Havana Fever by Leonardo Padura

from sale to the public and were never part of these modest offerings. Such delicacies were generally set aside for more or less well-established buyers: a few diplomatic bibliophiles; foreign correspondents and businessmen based in Cuba, with enough dollars to buy paper jewels; a small number of Cubans who’d got rich legally, semi-legally or entirely illegally, intent on investing in safe bets; and a few book lovers who were frequent visitors to the islands and had established preferences in matters of literature, cigars and women. However, the real recipients of the invisible bibliographical rarities were various professional dealers in valuable books, particularly Spaniards, Mexicans and a few Miami and New York based Cubans, who supplied auctions or owners of bookshops that were advertised on the internet. In the early nineties these specialists had detected the rich Havana vein, exposed in the harshest years of the Crisis, and came ready to purchase whatever their desperate Cuban colleagues might generously offer. Then, when they’d made their connections and plumbed the mine’s depths, they changed tactics and brought on each trip a list of exotic goodies already flagged by customers seeking a specific title by a well-known author, and in a particular edition. This underground trade was by far the most productive and most dangerous, and now the Cuban authorities had rumbled that some booksellers had conspired with library employees to take Cuban and universal treasures, bibliographical holdings, including manuscripts that could never be recovered, out of the country. It was almost impossible to eradicate this constant drain because on occasions the provider was a librarian on two hundred and fifty pesos a month who found it difficult to resist an offer of two hundred dollars – representing twenty months of his salary – for extracting a magazine or tome requested by a determined buyer. Such piracy on the sly had forced Cuban libraries to lock their most precious books in remote vaults, but nobody could put a stop to the leak from a tap beyond repair, thanks to which some found a temporary solution to material deprivation.
    Pancho Carmona enjoyed a reputation as the provider of the bibliographical jewels most in demand. His business card pompously introduced him as a specialist in rare and valuable books, although his commercial tentacles reached into adjacent areas, including the plastic arts, furniture, Tiffany jewellery and the most eclectic of antiques. Three times a week Pancho provided a range of legal delights in the plaza de Armas, and on the other three days, in the reception room of his own home, on calle Amargura, he’d organize a kind of bookshop only open to trustworthy or highly recommended customers. One month he’d invite them to sit on Louis XVI furniture, another on Second Empire armchairs and the next on comfortable Liberty sofas, always in the shadow of classic Cuban painting or drawing, lit by restored art nouveau lamps and surrounded by Murano or Bohemian glassware, keen to voyage to foreign parts. All his trade colleagues knew that neither place exhibited his most sought-after books, although nobody knew for sure where Carmona, a man whose best contacts came straight to him, as soon they arrived from Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Miami and New York, kept his secret hoard.
    Pancho had lived for twenty-five years on his salary as an industrial designer and had begun to specialize in the book trade when it took off as a profitable line, and the sales of records, his business at the time, took a turn for the worse, coinciding with the start of a Crisis that soon resulted in a bountiful harvest as far as he was concerned. Unlike other booksellers, Carmona had had the foresight from the start to see that the real money would never be in the modest exercise of buying books for two pesos to sell them for ten. The real challenge, he believed, was to take a leap into the void of really serious investment.