The Bridge from Cuba

The night of February 20, 2014 an overflow crowd of passionate Cuban-American fans awaited the island writer, Leonardo Padura, at the Coral Gables Congregational Church. Books & Books, the organizer of the event, together with the Cuban Research Institute of Florida International University, had wisely foreseen the need to move the reading to the larger location down the street from the landmark Miami bookstore.

Leonardo Padura has achieved an international following for his Mario Conde detective series. More recently, his long and probing historical novels have won him a new literary fame in the United States, including a recent write up in The New Yorker. An American edition of his work, The Man Who Loved Dogs, ostensibly about Leon Trotsky and his assassin Ramón Mercader, but ultimately a profound meditation on utopian ideals, was just released by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Read more