WELL……………………… DEM POOR NOW YES

Peggy Blair‘s debut novel, The Beggar’s Opera, will be published this month by Penguin Canada. It was shortlisted for the 2010 Debut Dagger Award. Her first book of non-fiction, Lament for a First Nation, came out in 2007. Blair will be guest editing The Afterword all this week.

Since my debut mystery novel, The Beggar’s Opera, is set in Havana, I’m often asked: why Cuba?

My daughter, Jade, and I spent Christmas in Old Havana in December, 2006, which is when the story starts. There were policemen on every corner. I saw how bored the young officers were, slouched against lamp posts, waiting for a crime — any crime — to occur.

All around us was incredible poverty. Street children begged for pencils, soap, aspirin. Old women stepped out of the shadows and offered to exchange their almost useless domestic pesos for our more valuable tourist ones.

One afternoon, we were stopped by a very polite young man who, like so many others, asked if we could give him our pesos for his money. We had been accosted by beggars so often by then that we pushed by. It’s something I still feel ashamed of. It was only later that Jade told me that he’d held out an American quarter in the palm of his hand.

Twenty-five cents in a country where the average salary is perhaps ten or fifteen pesos a month was a lot of money, but I didn’t realize that at the time. American currency was illegal. A tourist had given him some change, I suppose, not realizing he couldn’t use it.

During our visit, I discovered there were two faces to Cuba: the one that tourists saw, which was music and beaches and outdoor restaurants and bars, and the stark reality of life as Cubans experienced it. I was astonished to learn, for example, that Cubans weren’t allowed to enter tourist hotels or restaurants; it was illegal. So was eating seafood: like so many things, lobster and shrimp (like the Internet and cell phones) were for tourists only.

I wasn’t planning to write a mystery novel about Cuba. In fact, I’m not sure I chose Cuba; my daughter once said she thought it chose me.

But when I decided to write The Beggar’s Opera, I immediately thought of Havana.

I’m in real estate now, but I was a lawyer for thirty years. As a criminal defence lawyer and Crown prosecutor in Alberta, I’d worked with the city police and the RCMP. How could the Cuban police possibly investigate crimes without any pencils, or film for their cameras, or fuel for their cars? How could DNA tests or rape kits be processed in a country that lacked medical supplies because of the longstanding America trade embargo? For that matter, how could a forensic team work effectively if it lacked the most basic supplies, like soap?

All of this inspired the idea of a Cuban police inspector coping with extreme shortages in the course of his investigations.

Of course, Cuba is far more than the sum of its shortages.

We saw astonishing art museums, the incredible book market at Plaza de Armas (with hundreds of thousands of used books), cigar and rum factories, artists’ stalls, and, of course, the Malecón. We also visited most of Hemingway’s favourite bars (no easy task — they’re all over the place).

Havana is colourful mimes on stilts, elderly cigar ladies, child beggars, feral cats, and homeless dogs. It’s gorgeous, collapsing Spanish colonial architecture, crazy anti-American billboards, and one of the most educated populations in the world.

Yes, Cuba is Communist. Its bureaucracy, like so many in third world countries, is inane and corrupt. But the Cuban people are incredibly resilient, generous, and kind.

It was quite possibly the most interesting place I’ve ever been. How could I not write about it?

Posted in: Afterword, Guest Editors Tags: Cuba, Guest