society in which he lives—and of respect toward an intellectual of value.” Others believe that the regime is putting up with Padura for more cynical reasons. He enjoys a devoted international audience, so censuring him would have a political cost. And as long as he is seen to be writing frankly, the regime can use him as a demonstration of its tolerance. A longtime Castro insider told me, “Padura is an intelligent person who understands the limits. Open dissent in Cuba is a major act, and he hasn’t done that. He goes just as far as he thinks he can. In a sense, there is a kind of implicit pact between him and the regime. The mere fact that he defines himself as a patriot—a Cuban writer living in Cuba, with all that that signifies—is a clear message to the regime that he is not a threat.”

At the beginning of Padura’s 2005 novel “Adiós Hemingway,” the hero, a hard-drinking, hard-up former detective and frustrated writer named Mario Conde, visits the port town of Cojimar, near Havana. He recalls a day in 1960, when he was a young boy, and his grandfather, Rufino, took him there for ice cream after watching the cockfights in a nearby town. Rufino pointed out an old man with a beard, leaping ashore from a beautiful black-hulled fishing boat, and said, “That’s Hemingway, the American writer. He likes cockfights too.”

Hemingway, who looked something like Santa Claus but had an air of sadness about him, embraced another man on the quay, and then strode off to a shiny black Chrysler that was waiting for him. Before pulling away, he looked toward Mario and his grandfather and seemed to wave.

“Adiós, Hemingway,” the boy shouted, and got a smile in return. Years later, Conde learned that Hemingway had just taken his last trip across a stretch of sea that he loved dearly; he understood that the American writer was not saying goodbye to him, “a tiny insect that had landed on the sea front at Cojimar,” but to “several of the most important things in his life.”

In Padura’s more recent novels, he often uses a historical figure—Trotsky, Hemingway—to critique the present. Hemingway is a hero to many older Cubans: for his macho image, for his love of the island, and for his supposed affection for the Revolution. Padura told me, “When I began writing, Hemingway bowled me over: for the way he wrote and how he lived.” But he grew disenchanted with Hemingway’s behavior in the Spanish Civil War, feeling that he had been too accommodating of the left’s excesses. “His cynicism seemed unpardonable to me, and I did not forgive him,” he said. Hemingway came to Cuba in 1939, and stayed through the guerrilla war that brought Castro to power, in 1959. The next year, Fidel won the annual billfishing tournament that was named in Hemingway’s honor. A photograph taken that day shows the two exchanging smiles as Papa gives Castro a big silver cup; it remains a great favorite of official Cuba. But by the time Castro declared the “socialist nature” of his revolution, during the Bay of Pigs invasion, in April, 1961, Hemingway had left Cuba, heading for treatment at the Mayo Clinic, and it was only two months before he retreated to his cabin in Idaho and killed himself.

Cubans have never been certain whether Hemingway left the island with regret or with relief. In Padura’s fictionalized account, he leaves behind a clue. Three decades after his departure, a human skeleton is uncovered in the cockfighting pit on the grounds of La Finca Vigía, his hilltop compound near Cojimar, and the police summon Conde out of retirement to help investigate. The remains are those of an American F.B.I. agent, sent to keep an eye on Hemingway, and the police suspect that Hemingway committed murder and covered it up. Conde, the frustrated writer, is unable to be impartial. He worships Hemingway; before he joined the police force, he knelt before a picture of him and vowed to use his adventures as material for writing. Picking through the detritus of the author’s life, Conde excitedly claims one of his trophies: a pair of Ava Gardner’s panties.

On a visit to Cojimar a few months ago, Padura sat with me on some steps that led from the seawall to the water. Every afternoon, men and boys gather on the old concrete pier to fish, dangling their legs over the edge. Across the narrow bay, a shoreline of coral falls away to mangrove scrub and then to the unkempt apartment blocks of Alamar, a Soviet-style workers’ city. For the residents of Cojimar, as for many Cubans, the economic reforms are still an abstraction. That withering hot afternoon, there were no passing ships, no fishing boats, no swimmers. In a little park overlooking the pier, men sat in the shade, nursing beers. Across the lane, a small white monument features a bronze bust of Hemingway, facing seaward. Except for the animated fishermen, Cojimar felt like an open-air theatre where the show had long since ended.

In the nineteen-eighties, Castro established another memorial, a “Marina Hemingway,” on the western fringes of Havana, to attract moneyed tourists with yachts. Padura’s hero loathes the place, “designed to exclude the scruffy Cuban but enable the rich and beautiful of the world to enjoy yachts, beaches, meals, obliging whores and lots of skin-flattering sun.” The streets of Havana are even worse—the inverse of a workers’ paradise, where the teeming citizens are “trapped by an anxiety that could only be relieved through shouting, violent gestures and resentful glances.” At one point, Conde sees a pair of young girls prostituting themselves. Nearby, boys exercise a dog bred for fighting, and a black man wearing Santería charms and gold chains angrily curses the flat tire of his ’54 Oldsmobile. The city, Padura writes, “was about to erupt, and the clouds of smoke it was giving off were warning signs.” In a reflective moment, Conde realizes, “He was a goddamn private detective in a country with neither detectives nor private people; he felt like a bad metaphor for a strange reality.” Like Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles, Padura’s Havana is a geography of human failings: streets are filthy; elevators don’t work; the well connected have good Scotch and expensive cars while the rest go hungry. The details are immediately recognizable to anyone who lives there. What Padura does is to find a politically acceptable way to acknowledge the obvious.

For readers of a certain political sensibility, “Adiós Hemingway” is a requiem for the failures of the Revolution. But Padura’s ugly scenes in Havana are ambiguous; they can be read as a condemnation of Fidel’s revolutionary economics or as a criticism of the spread of nascent capitalism. And, crucially, he does not turn Hemingway against the Revolution. He has written about his historical research for the novel, including Hemingway’s declassified F.B.I. file—which, he pointed out, has fifteen pages that the U.S. government has still not released, on “national-security grounds.” At the end of the book, Conde concludes that the F.B.I. agent died in an armed confrontation with Hemingway and two loyal Cuban retainers; Hemingway fled to avoid further trouble with American law enforcement. The implication is that the great writer loved Cuba—even Fidel’s Cuba—and left only because the agents of imperialism forced him to go.

The streets of Havana are newly full of private cars: Eisenhower-era Buicks, Chryslers, and Studebakers, which people have painted in bright colors and put into service as taxis. Cubans are now allowed to own small businesses—repair shops, hair salons, cafés—and to buy and sell property. On residential streets, a smattering of houses are freshly painted, evidence of the prosperity slowly spreading to the few locals who have entered the real-estate market. People have carved out cafés and restaurants from the front rooms of their houses and the ground floors of apartment buildings.

But some of these new enterprises offer little more than coffee, kept hot in thermoses, and many are empty of clients. Outside the state-owned Coppelia ice-cream shop, people stand in long, slow-moving lines. The city looks much the same as it did the last time I saw it, in 2008: beat up and worn and badly in need of a paint job. Old people sit listlessly in doorways and parks, and, as always, Cubans in T-shirts and flip-flops carry their belongings in plastic bags. People have more choices, but Havana remains a decaying city of eternal scarcities, where the inhabitants spend much of their lives scrambling to satisfy basic needs: resolviendo, as the Cubans say—resolving things. When I lived there, from 1993 to 1995, everyone I knew, including Party members, was involved in one hustle or another—anything from selling cigars or medicine stolen from state-owned factories to buying illegally farmed food on the black market. In that sense, some of Raúl Castro’s “reforms” have merely brought into the open what most Cubans were already doing in secret.

After a few days in Havana, I realized that something else was different. For decades, Fidel’s Revolution maintained a larger-than-life, exhortatory presence. Now that seemed muted. On the Malecón, the seaside promenade, the “U.S. Interests Section,” the de-facto American mission, is set inside a modernist building that is officially the Swiss Embassy. In 2006, after the American chargé d’affaires installed a digital ticker with uncensored news bulletins, Fidel erected a thicket of more than a hundred black flags outside and built a concrete bandstand where anti-American demonstrations were held. Now the flagpoles were bare, the bandstand deserted.

Around Havana, there were only a few of the old declamatory billboards, and those which remained had been allowed to peel and crack. The iconic placard that hung over a main traffic tunnel to announce the goal of “Socialism or Death” had been taken down. A new one read, incredibly, “The Changes in Cuba Are for More Socialism.” Another valiantly proposed, “The Party Is Immortal.”

In a famous speech in June, 1961, Fidel Castro prescribed a path for Cuba’s intellectuals: “Within the revolution, everything; outside of it, nothing.” In the intervening decades, the state’s cultural apparatus has been controlled by half a dozen Castro loyalists, who have loosened or tightened the strictures, according to the country’s circumstances, their own taste, and, most of all, their interpretations of the Castros’ whims. Since the eighties, the Casa de las Americas—the country’s preëminent cultural institution—has been run by the poet Roberto Fernández Retamar, who also served on the ruling Council of State. The Cuban Institute of Art and Cinema Industries, which oversees the movie business, was led for decades by Alfredo Guevara, another lifelong Castro friend.

The effect has been stultifying. To the extent that Cuba has a literary scene, it is intermingled with a smallish crowd of actors, artists, musicians, and architects, who have learned how to adapt to the strictures of the system. A handful have flourished: Nueva Trova crooners like Pablo Milanés and members of popular bands like Los Van Van; actors like Jorge Perugorría and Mirtha Ibarra. But the openness they create tends to be cultural, not political, and most of them oscillate, like tethered moths, around the various cultural offices. For writers, the central agency is the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba, or UNEAC, with several publishing houses, including Editorial Union, which has put out most of Padura’s work.

Once a year, the Cuban Institute of the Book holds the Havana Book Fair, where authorized works are exhibited and sold. The few bookstores in Havana are mostly devoted to the obviously permissible (histories of Cuba, the poems of José Martí). Every store seems to have a shelf devoted to Fidel’s thinking about the world: “Capitalism in Crisis,” “Obama and the Empire,” “My Early Years.” Cuba stopped importing most books from the capitalist West in the sixties, and so, as Pedro Juan Gutiérrez told me, “almost nobody knows the work of John Cheever, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, Michel Houellebecq, Marguerite Duras, and a long et cetera of others. It means that the readers are almost equivalent to illiterates.”

Padura’s books have all been distributed in Cuba, and he has been prolific. In addition to the Trotsky and Hemingway novels and his five other Conde books (released in English as “Havana Black,” “Havana Blue,” “Havana Gold,” “Havana Red,” and “Havana Fever”), he has published three more novels, two story collections, five anthologies of journalism, critical studies of Alejo Carpentier and of the poet José María Heredia, a book about the Caribbean’s greatest salsa musicians, and one about Cuba’s baseball stars. His latest novel, “Heretics,” published in Spain this fall, is a centuries-spanning narrative about the travels of a painting by Rembrandt, with appearances by Conde.

In the Plaza de Armas, in the old colonial neighborhood near the port, I visited an open-air used-book market. Books by or about Che Guevara and Fidel Castro abounded, along with reprinted posters from the revolutionary heyday of the sixties, all clearly aimed at tourists. There was nothing by the emigré writers Reinaldo Arenas or Guillermo Cabrera Infante. When I asked about books by Pedro Juan Gutiérrez, I drew blank looks from most of the stallholders. Finally, one handed me a couple of thin volumes he had tucked discreetly under a pile of other books. Padura’s books, on the other hand, were everywhere.

Padura lives in Mantilla, where Havana bleeds into the countryside in a welter of auto-body shops, small farms, and modest roadside homes. It is not a convenient place to live; the drive downtown takes at least thirty minutes, and the street in front of the house is wide and noisy with traffic. But Padura was born in the house and grew up in it, and his mother still lives downstairs. (His father died in September.) After Padura married his wife, Lucía, whom he met in 1978, he began building the second-story apartment, where the two have lived ever since.

Their home is spacious and light-filled, with a well-appointed kitchen and verandas that look out on the neighborhood; the dining-room table has a tablecloth silk-screened with the cover from a German edition of one of Padura’s novels. The house is meticulously clean—a symptom, evidently, of Padura’s fastidious nature. When I visited, he encouraged me repeatedly to go “wash my face,” and then, when I complied, called Lucía to bring me a fresh towel.

Padura is burly and tough-looking, with a stubbly haircut and the demeanor of someone used to life on the unfashionable fringes of his city. He has a recognizably Cuban swagger—he drinks (formerly rum, now red wine), smokes black-tobacco cigarettes, and curses exuberantly—but he is also watchful. Lucía, a shy woman with a perpetual half smile, accompanies him everywhere, and he dedicates all his books to her, “with love and squalor.” They have no children, and focus their energy on a decrepit dachshund mutt named Chorizo, who lay like a limp toy on the shiny tile floor. Padura fussed over him constantly, carrying him out to a terrace where he could urinate, then back again. “He’s sixteen, just imagine,” Padura said. “Well over a hundred of our years.”

Padura told me that he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else. “Everything started from here, from this house, from this neighborhood,” he explained. His great-grandfather set up a general store in Mantilla, and the family never left. His father and mother built the house in 1954, and he was born the next year. “In my house, there was no literature. My parents are of a low cultural level.” Padura said this without censure; it was a statement of fact.

In the first years of the Revolution, Cuba’s artists enjoyed seemingly limitless freedom. But by the late sixties the Communist Party’s dogmatists, increasingly aligned with the Soviet Union, began to persecute intellectuals who exhibited “counter-revolutionary tendencies.” Writers like Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Carlos Franqui saw the warning signs and fled early on. Those who left were branded traitors or gusanos—“worms,” Fidel Castro’s epithet for Cubans who moved to the United States—and were banned from returning. Those who stayed were hounded, particularly homosexuals, who were seen as “decadent,” and therefore politically suspect. After a harsh imprisonment, the gay writer Reinaldo Arenas left for America in 1980, during the Mariel boatlift.

The hallmark episode of this grim period centered on the poet Heberto Padilla. In 1968, Padilla published a book of poems called “Out of the Game,” and won a state-sponsored prize. Almost immediately, though, the government denounced the book as counter-revolutionary, and agreed to allow publication only after it added a prologue that made clear the official opinion of the book. Three years later, Padilla staged a reading of a new poem, called “Provocaciones,” and was arrested by state security for “subversive activities.” He was held in prison for a month, and then forced to appear before his peers in UNEAC to express his contrition. In a grovelling speech, Padilla said, “I will never tire, as long as I live, of repenting such unspeakable and shameful acts. This is an irreplaceable experience that has divided my life in two: the man I was and the man I will be.” The time afterward was one of fear and constraint, known among writers and thinkers as the Five Gray Years. The choice between forced exile and the trauma of ostracism at home was stark enough to silence most of them for the rest of their careers.

Padura belongs to what he has referred to as the Hidden Generation: the Cubans who came of age after the worst spasms of the Revolution but before the fall of Communism. Like many of his peers, he grew up believing in Fidel’s vision of a Socialist future; in the summers, he cut sugarcane in Party-run “field schools.” As a boy, he dreamed of becoming a baseball player. “I was overflowing with passion, knowledge of the game, ability, intelligence, and speed,” he said. “But I would have needed to measure about thirty centimetres more than I do.” He resolved to become a sportswriter, but when he entered Havana University, in 1975, the school offered no courses in journalism. “Socialist planning had decided that there were too many journalists,” Padura said. Instead, he studied philology, focussing on Hispano-American literature. In the end, it was an advantage, he said: “I was able to study journalism without being contaminated by the vices of the academy.” In 1980, after graduating, he began working as a reporter for El Caimán Barbudo, the monthly literary supplement of Juventud Rebelde, the Communist Youth newspaper. Unlike Granma, the Party’s “official organ,” Cuba’s youth media occasionally stray from approved stories; when prostitution surged in the nineties, they dared to point it out. Padura spent much of his time writing features about neglected corners of Cuban life and history: Havana’s Chinatown, the Bacardi rum dynasty, the rise and fall of a notorious pimp in the years after independence, in 1910. The “Padilla affair,” as it became known, was not much talked about, Padura said. “But there was still a lot of pressure about what you could and couldn’t say, and there was a member of the Ministry of the Interior who read our work and called us to account if we got out of line.”

After three years, Padura wrote an article that mentioned a man who had been officially blacklisted. He was sanctioned for “ideological problems” and sent to work on the main paper at Juventud Rebelde. As he recalls it, it wasn’t a punishment; he had the support of his editors to work on stories that interested him, and he honed his craft. “I was lucky,” he said. “Because there I became a real journalist, I became famous, I learned to write narratively.”

By this time, Cuba was involved in the war in Angola, sending thousands of “internationalist” troops to fight in one of the fiercest proxy campaigns of the Cold War. When Padura was in his late twenties, he volunteered to spend a year there as a news correspondent, and he recalls it as an alienating time of fear and homesickness. It helped inspire some of his first published short stories: ruminations about revolutionary faith, the varieties of exile, and loneliness.

In 1989, while Padura was at Juventud Rebelde, the Soviet bloc began to disintegrate, ending the generous economic credits and favorable trade relationships that had kept Cuba afloat for three decades. The U.S., which had maintained an embargo against Cuba, tightened the strictures. The following August, Castro announced his plan to stave off disaster, the Special Period in Time of Peace. It was the beginning of nearly a decade of precipitous hardship for many Cubans, as the economy shrank to almost nothing. Because of the lack of fuel, bicycles replaced cars, and oxen replaced tractors. Many Cubans went hungry; a Party official confessed to me that his family sometimes had little more than sugar water for dinner. Violence, theft, and prostitution soared, and there were riots in poor neighborhoods. In 1994, as many as fifty thousand Cubans fled on improvised boats in an effort to reach the United States. Zoé Valdés, a former cultural official, wrote a novel about the period whose title—“La Nada Cotidiana,” or “The Everyday Nothingness”—summed up the widespread feeling of despair. Soon afterward, she fled to Paris.

Those who stayed did their best to weather the changes in the economy. The government introduced the “convertible peso” to compete with the U.S. dollar, which was common in tourism and on the black market. The new currency was far more valuable than the regular peso, and those who had access to it prospered. The effect was a surreal inverted economy, in which doctors went hungry while street artists and chambermaids—as well as writers and artists with sales abroad—could afford meat with their rice and beans.

In 1990, Padura became the editor of La Gaceta de Cuba, an UNEAC publication, and he remained there for five years. “Unless you worked for an official organismo, you really couldn’t work at that time,” he recalled. “The state, formerly omnipresent, couldn’t even insure food for the people. I took advantage of that change.” La Gaceta ceased to publish for two years, leaving him with a modest stipend but no real responsibilities. “I wrote and wrote,” he said. “Almost everyone thought about leaving Cuba, but I decided to stay, and from ’90 to ’95 I worked like a crazy man.” He read voraciously, favoring the Spanish-language writers Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and especially the twentieth-century Americans: Fitzgerald, Faulkner, McCullers, Roth. “Nobody knows how to tell a story better than the American novelists,” he said. He credits John Updike with inspiring his greatest achievement of these years, the creation of Mario Conde. With Conde, he said, he had tried to do in Cuba what Rabbit Angstrom had done for American society. “These novels express a disenchantment with a social project—the Revolution—which, although it can be something beautiful, has been something . . . arduous.”

When Padura started writing, detective novels were tremendously popular in Cuba; they constituted as much as forty per cent of the books published there, and some titles could sell two hundred thousand copies in a few days. But, like much art of the time, they were what Padura has described as “an official propaganda pamphlet with no literary value.” In 1972, the Ministry of the Interior had announced a competition to develop the genre in Cuba: “The works that are presented will be on police themes and will have a didactic character, serving at the same time as a stimulus to prevention and vigilance over all activities that are antisocial.” The heroes were to be champions of the people, so upright that they refrained from swearing.

Padura wanted fiction to engage “the biggest problems of society: corruption, repression, hypocrisy, ideological erosion, opportunism, poverty.” Crime writing, he said, was “a way to enter and touch the dark side.” Mario Conde is a drunk with dissolute friends and a tenuous hold on his job at the police department. But he has an appealing physicality and an eye for women, rum, and food, and he is a despondent idealist, given to contemplating life’s insoluble questions—all of which makes him as identifiable for Cubans as Rabbit Angstrom was for suburban Americans. “Conde very often thought as I did, acted as I would have acted,” Padura told me. Conde loves Hemingway, and wishes he had become a baseball player; he was born the same year as Padura, and worked for a time as a reporter.

Padura was in good favor with the publishing committees, having released unchallenging books on baseball and on salsa musicians. But when he finished the first Conde book, “Pasado Perfecto,” in 1990, it was denied publication. (In the book, a friend of Conde’s channels his frustration: “Do you think anyone in this state can write? No shit, you don’t feel like writing, let alone living, but it’s important not to give up.”) Padura’s only option was a foreign publisher—which, as one Cuban writer explained, “gives us protection at home,” and also increases the chances that a book will come out in Cuba. Padura managed to get his book put out by the University of Guadalajara Press, and when he brought back copies of the first edition people told him that they loved Conde. The character, he realized, was “a reflection of the problems and the frustrations of my generation.”

Around that time, Cuban writers   found a new champion: Abel Prieto, who was the president of UNEAC and then the Minister of Culture. Prieto was a Party member who stood up in meetings to condemn dissenters—but he was also aware that the country had lost much of its intellectual capital. He convinced Castro to allow intellectuals to come and go more freely and, as long as they didn’t break politically with the system, to keep their foreign earnings.

In 1993, Padura’s second Conde novel, “Vientos de Cuaresma,” won an UNEAC prize that guaranteed publication, and Prieto began pushing to have the first, rejected book printed as well. Although there wasn’t enough paper available at first, it was released the next year, in small printings that sold out within days. Padura began to think of the Conde novels as a series—four books that traced the seasons of 1989, the year the Berlin Wall came down. With each book, Lucía told me, “It’s been a matter of pushing the envelope a little further, seeing how far he can go.” The books have grown more audacious and more lurid as he has gained confidence. The first one is a relatively restrained story of official corruption; the second is about a young teacher with “a pristine ideological record sheet,” who, after she is found dead, turns out to have been leading a licentious double life of sex and drug use.

His third novel, “Máscaras,” took up the repression of intellectuals and homosexuals in the nineteen-seventies. Conde, who is suspended from the force, investigates the murder of a transvestite, who is found dead in a Havana park, wearing a red dress. The principal suspect is Alberto Marqués, an old gay playwright, whom Padura, mimicking the Party’s language, accuses of a parodic list of vices: “A homosexual of vast predatory experience, politically uncommitted and ideologically deviant . . . protector of dissolute faggots, a man of questionable philosophical associations, full of petty-bourgeois, classicist prejudices.” As the investigation deepens, though, Conde becomes sympathetic to Marqués, who, despite suffering repression, “took it like a man and stayed here on the island.” He also becomes intrigued by Havana’s gay demimonde. Padura’s treatment of sex is usually more suggestive than explicit—like most revolutionary societies, Cuba has a marked strain of prudishness—but in one scandalous scene Conde has sex with a woman who he suspects is a transsexual.

For Padura, writing about the persecution of homosexuals “was like diving into a pool without looking,” he says. But he showed an unerring instinct for political shifts. Prieto, along with other culture ministers, had begun to rehabilitate gay writers such as José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, who both died in the late seventies; their work was reprinted, and Lezama Lima was given a posthumous prize. Castro’s old friend Alfredo Guevara, the director of the film institute, was helping to make “Strawberry and Chocolate,” in which a Communist Youth militant and a gay man become friends.

Padura’s gamble paid off. “On January 13, 1996, God reached out and touched me,” he said. “I was told I had won the Café Gijon prize,” a Spanish literary award that came with a stipend of about sixteen thousand dollars. At a time when the average Cuban made about six dollars a month, it was a fortune. Soon afterward, the Spanish publisher Tusquets offered to publish his books. “When that happened, Lucía said to me, ‘From this moment on, you’re a writer,’ ” Padura said. Suddenly, he inhabited the tiny community of creative types who had established a reputation overseas while staying in favor with the regime. He and Lucía bought a blue Subaru, and they began travelling abroad with increasing frequency. When I visited, they had recently returned from a book tour in Argentina and Chile, and were leaving soon for Greece and Spain.

With the pride of a small-town boy made good, Padura ticked off his accomplishments. “I’ve been translated into twenty languages, and I’ve been given more prizes: the Officier des Arts et des Lettres of the French government”—he waved to a shelf of mementos—“and last year the Spanish Council of Ministers gave me honorary Spanish citizenship for my literary merit.” Several of Padura’s novels have been adapted for foreign movies and telenovelas; Lucía acts as his co-writer on the screenplays.

One night, I went with Padura to a party in Guanabacoa, a small town east of Havana, a gathering of actors, writers, and artists. A man named David Mateo told me that he was the editor of an online art magazine, which seemed unimaginable. Several years ago, the regime engaged Venezuela’s state-owned telecommunications company to lay high-speed cable to Cuba, but the project is still unfinished, and getting online is maddeningly slow and expensive. I stayed abreast of the news in Havana by going to the Internet café at a tourist hotel and paying exorbitant fees; for the average Cuban, an hour of Internet access costs a week’s salary. In any case, most Cubans are allowed access only to the island’s “intranet,” which the government filters and controls. Mateo’s contributors sent him dispatches by e-mail, and he replied as best he could. The magazine itself was assembled abroad. He had no idea what it looked like.

When Padura was a young reporter, if you wrote something that displeased the Party, you were assigned to another paper, or to a work farm. Today, censorship works more subtly. The few publications that are allowed a little leeway have small print runs and limited distribution, and even they must submit to supervision. A reporter at a prominent magazine told me that every issue is sent to government overseers: “They can make suggestions for changes in the content, and even veto the publication of articles.” For writers outside the system, the cultural institutions are remote and mysterious; there is only a lingering sense that certain things are appropriate and others aren’t. “It’s all very light, very discreet,” Pedro Juan Gutiérrez told me. “You can’t go and let off steam, because there is nobody in an office, behind a desk, saying anything. If you are disliked, you are disliked.”

When I asked Padura if his novels had ever been censored, he said, “Fortunately, no.” But he pointed out that “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” his Trotsky novel, was printed in a very small edition, with about two thousand copies allowed onto the Cuban market. When it was released, at the Havana Book Fair, the room was crowded with Padura’s fans, with others outside waiting to get in. The state media didn’t report the event, and hardly mentioned the book.

In journalism and in fiction, Padura has returned over and over to the Special Period and to the repression of the seventies, as a way of reckoning with the broadest failures of the Revolution, and of his generation’s complicit silence. In August, 2012, on the hundredth anniversary of Virgilio Piñera’s birth, Padura published an article titled “Remembering Is Always Better Than Forgetting.” Without mentioning Piñera’s homosexuality directly, he criticized “the marginalization and opprobrium” Piñera had experienced, and denounced the tendency among those who had committed abuses of “forgetting that which is inconvenient.”

The Castros, though, go unnamed in the piece, and in almost all of Padura’s journalism. In the same article, he gives a clue to his reticence: “Those who were powerful in those days saw us as ants they could squish with their boots. Those of us who were in the role of ants will never be able to forget the size of the boot that wanted to squish us, or the fear we felt.”

Even in fiction, Padura alludes to Fidel only at a historical remove. In “La Novela de Mi Vida,” he imagined the life of the nineteenth-century Cuban poet José María Heredia, who became a national hero, and an exile, for his outspoken criticism of Spain’s colonial government. At one point, the hero talks with the all-powerful Spanish governor about political repression on the island. “This country is under the covetous scrutiny of the United States and En-gland, and if we give an inch, they will take everything,” the governor says. “If in order to preserve this island as Spanish the political claims of a few must be silenced, well, we will silence them. The lesser of evils. That is politics, and that is realism.”

When the governor spoke of Realpolitik, no one could mistake who was really talking. “Heredia is in constant dialogue with the present day,” Padura explained. “It’s a novel about the effects of power on the lives of individuals and on literature, from the perspective of contemporary Cuba—and any reader can easily see that.” Not long after the book came out, in 2002, Castro’s state security rounded up seventy-five dissidents, including twenty-nine “independent” journalists, and threw them in prison on charges of treason.

Padura says that he is “aware of a certain responsibility” to communicate the reality of life in Cuba, and it doesn’t always sit easily. In a 2011 essay titled “I Wish I Were Paul Auster,” Padura wrote wryly of the burden he feels: “Auster never gets interrogated about the possible direction the American economy is taking,” or “why he continued living in his country during the horrible years of the George W. Bush government.”

Padura jokes that whenever he is on a book tour abroad “people come up to me and tell me not how well I write but how brave I am to write what I write in Cuba.” For some of his peers, though, he is too circumspect a critic. Patricio Fernández, a prominent Chilean editor and author, told me, “To be on the island as a writer, it is necessary to become a juggler, and to sign a kind of psychological agreement in which the writer promises not to make noise.” Another Cuban writer said, “His books sell like hotcakes, and they are just as light and soft.”

But no one else has managed the same balance of provocation and reassurance. Pedro Juan Gutiérrez scrupulously avoids politics in his books. Instead, he writes almost exclusively about sex—exuberant, squalid, no-holds-barred sex—as he chronicles the riotously promiscuous life of a man named Pedro Juan, who lives in a crumbling apartment block on a seedy back street in central Havana, where Gutiérrez also lives. Although Gutiérrez has sold well internationally, for decades most of his books were not available in Cuba. In recent years, a couple of slim volumes of his fiction, less explicit than the “Dirty Havana” books, have been quietly published. Gutiérrez told me recently, “I think there’s a real will to relax a bit with regard to what the intellectuals are doing.” Many young authors, he said, are “writing what they really are interested in, and putting everything in doubt.”

One of them is Wendy Guerra, a witty, intense woman in her early forties. In 2006, Guerra’s novel “Everyone Leaves” was published to acclaim in Spain; in 2010, she was given one of France’s highest cultural honors, the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. “Everyone Leaves” is a thinly veiled autobiography: the journal of a young woman who feels betrayed by a succession of men in a male-dominated country, and oppressed by the conformism of the Revolution. Guerra told me that she regards Padura with the affection of a younger sister and that she regularly seeks his and Lucía’s advice, but that she isn’t published in Cuba. “One of the ways Cuba’s socialist system has to disqualify you has always been to disappear your name,” she said. “My awards are not announced in the press; I don’t appear in the newspapers and I cannot access the media.” She was determined to remain in Havana, and to keep writing, but she felt invisible to her peers. “Sometimes people see me on the street and they ask, ‘Wendy, did you leave the country?’ ” she said. “There’s a saying: That which ceases to be named ceases to exist. I live in an island ‘in-xile.’ They exiled me without making me leave my own country.”

Padura is most forthright in his views about journalism. “In the official press there have been few changes, really,” he said. “And it’s logical. If the press belongs to the government and to the Party, is it realistic that that press will criticize the government and the Party?” Granma is the same numbingly dull propaganda sheet as ever. During my visit, while Turkish protesters denounced their Prime Minister in Taksim Square, the front page of Granma reminded readers that a discussion of Che Guevara’s ideals would be held that evening on state-run television.

One morning, Padura invited me to a talk he was giving to journalism students at Havana University. As we got into his Subaru, he told me that the journalism program remained the stepchild of Cuban academia. “They’re always changing their classrooms, being pushed from one place to another,” he said. He pulled out a piece of paper. “I have their latest address. Let’s hope I can find them.” Finally, on a back street near the Plaza de la Revolución, we came upon a small group of students at the entrance to a faculty building. With them was their professor, a goateed man named Rafael Grillo. Smiling, he told Padura, “You’ve really come. I thought you wouldn’t.”

As always, Padura was dressed in practical clothes: a gray polo shirt, beige pants, and walking shoes. He carried in his hand a tourist-style belt pack with his money and documents in it. In the classroom, about thirty students were waiting, and as Padura began to speak some of them snapped pictures with their phones. Padura described the need for greater Internet access as his “special punching bag,” and complained that he had to get his news from a foreign friend, who e-mailed him a dozen times a day with updates. Recently, the government had announced that it intended to open Internet cafés across the island. “If it is as they say, it’s incredibly important,” he told the students. “It would be the first time that the government has shown it recognizes that it can’t have a monopoly over information.” Padura called for the government to loosen the constraints on journalists, a change he called “more important than anything else—the Party, even the Politburo.” He told the students, “You may graduate from here with the best of intentions, and in six months end up as a reporter for Granma, or Cuban television.” He grimaced. “And you know what that means.”

For Cubans, such an open discussion of press freedom was unprecedented. Political dissidents who carry out public protests are usually detained and sometimes beaten, by policemen or by pro-regime mobs. Nonetheless, an official recognition appears to be growing that the state media need to open up. In a recent speech, Raúl Castro accused the media of being “overly strident and formal,” and of “not engaging in debate” (never mind that he had helped silence them for decades). Indeed, after Padura spoke, a brash young man in the crowd pointed out that his criticism of the press seemed merely to echo Castro’s remarks. Padura only repeated that there was an “undeniable void” at the heart of the Cuban media. He mentioned Yoani Sánchez, the dissident blogger, whom the government had recently allowed to travel outside of the country after years of denying her requests. “They built Yoani up into a huge personality, because they didn’t let her travel, and what’s happened? She went out, she came back, and that’s it.” Padura deadpanned, “Cuba’s banana harvest, I don’t think, has been affected.” The students tittered. Padura was right, of course: a Cuban who relied on the local press would never have known that Sánchez had returned to Havana, or even, perhaps, that she existed.

Padura’s critics might wish him to be braver, but that would mean a life in exile, a condition that Padura has referred to as “a terrible condemnation.” Ironically, some of the exiled Cubans did their best work after leaving the island. Cabrera Infante wrote his masterwork, “Three Trapped Tigers,” in London; Arenas produced a brilliant memoir, “Before Night Falls,” while living in New York. But life in exile can be barren. In an unpublished 1983 interview with the writer Ann Tashi Slater, Arenas spoke of his displacement: “Everyone who lives outside his context is always a bit of a ghost, because I am here, but at the same time I remember a person who walked those streets, who is there, and that same person is me. So sometimes I really don’t know if I am here or there. And at times the longing to be there is greater than the necessity of being here.”

Worst of all, perhaps, is the example of Heberto Padilla. Freed from jail but shunned by official Cuba, Padilla scratched together a living as a translator, and was prevented from leaving the island until 1980, when Senator Edward Kennedy helped secure permission for him to emigrate. He settled in the United States, wrote a poignant memoir, “Self-Portrait of the Other,” and found work teaching, but he was never allowed to return to Cuba. He died in 2000, in Alabama, after twenty years away from home.

When the Castro era has subsided, Padura may well be among the few artists to have worked through to the end. Like most of his fellow-Cubans, he is distinguished not least by his ability to survive. Wendy Guerra told me, “Padura’s prize was a historical necessity on the part of those offices that stand guard over words. He is the father of Mario Conde, that personage who the engineers and the doctors follow, the first personality to emerge in Cuban popular fiction in fifty years of revolution.”

But Guerra suggested that there was another reason for Padura’s relative freedom. “The jefes don’t read,” she said. “They are just trying to avoid being singled out internationally, and they think it’s better to publish us than to get into problems about something which they think has no importance.” If Guerra is right, whatever openness the government has created is based on practical calculations; culture is incidental. An hour east of Cojimar, a Chinese oil well sits by the road, and to the west a vast new port facility is being dug by Brazil. At the once exclusive resort of Varadero, vacationers from Russia and Algeria join the crowds looking for cheap beach holidays, and at the end of the peninsula a pristine forest has been replaced by tourist hotels under construction. Where Fidel once forbade golf, foreign investors have been given permission to build exclusive courses, ringed with condos and shopping malls. Meanwhile, in Havana, I saw homeless people for the first time: men with shabby clothes, some clearly mentally ill, searching through trash bins or wandering aimlessly.

It is as if with its “changes” the Cuban state had already begun to recede, and the new ethos, as in much of the rest of the world, is sálvase quien puede—every man for himself. In “The Man Who Loved Dogs,” Padura writes that “the Utopia was betrayed and, worse still, reduced to a swindle of the greatest human wishes.” When I asked him recently whether the Revolution was over, he dodged the question, speaking vaguely of the institutionalization of Socialist ideas, of pragmatism and the stages of social change. But on the afternoon we spent together in Cojimar he was more direct. “Cuba is trapped between two eternally competing visions,” he said. “One is that it is a Socialist paradise; the other is that it is a Communist hell. In reality, Cuba is neither a paradise nor a hell but, rather, more of a purgatory, where some of us have the possibility of salvation.” ♦


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Flames-Blackhawks Preview @NHL

CHICAGO (AP) - Adam Burish doesn't agree with those who say the Chicago Blackhawks are intimidated or cowering from the Calgary Flames' aggressive play.

"They had to play more physical and more tough and they did that," Chicago's rough right winger said Friday. "But it was nothing out of the ordinary."

After losing two tight games in Chicago, the Flames regrouped for a pair of victories on home ice at the Pengrowth Saddledome. Now comes a crucial Game 5 back at the United Center on Saturday night.

Since the Blackhawks are a younger team making the franchise's first playoff appearance in seven years, Calgary's approach has been to get tough to test the inexperienced Blackhawks for physical and mental weaknesses.

"People want to say because we're young, we don't know how to handle the physical play, but all our guys are still healthy and our guys feel pretty good," Burish said. "It's a non-issue."

Flames star Jarome Iginla said Friday that Calgary's physical play was, for one thing, a way to slow the Blackhawks down physically.

"We don't play as open or end-to-end," he said. "When we are having success, we need to play physical, aggressive and get in your face. ... When we've let up and let them skate, they can skate and make things happen. We got to stay on that body."

Burish broke a stick with a high check on the shoulder of the Flames' Renee Bourque - his former Blackhawks and University of Wisconsin teammate - at the end of a very "chippy" Game 3 that featured plenty of after-the-whistle confrontations and trash talking.

After the NHL told the teams before Game 4 it wanted to limit the extracurricular activities and the jabbering, there seemed to be less of it Wednesday night.

"You still have to challenge them," Burish said. "You can't give a guy like Jarome Iginla a free pass."

Burish said he and Bourque are still friends, despite the confrontation.

"What happens on the ice, that's it. Done. If he were to cross check me that way, I'd be ticked off as heck on the ice. I'd want to go after him, but once the game is on for me, that's my job, that's my business," Burish said. "We'll get together when we're back in Madison at some of our old hangouts."

Bourque missed the Flames' 6-4 victory in Game 4 after apparently aggravating an ankle injury in Game 3.

Calgary coach Mike Keenan wouldn't give an update on Bourque or Craig Conroy, who left Game 4 with an injury. He did say Daymond Langkow, injured late in Game 4 when he blocked a shot, was expected to play. All skated in practice Friday.

Blackhawks coach Joel Quenneville doesn't plan to replace goaltender Nikolai Khabibulin with Cristobal Huet even though the Flames scored 10 goals in the two games in Calgary - one an empty-netter.

Khabibulin has had success against the Flames and was in goal for Tampa Bay when it won the Stanley Cup against Calgary. Some sloppy defensive play by the Blackhawks has made his job even tougher.

"We need to be better and not give them point-blank shots they've had and take care of rebounds," Chicago defenseman Brian Campbell.

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NEW YORK >> Dick “Dickie” Moore, a saucer-eyed child star of the 1930s who appeared in “Our Gang” comedies, gave Shirley Temple her first screen kiss and was featured in many major Hollywood productions, has died. He was 89.

Helaine Feldman, a senior staff member at Dick Moore & Associates Inc., confirmed that Moore died Monday in Connecticut.

While not as famous as Temple or Mickey Rooney, Moore was a veteran of dozens of films, many of them top-drawer productions directed by such greats as Cecil B. DeMille (“The Squaw Man”), Ernst Lubitsch (“Heaven Can Wait”) and Josef von Sternberg (“Blonde Venus”).

He also wrote a 1984 book about the child star business, called “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star: But Don’t Have Sex or Take the Car.”

He was a member of producer Hal Roach’s “Our Gang” (“Little Rascals”) troupe in 1932-33, playing alongside Spanky McFarland, Stymie Beard and other Gang stars in such shorts as “Free Wheeling,” ‘’Hook and Ladder” and “Mush and Milk.”

But unlike Spanky and the Gang, Moore wasn’t limited to Roach’s comedies.

The handsome actor was Marlene Dietrich’s little boy in her 1932 film “Blonde Venus.” He recalled her as “warm and friendly” but saying it made him uncomfortable when she gave him a bath. That same year he played the leading lady’s little brother in the wacky W.C. Fields-Jack Oakie concoction “Million Dollar Legs,” and in 1933 he got the title role in a version of “Oliver Twist.”

Among his many roles were Julius Reuter as a boy in “A Dispatch from Reuter’s”; war hero Alvin York’s (Gary Cooper’s) brother in “Sgt. York”; the boy that Louis Pasteur cured of rabies in “The Story of Louis Pasteur”; and heroine Barbara Stanwyck’s young son in “So Big.”

In 1942, toward the end of his (and her) child star career, he gave Temple her first screen kiss in “Miss Annie Rooney.” As a young man, he had a featured role in the 1947 film noir classic “Out of the Past,” which starred Kirk Douglas and Robert Mitchum.

For his 1984 book, he mixed personal reminiscences — many of them painful — with interviews with dozens of his former colleagues and rivals.

“We lied about my age,” he wrote. “At eight, we said that I was seven; at nine, we said I was eight. ... When I turned 11, we finally told the truth.

“Many children lied about their ages, and the studios lied for them. It fostered the idea that we were precocious. ... Studios and parents with investments to protect wanted us to stay the productive kids we were.”

Moore was born on Sept. 12, 1925, in Los Angeles and had his film debut a year and a half later in John Barrymore’s “The Beloved Rogue.” As his film career waned, he appeared in television shows such as “Captain Video and His Video Rangers.”

As an adult, he was a correspondent for Stars and Stripes during World War II and later became a public relations executive, establishing Dick Moore & Associates Inc. in New York. He served as the public relations director for Actors’ Equity Association and was publisher of Equity News.

He also coproduced, co-directed and acted in a two-reel short subject called “The Boy and the Eagle” that was nominated for an Academy Award in 1949. His last film was “The Member of the Wedding” in 1952

He met actress-singer Jane Powell while researching his book and married her in 1988. He is also survived by a sister, the Hollywood publicist Pat Kingsley; son, Kevin Moore, and by several grandchildren.

Moore’s death comes only a few days after the passing of another former “Our Gang” member, Jean Darling.

This report contains biographical material compiled by former AP staffer Polly Anderson.


text:
A U.S. Postal Service spokesman said officials now plan to open the holiday weekend of Oct. 10-12.

Site engineer Jeffrey Cissell of Madison said a surveyor’s report on additional work to the storm water drainage system will allow him to sign off on the project.

Cissell’s approval of the drainage system, as well as a set of "as-built" system drawings are needed by the town before Inland Wetlands and Watercourses Enforcement Officer Heidi Wallace can give approval.

Wallace said those conditions must be met before Building Inspector Paul D’Orio can grant a certificate of occupancy.

The U.S. Postal Service initially projected a Memorial Day opening for the new post office, then an opening around the Fourth of July before announcing that the opening might occur in the fall.

Postal Service spokesman Carl Walton confirmed that a delay in the permitting process has kept the building unoccupied, but said problems have since been resolved.

"We expect to move in to the new facility on Columbus Day weekend," he said.

Wallace on Aug. 30 informed Cissell of what was needed to gain approval of the site’s drainage system.

Cissell said an initial surveyor’s report indicated that one of the new drainage basins was smaller than required by design specifications and that he asked the general contractor, Williams Construction Co. of Hanover, Mass., to do the necessary repairs.

The contractor indicated the work would be completed last week, Cissell said. When a surveyor approves what’s been done, Cissell said he can approve the drainage system and provide the town with the required documentation.

The virtually complete post office is built on the site of the former Dom’s Garden Center. Pending its opening, town residents will continue to use a temporary post office in the Westbrook Factory Stores on Flat Rock Place.

The town has been without a permanent postal facility since 1998 when a fire caused by a malfunctioning heating fuel line burned down the 22-year-old post office on Golf Links Road.


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1996 Fattoria Coroncino Vigna Gaiospino Cru Verdicchio DOC

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Spend $200 & get free delivery to most of Australia

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1996 Fattoria Coroncino Vigna Gaiospino Cru Verdicchio DOC

Le Marche
$28.99 Bottle
  • Closure: Cork

Notes sourced from Enoteca Sileno

Grape Varieties: 100% Verdicchio
Region: From a single vineyard of 2.7 hectares close to the Adriatic coast in Le Marche.
Production: The well ripened grapes are hand picked before undergoing a soft press and fermentation in stainless steel at a controlled temperature of 20°C for 2–4 weeks. During this time Malolactic fermentation occurs. 20-30% is then fermented in large 500 litre French oak barrels for 18 months before bottling with the wine spending further time in the bottle before release.This wine has impressive structure and consistency; it ages very well for up to 10 years.
Characteristics: Pale golden straw in colour, intense slightly nutty fresh bouquet. The palate is flinty dry and tangy with a slightly oily texture balanced by firm acidity. It is full of fruit and finishes with a pleasing delicate bitterness.
Serve: 10-12° Celsius.
Try it with: Oysters, freshly shucked or some lightly smoked trout. Also as an aperitif.


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A cube containing the filters and mirror used in epi-fluorescence microscopy to separate fluorescence excitation and emission light

The function of a filter block is to separate fluorescence light returning from the specimen from the light used to excite the specimen so that the fluorescence light can be observed on a dark back ground. The filter block contains an excitation filter, dichroic beamsplitter (mirror) and a barrier / emission filter:

The excitation filter, usually a bandpass filter, allows only wavelengths of light necessary for excitation to pass through to the specimen.

The emission / barrier filter separates fluorescence emanating from the specimen from other background light.

The dichroic mirror separates excitation light from fluorescence by reflecting light of one range of wavelengths and transmitting only light of another range of wavelengths.

The excitation filter, barrier filter and dichroic mirror need to be matched to the excitation and emission characteristics of the fluorescent probe to ensure a high signal to noise ratio between the fluorescence and background light. The ideal combination of barrier filters and excitation filters is one that lets no light pass when combined. However, most filter combinations are not 100% efficient in preventing stray light from reaching the eyes / detector(s). Nikon's proprietary 'Noise Terminator' technology reduces stray light from filter blocks to improve signal-to-noise ratios.

Filter blocks are used in all epi-fluorescence imaging applications. The choice of a specific filter block will depend on the fluorescent probe(s) being used in the imaging application. For a quick and simple-to-use Nikon filter block selector matched to specific fluorescent probes visit:

Introduction to fluorescence microscopy: [microscopyu]

The filter block is housed in a filter cube holder that can be rotated or moved sideways to select the appropriate filter set for imaging. Different microscopes accommodate varying numbers of filter blocks.

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text:
Mega Latios & Latias will help you catch Legendary Pokémon

Mega Beedrill and Mega Pidgeot aren’t the only surprises in Japan’s CoroCoro Comic this month, with more Pokémon Omega Ruby and Pokémon Alpha Sapphire news having emerged.

Mega Latios and Mega Latias, exclusive to Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire respectively, have also been revealed, but, more importantly, will allow players to traverse the overworld to discover Legendary Pokémon such as Reshiram, Zekrom, Dialga and Palkia by discovering islands in the sky.

Pokémon Omega Ruby and Pokémon Alpha Sapphire will release in Japan, Australia and North America on November 21st, and Europe on November 28th.

[Thanks Serebii]

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Poké Ball-patterned Vivillon distribution event announced

The pop-up Pokémon Center that will shortly be arriving in Paris won’t just be selling merchandise, The Pokémon Company International have shared.

Pokémon X and Pokémon Y players that visit the store will be able to receive a special Poké Ball-patterned Vivillon, available whilst it is open between 4th – 21st June 2014. The Vivillon is Level 12, and will be provided with the moves Stun Spore, Gust, Light Screen and Struggle Bug.

It remains unclear whether it will be distributed outside of France, but 2014 Pokémon National Championships attendees can grab a Shiny Mamoswine.

[Thanks Serebii]

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After starting out with a Yellow Game Boy and a copy of Donkey Kong Land, Alex once hid in his room to play The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time one Christmas. Now he shares his thoughts on Nintendo Insider, keeping track of everything to do with Nintendo.

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HOME Menu Themes

Nintendo 3DS HOME Menu themes are now available to purchase in the Theme Shop, allowing you to brighten up the HOME Menu of your Nintendo 3DS family system. These themes add an extra level of personalisation, and can include custom background music, background images, icons and sound effects. New themes are being added to the Theme Shop regularly, so make sure you check back from time to time – there’s something for everyone!

Check out the latest themes at our New Releases page.


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FEEDBACK from previous callers:

11/22/2002 mycall69 she was great. took me somplace I never thought of going before. Had a bit to much else going on in the background and on the line though.

10/21/2002 Member 53672532 This was the best call I've had in over a year on Keen. If you call one girl, this should be the one. I can't say enough good things about this girl. Just call!!

10/4/2002 Gambler 7 come 11 Great voice, I think you will find [her]to be well worth you time. She is fantastic.

The list goes on!!!


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'The Voice' 2013 semifinals: Final five vie for a spot in the finale

The final five contestants took the stage tonight performing for the four coaches who applauded politely and refused to say anything critical, presumably for fear of influencing America's vote. (NBC Universal)

Tonight the contestants all got to go home. As in, to their hometowns. Sweet as it was to see the reunions with family and friends it raised some questions:

Where have they been living the past five weeks?

Are they all holed up in the same hotel?

Do they crash at their coaches' LA places? (Now that'd be a great addition to this show. Sure, Adam and Amber get along during the live shows but what happens when Amber drinks all of Adam's soy milk? Did I just come up with the premise for Season 5? You're welcome, NBC.)

Anyway...Here's a look at tonight's semifinal performances in which each singer performed two songs.

The Swon Brothers (Team Blake)
Performances: "Turn the Page" by Bob Seger
Dedicated to their past and present band members, the brothers, particularly lead singer Zach, sounded strong. He sounded so good in fact it made me wonder if he would have gotten this far solo? But where's the brotherly love in that?

"Danny's Song" by Kenny Loggins
Adam called this one of his favorites despite it being a country song and it's true. The choice to do a better known song was a smart one and could mean some non-country votes.

Highlights from Home: The Swon Brothers headed home to Muskogee and played a massive 'swoncert' for what looked like 50 percent of the state. They got a weekend dedicated to them and a rising star award from the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame (it's larger than you think)

NUP_156270_1122.JPGSasha Allen who performed "I Will Always Love You," by Whitney Houston tonight among harp players and streamer-dancers, is a frontrunner in the competition.

Sasha Allen (Team Shakira)
Performances: "I Will Always Love You" by Whitney Houston
As soon as this was announced you knew it'd be make or break. Sink or swim. Allen did as near a perfect rendition as one can as a smoke machine pumped atmospheric gray-ness all around her. The worry though is that for all its power and greatness it was almost expected.

"Bad Girls" by Donna Summer
Sasha performed the 70s hit with spunk and power and all the judges loved it, especially Usher who definitely looks like a boy with a schoolyard crush after every Sasha-fierce performance.
Highlights from home: NYC-native, Allen surprised her daughter by picking her up at school, a moment which made her performance of "I Will Always Love You," all the more meaningful.

NUP_156270_1587.JPGMichelle Chamuel, of Amherst Mass., continued to impress with performances of "Clarity" and "Time After Time"
Michelle Chamuel (Team Usher) Performances: "Clarity" by Zedd

Chamuel struggled on some of the higher notes when she tried using her falsetto but she picks tough songs to sing and usually stays in a safe range she knows she can handle.

"Time After Time" by Cindi Lauper
What a week for Cindi! Sweeping the Tony's and then having her song performed by the frontrunner on the Voice. Those are two pretty major accomplishments. I wonder which she's more proud of? Chamuel was great on this, her second Lauper song (She sang True Colors in a previous round) She dedicated the performance to her coach, Usher, who said simply afterward: "You're the winner."
Highlights from home: Chamuel's trip to Amherst Mass. included a big homewarming party with family all clad in teeshirts screen printed with thick-framed glasses. Chamuel also sang "God Bless America" at Fenway Park, prompting Adam to whisper into her ear (and directly into his body mic) "That was hard to watch as a Yankee fan."

Danielle Bradbery (Team Blake)
Performances: "Who I am” by Jessica Andrews
Dedicated to her family, particularly her mom who signed her up for the show, Bradbery continued to sing with the professionalism of someone twice her age, even as baby pictures of her looped on backdrop screens.

"Please Remember Me" by Tim McGraw
After McGraw himself wished Bradbery well through the TV in the "media room," Bradbery gave another solid performance, albeit not as strong as her first of the night.

Highlights from home: it was pretty awesome when Bradbery pulled up to her Houston-area high school in a limo and saw the entire school outside, cheerleaders screaming, band playing and principal ready to greet her. The only thing cooler is that she got to get back in the limo and go back to Los Angeles.

NUP_156270_1511.JPGDanielle Bradbery, the youngest singer in the competition, spent a few days at home in Houston, Texas, before returning to the final five performance show.

Amber Carrington (Team Adam)
Performances: "Firework" by Katy Perry
Katy warned you (personally on the TV in the media room) that this was a tough song to sing, and unfortunately it became clear in the opening low notes that she was right. Carrington consistently struggles in the lower register, particularly at the beginning of songs. But then she opens up, she oftentimes sounds so good that by the end it's easy to forgive her earlier mistakes.

"Sad" by Adam Levine
Only slightly self-serving to see Adam Levine give his lone team member one of his songs. But honestly, this one was much better than Firework. Carrington does well on the ballads. As Blake commented, she's one of the better singers at connecting emotionally with what she's crooning about.

1. Michelle Chamuel/Team Usher
2. Sasha Allen/Team Shakira
3. Danielle Bradbery/Team Blake
4. Amber Carrington/Team Adam
5. The Swon Brothrs/Team Blake

Tomorrow we find out who goes home. Will a member of Team Blake bid us adieu or will we get to see how the first celeb coach reacts to being eliminated?


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Big Ideas

You Have Big Needs—We Have Big Ideas
You Have Big Needs—We Have Big Ideas

You Have Big Needs—We Have Big Ideas.

Since 2014, the National League of Cities' BIG IDEAS series has featured cities and businesses that are using "big ideas" to drive communities forward. The series has quickly become an ideal platform for leaders to share their success stories and describe, in detail, the steps they have taken to make their communities better.

About the Format

Big Ideas for Cities
Leaders are invited to share the best practices and innovative solutions moving their cities forward. The series is filmed year-round and open to individuals from all sectors - public, private and nonprofit. Talks are filmed at NLC's studio in our new building on North Capitol Street in Washington, D.C.

Big Ideas for Small Cities
Small city officials deliver TEDx-style talks to share their big ideas at our annual City Summit event each fall.

Big Ideas for Small Business
The City Solutions and Applied Research Center provides resources to help local government and small businesses work together to promote community growth and development.

How to Submit

Click here to submit a proposal for Big Ideas for Cities. We are accepting applications from city leaders, as well as business and non-profit industry professionals.

Sponsorship Opportunities

Interested in sponsoring Big Ideas? Contact Laura Lanford ( for further information.


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In Pics – The Stars Out In Force At The Star Wars: The Force Awakens Premiere

If you weren’t lucky enough to be at the humongous Star Wars premiere in Los Angeles (we’re not bitter about them forgetting our invite, honest) here’s what went down as the seventh instalment of the epic franchise kicked off last night.


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WTF 2015? The Weirdest NME News Stories Of The Year

The stories that shocked, scared and, quite frankly, left us feeling very confused in 2015

You’ll have done well in 2015 to avoid much of the news; so often filled with horror, despair and misery. But the news reporters of the world haven’t always had the most depressing job in the world: there have been some weird and wonderful moments in the world of music and entertainment, from popstars publicly licking donuts to comical DNA tests, here’s a round-up of the weirdest news stories from the past 12 months.


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New Features: Live polling and Q&A Session tools

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New Features - Noodle Live event app - Live Poll and Q&A

We want events to be interesting and easy, like everyone I guess, so we’ll never stop improving our apps and we’re always open to suggestions.

You wanted live polling, Q&A session support and ‘fastest finger first’ functionality. So, with a click of our fingers, a poof of smoke and just a pinch of some very dedicated and highly intelligent developers, we’ve conjured them up for you. Aren’t we lovely!

In January we launched a whole new suite of ‘session tools’, which make speaker sessions more interactive and thus more enjoyable to be a part of. Attendees can now use their event app to ask questions, answer questions and provide real-time feedback and polling – making your app so much more than just a digital version of the event programme.

New Features - Noodle Live event app - Live Poll and Q&A

Live Polling

Our live polling feature means speakers can now throw a question to the floor for delegates and visitors to answer via the app, results are fed back straight back in real time. Questions can be true/false style or multiple choice with similar options to that of an online questionnaire.

Speakers could use this function for a quick temperature check, gauge opinion in the room on a specific topic or even direct the course of a session based on responses, choose your own adventure style – which has HUGE potential.

Remember 90s TV ‘choose your own adventure’ game Knightmare? “Simon, sidestep to your left…”

Speaker Q&A

With our speaker Q&A functionality, we provide a separate iPad app for speaker chairs to use. Delegates/visitors submit questions via their own app, which can then be reviewed by the speaker chair.

Question and Answer Sessions Tool - Q&A - Noodle Live events app

Having this function on the app saves someone running around with a microphone – the speaker can quickly and easily read out the questions, with confirmed questions displayed in the app and, if required, displayed on a screen.

The feature is better than an unmoderated Twitter wall as it gives you more control over what content is being displayed for your visitors.

Again, there is a lot of potential for creativity with this functionality, e.g. speakers could have delegates play fun ‘fastest finger first’ style games.

Who Wants to be a Millionaire

Importantly, using the app for more interactive sessions means people are more likely to use it for other purposes too – making your app an event essential.

About Noodle Live

Noodle Live brings a seamless social experience to events, conferences and exhibitions using a combination of mobile applications and RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) swipe cards to streamline information sharing.

For more information check out our
 video or visit

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This post was written by Clemi Hardie, founder and MD of Noodle Live.

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