• by Leonardo Padura Fuentes
• Tuesday, June 30, 2009
• Inter Press Service

This year's theme for the forum of the Literary Chiasso festival in the enchanting Swiss town was "nostalgia for the future", a subject that revealed with striking clarity the worries of thinking people today, writes Leonardo Padura Fuentes, a Cuban writer and journalist whose novels have been translated into a dozen languages.

In this article, Padura writes that the only way of understanding this longed-for future is to observe with objectivity and detachment the unsatisfactory present that we have come to through errors (or sins, it could be said) committed in the past: a world assailed by poverty, inequality, xenophobia, religious, political, and economic fundamentalisms, war, terrorism, the infinite range of corruption and violence, the devastation of nature and its resources, the myriad forms of dictatorship, censorship, and marginalisation, and for two years now, an economic crisis. Such a world could never be the product of mere chance or divine damnation.

What then would this future be like that we already feel such nostalgia for, when the crisis ends, when the fundamentalisms and terrorism are overcome, when the issue of hunger, the modest yet slandered millennium goals, and ecological devastation are finally taken seriously? Will we have time to build a better future, with real democracies free of demagogy, to save the planet and our place on it?

(*) Leonardo Padura Fuentes is a Cuban writer and journalist. His novels have been translated into a dozen languages and his most recent work, La neblina del ayer, won the Hammett Prize for the best crime novel written in Spanish for 2005.

//NOT FOR PUBLICATION IN CANADA, CZECH REPUBLIC, IRELAND, POLAND, THE UNITED STATES, AND THE UNITED KINGDOM//

© Inter Press Service (2009) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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