Patria de Martí Artículos y Ensayos

^{Totalitarianism in the tropics: Cuba's "Padilla case" revisited1}

Introduction:

This is an essay on the seemingly endless struggle between literature and power. It is anchored in Cuba’s “Padilla Case,” the arrest, trial, and public confession of the poet Heberto Padilla. The case had far-reaching repercussions, breaking up the love affair between “the Cuban Revolution,” i.e., Fidel Castro, and literary figures of international renown who, up to that point, had lent it valuable intellectual and moral support. Drawing on Richard Overy’s The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia,²the analysis highlights parallels between the efforts of these giants of tyranny to control what was written, published, and read in their countries with those exerted by their Caribbean counterpart, an offers an explanation for why totalitarian regimes find poets and writers so threatening.³

Controlling the Culture: Hitler and Stalin

In The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Richard Overy conceptualizes a totalitarian party-state not as one that achieves complete control over the lives of its subjects, something that is clearly impossible, but as one that is“concerned with the ‘totality’ of the societies in which they worked. In this narrower sense, both movements did have totalitarian aspirations and never were simple parliamentary parties. There were few areas of public life that did not come under party review, or had to be coordinated with the party, or eliminated. The public was subjected, willingly or unwillingly, to permanent party surveillance. . . .”⁴

One of those “areas of public life” over which Hitler and Stalin sought to exert complete control is culture—that is, art, film, music, theater and literature. Both set themselves, either personally or through their representatives, as final judges of what could be produced or made public in all forms of artistic creation. The only style that was acceptable under them was what in Stalin’s Russia Maxim Gorky called “socialist realism” and what in Hitler’s Germany Overy labels “nationalist realism.”⁵ Neither style was “realistic,” as this term is generally understood. Neither socialist nor nationalist art was descriptive of the actual conditions in which people lived, worked, or fought. Rather, it was “idealistic” or “romantic,” depicting the utopian mirages of the regime. As Overy puts it:

Official art was not entirely blind to aesthetic achievement, but the principal purpose of art was to express approved social values and political ideals in ways that could be appreciated by the ordinary public rather than the narrower world of art critics and patrons. All culture under the dictatorship was intended to be democratic⁶ rather than self-indulgently elitist.⁷

Under both regimes, artists and writers were instructed to abide by the “principles of simplicity and accessibility.” Hitler spoke not only for himself but, unwittingly perhaps, for Stalin, too, when he advocated “‘art that people can comprehend, because only art that the simple man can understand is true art’.”⁸ “Popular culture,” that is, one supposedly emanating from ordinary workers and peasants that echoed official themes and would erase the difference between high and low culture, was favored against “decadent,” “elitist,” or “bourgeois” culture. In the early years of the Bolshevik regime, “a popular movement of authentic proletarian culture, known by the acronym ‘Proletkult,’ recruited thousands of workers to be trained as revolutionary writers and artists to take the place of bourgeois artists and end the divide between high art and popular culture. The regime disliked the democratic and autonomous character of the movement and it declined sharply after 1921. . . . ”⁹ Nevertheless, if those organizational means were discarded, the goal of promoting “popular culture” over “elite culture” remained alive.

To encourage the production of art-cum-party-propaganda, the regimes employed a combination of positive and negative incentives. Depictions of heroism in labor or war, of individual sacrifice for the collective, were honored, their creators showered with prizes and other symbolic rewards as well as with material goods. Odes to the leader, genuinely or opportunistically conceived, could bring recognition. By contrast, no expression of ambivalence, doubt, criticism or challenge to the regime’s interpretation was allowed, and “any attempt to defy the new cultural norms was suppressed through a combination of official censorship, exclusion and terror.”¹⁰In both regimes, contemporary as well as past literature was censored. Lists of proscribed books were drawn up; those blacklisted were stored away or destroyed. In Stalin’s Russia, “In 1938-9 alone 16,453 titles were withdrawn from circulation and over 24 million copies pulped.”¹¹ Within a little over a year of Hitler assuming the chancellorship, “1,000 newspapers had been closed down, and 350 voluntarily wound up.”¹² “Minister of Propaganda and Enlightenment” Joseph Goebbels banned “all artistic criticism. The press was allowed only to print ‘art reports’ or ‘the contemplation of art.’ The critical evaluation of artistic output was permitted only to those who were judged to display Nationalist Socialist ‘purity of heart and outlook,’ and would say what the regime wanted.”¹³

To control the writers, the Soviet Union organized a “Union of Writers”; the equivalent body in Hitler’s Germany was known as a “chamber,” a subordinate entity within the “Reich Chamber of Culture,” itself “under the auspices” of Goebbels’ “ministry.”¹⁴ To belong to the union or chamber meant opportunities for publication, eligibility to attend conferences or retreats, permission to travel abroad, preferential access to better housing and other material goods, “and the prospect for the fortunate few of real fame.”¹⁵Under this regime, opportunists abounded. Those who refused to abide by the regime’s strictures were denied admission or expelled from the “union” or “chamber” and sentenced to a sort of artistic death—officially, as writers they simply ceased to exist. Overy quotes Mikhail Bulgakov’s lament, “‘To be known . . . To be known!’”¹⁶

Recalcitrant or non-conformist writers faced a range of unpleasant choices. One was exile, emigrating or escaping to another country where they could create freely, but at the cost of having to adjust to a new environment while becoming “non-persons” or objects of continuous vilification at home. This had to be particularly hard for writers, whose readership was drastically reduced unless they could become adept at another language. Another was a sort of internal exile, withdrawal into solitary existence, writing privately, practically in hiding, without hope of publication. There was self-censorship, avoiding dangerous topics or simply suppressing the creative impulse or channeling it into translating the work of authors of other languages, the option that Boris Pasternak took.¹⁷ A riskier route was going underground, meeting clandestinely with a few other trusted writers in informal—and illegal—literary circles, exchanging or distributing forbidden or unsanctioned manuscripts, always under the threat of being discovered or betrayed to the political police by an informant within the group. Discovery entailed harsh consequences—official campaigns of vilification, psychological pressures, material deprivation, arrest, beatings, imprisonment, being sentenced to forced labor or even execution, as in the case of the Soviet writer Isaak Babel.¹⁸ Suicide was the final option, although according to Overy very few took this step. One such case was that of the futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovski, who “shot himself,” “leaving a brief suicide note with the laconic conclusion: ‘Seriously, there is nothing to be done. Goodbye’.”¹⁹

 

Castro’s “Cultural Revolution”

In Cuba, Fidel Castro’s totalitarian party-state duplicated some of the principal policies and structures devised by Hitler and Stalin to control society and culture. These encompassed “science and technology, education and culture, sports, the media . . . .”²⁰In this paper, I focus almost all attention on one aspect: his war on writers who would not toe the line, those who refused to play their assigned role in “the Revolution.” The signal event in this war was what became known as “The Padilla Case.” In the words of César Leante,

This affair caused a radical turn in Cuban literature and art, and also significantly altered the relations between foreign intellectuals and the revolution.²¹ It may be affirmed that culturally there was a before and after the Padilla case. Nothing was ever again as it had been. The precarious understanding or compromise between creation and politics was undone by it. Henceforth, either the artists saw clearly or the revolution displayed its true colors. . . . Art is liberty, the revolution requires submission.²²

 

Heberto Padilla was a poet and novelist.²³ In his memoir, La Mala Memoria,²⁴ he recounts a 1951 campaign trip in the province of Matanzas, east of Havana, in which he along with several others, including the young Fidel Castro,²⁵ traveled from town to town giving speeches on behalf of a candidate of their party, “The Party of the Cuban People,” also known as “Ortodoxo.”²⁶Conversing among themselves, he learned that Castro liked Curzio Malaparte’s Kaputt and Coup D'etat: The Technique of Revolution. One night, while resting in Varadero, Cuba’s most famous beach, Castro voiced contempt for democracy: “True political changes are made by a vanguard . . . . Majority consent is always spurious. . . . New ideas are imposed with the fists.” When warned not to let Eduardo Chibás, the leader of the party, hear him, “Fidel burst out laughing. In Cuba a guffaw can cancel the most serious debate. I wish I could remember his exact words, especially the vehemence with which he expressed them; but I believe I have been faithful to them.”²⁷

Padilla remembers that one of Castro’s most prized books was a collection of Mussolini’s speeches and writings, and that Mein Kampf was one of his favorite reads. And he recalls something else: Castro’s photographic memory, which he put to political use, brazenly plagiarizing the words of others in his own speeches.

Recently I listened to old recordings of Mussolini attacking ‘British imperialism’ and I had the impression that I was listening to Fidel Castro attacking ‘Yankee imperialism’ to the noisy approval of his fevered followers. His admiration for Mussolini has not abated all these years: ‘Venceremos’ [we will be victorious], the pet phrase with which Castro ends all his speeches, was Mussolini’s motto. The imitation of Hitler is the most dramatic: At his trial for the Moncada assault, Fidel concluded his defense with the same phrase that Hitler used before the Munich tribunal: ‘Condemn me . . . . History will absolve me.’²⁸ The impudence with which he mocks historical memory is one of the most constant traits of his personality.”²⁹

The Moncada garrison was Cuba’s second-largest military base, located in Santiago de Cuba, in Oriente Province, at the easternmost end of the Island. On July 26, 1953, Castro led around 150 poorly armed and equipped men on a suicidal attack against it, nearby government installations, and a Rural Guards barracks in Bayamo,³⁰ about 60 miles northwest of Santiago. A year earlier, Fulgencio Batista, former dictator and president of Cuba, had seized the government in a coup against the elected president, Carlos Prío.³¹It was a carnival weekend in Santiago, and Castro had hoped to find the soldiery drunk or asleep. The assault was a failure, repulsed with many casualties; after surrendering, many of the attackers were murdered in cold blood. Castro escaped but was captured, tried, and sentenced to 15 years in prison, of which he served fewer than two.³²Shortly after being freed, Castro left for Mexico, where he raised funds and recruited men for an “invasion” of the Island. He landed in Oriente in December 1956. The landing, too, was a fiasco, but he and a few others made their way to the Sierra Maestra, Cuba’s largest mountain chain, from which they waged a two-year guerrilla war and, more importantly, a propaganda campaign against Batista’s dictatorship.³³

Fulgencio Batista’s flight from Cuba³⁴on January 1, 1959and Fidel Castro’s triumphal entry into Havana a few days later (which as a child I watched on television) found Padilla in New York City, where he taught Spanish at a Berlitz school. That spring he hurried down to Cuba, anxious to participate in the “splendid political transformation in the direction of decency” that had been launched. “What was needed was to raze what was bad and begin anew.”³⁵ He worked for Prensa Latina, both in Cuba and in London. Also, he contributed to a literary supplement edited by Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Lunes de Revolución. Carlos Franqui directed the parent newspaper,³⁶which initially took over the plant of Alerta, one of the newspapers seized from Batista supporters before moving into the building confiscated from Prensa Libre, the last independent newspaper to fall before the Castroite’s onslaught against the free press (see below).Previously, during the struggle against Batista, Franqui had edited Revolución clandestinely and had been in charge of Radio Rebelde, which broadcast from Castro’s mountain hideout.

Padilla allows that the exodus of people during the first two years of Castro’s regime “lacked importance for us. It was made up of established interests that took for granted that they would be back soon.”³⁷ One may be forgiven for so characterizing those that fled during the first few months of 1959, but by the end of the year the number of exiles was growing rapidly. Thereafter, the exodus swelled like a tidal wave: the middle class fledby the hundreds of thousands. Among those who escaped were just about all the former owners and editors of the independent media, including Miguel Angel Quevedo, editor of Bohemia, Cuba’s most important magazine, who had propagandized for Fidel Castro even during Batista’s dictatorship.³⁸ In fact, the seeds of what was to become the case that bears Padilla’s name were sown as early as the first year of Castro’s regime. No sooner had Castro begun his trek from the Sierra to Havana that summary trials and murders of former adherents to the previous regime were carried out. Hundreds were shot before hastily arranged firing squads.³⁹ Show trials of alleged Batista henchmen were televised. Multitudes gathered in a “plaza of the revolution,” to be harangued by Fidel Castro for hours. Whipped into a frenzy, they would demand “paredón, paredón” (“to the wall, to the wall,” i.e., to the firing squad) for “counter-revolutionaries” and “traitors.” In the next few years and for decades thereafter, members of his own “July 26th Movement,” fellow guerrilla fighters, members of the old Popular Socialist Party (communist), high-ranking members of his regime, even highly decorated member of his “Revolutionary Armed Forces” would eventually end up exiled, sentenced to long prison terms, executed, or dead by suicide.

If the early “bloodbath” (as Wayne Morse, United States Senator from Oregon characterized it)⁴⁰was not enough to alarm Padilla, something closer to a man devoted to the written word should have: Castro’s silencing of the“bourgeois” press, that is, of all media that was independent of him. First to fall were the newspapers that were tarred as belonging to or that had unconditionally served Batista. Without any judicial procedure of any kind, they were simply seized, their plant and equipment shifted to publications and editorials controlled by Castro’s followers, including Revolución (whose turn, as well as that of the communist newspaper Hoy, ironically would come in time). Next, Castro charged against the satirical weekly Zig-Zag, a magazine that had been critical of the previous regime, on account of a caricature that depicted him as climbing a mountain followed by a train of unprincipled opportunists. The newspaper guilds, of journalists, printers, graphic arts, etc., like other labor unions, were taken over by members or associates of the communist, Moscow-aligned Partido Socialista Popular (PSP). Then, one newspaper after another, one radio and television station after another, fell like dominoes, their editors having come under attack as “traitors” and “counterrevolutionaries” (“crimes” punishable by a prison term and even death by firing squad), vilifications that found echo in the pages of Hoy and Revolución, for calling for an end to the show trials, the summary executions, the restoration of the Constitution of 1940 and the holding of free elections, promises that Castro had made during his propaganda war against Batista. Pursuing a policy of economic strangulation, enterprises confiscated by the regime did not advertise with them, and those that remained in private hands were pressured to follow suit. In the case of the print media, their distributors were terrorized. As if borrowing a page from the Nazi brown shirts or Mussolini’s black shirts, a mob would assemble in front of the offices of the offending media organs to shout insults and threats against the lives of their owners and editors while other groups would symbolically bury them. Inside a newspaper, a group of employees, usually a minority, some wearing militia uniforms and carrying weapons, would demand the right to insert “corrections” to editorials critical of the regime. If the editors balked, the employees would forcibly occupy the plant. The same fate befell the offices of international press agencies. Most owners and editors of the expropriated media sought asylum in embassies and escaped abroad. Publishing houses and printing presses, too, fell under the control of the party-state. By May 1960, that is, in a little over a year, about the same time that it took Hitler to bring to heel the German press, just about every media organ not under the control of “the Revolution,” i.e., the regime, that is, of Fidel Castro, had disappeared.⁴¹Thus, concludes Leante, “in the name of the abstract, indefinable but omnipresent ‘revolution’ was thought and expression that was not common or vulgar strangled.”⁴²

At the time these outrages were taking place, however, Leante, like Padilla, was oblivious to their import.⁴³ Leante blames his own “complicity” on having been ensnared into an “ideological trap” with the use of adjectives: “there was a free ‘bourgeois’ press and a free ‘revolutionary’ press. The former is that for which all the newspapers were clamoring, except Revolución and Hoy that embodied ‘revolutionary’ free expression. . . . We fell into that Manichaeism, into that lying dichotomy, into that pedestrian division.” That “dichotomy,” he continues, was “consolidated” with the support of no less a figure than Jean Paul Sartre.⁴⁴ He visited Cuba in the spring of 1960, in the wake of the fall of “the last bastion of the independent press of Cuba, the daily with the emblematic title Prensa Libre (‘Free Press’).”⁴⁵ One night, at a meeting in the offices of Revolución, Sartre asked those assembled “if there was freedom of the press in Cuba.” Panic ensued. “How to answer him when, only a few days earlier, the last remaining non-government newspaper had been ‘confiscated’?” Noting the embarrassment, Sartre clarified: “What he wanted to know was whether revolutionaries could express themselves, whether there was freedom of the press for them. A sigh of relief. Oh yes, of course, naturally. Everyone who was a revolutionary could say whatever he wanted, there was no limit to that liberty. . . .”⁴⁶

A little over a year later, on June 30, 1961, Fidel Castro made this point in a typically long speech closing the “First Congress of Cuban Writers and Artists” that was held in the National Library over three consecutive Fridays. The background to the meeting was a dispute between the collaborators of Lunes, on the one hand and, on the other, members of the PSP, in particular Edith García Buchaca, effectively in charge of the National Cultural Council (CNC), and Alfredo Guevara, head of the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinema (ICAIC), over the suppression by the latter of an independently produced documentary, PM (Post Meridiem)on the grounds that it was “counter-revolutionary.”⁴⁷ The documentary, co-directed by Cabrera Infante’s brother, Sabá, and Orlando Jiménez-Leal,⁴⁸ and supported in part by Lunes, consisted in a fourteen minute, free-cinema style “short” that unobtrusively recorded images of night life in around the port of Havana and the beach of Marianao. Working-class revelers of both sexes and all shades of skin color, crowded in small locales, are shown in various stages of inebriation, dancing to music by anonymous bands, drinking and smoking, arguing or simply passing the time.⁴⁹ Needless to say, there were no images of heroic workers and peasants, rifles in hand, raising their fists in defiance of “Yankee imperialism.”⁵⁰

More than 200 intellectuals signed a letter protesting the censorship, after which PM was shown to an overflow crowd at the Casa de las Américas. But detractors of the documentary, principally Alfredo Guevara, appealed to Fidel Castro. At the congress, there was a wide-ranging discussion about the role of writers and artists under the new dispensation, the autonomy of art, and aesthetic merit independent of political content. Padilla jousted with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, a PSP “leader” who had once served on Batista’s cabinet and who eventually would act as “vice-president” under Castro, over the “fascist” T. S. Elliott, apparently getting the better of the communist, who was out of his league.⁵¹ Also at the congress, the poet and playwright Virgilio Piñera expressed fear that freedom of expression was under threat.

In his closing speech, later transcribed under the title, “Words to the Intellectuals,”⁵² Castro elevated what he called “the right of the Revolution to exist” over any other right, including that of free expression. A revolutionary, he added, knows this; that is why he “puts something above even his creative spirit. He puts the Revolution above everything else, and the most revolutionary artist will be that one who is prepared to sacrifice even his own artistic vocation for the Revolution.”

What about those “honest” writers and artists who, without being “revolutionary” themselves, nevertheless wish to help “the Revolution,” he asked?

The Revolution must . . . act in such a way that the entire sector of artists and intellectuals who are not genuinely revolutionary find a place to work and to create within the Revolution, and so that their creative spirit will have an opportunity and freedom for expression within the Revolution, even though they are not revolutionary writers or artists. This means that within the Revolution, everything goes; against the Revolution, nothing. Nothing against the Revolution, because the Revolution has its rights also, and the first right of the Revolution is the right to exist, and no one can stand against the right of the Revolution to be and to exist. No one can rightfully claim a right against the Revolution. Since it takes in the interests of the people and signifies the interests of the entire nation. I believe that this is quite clear. What are the rights of revolutionary or non-revolutionary writers and artists? Within the Revolution, everything, against the Revolution, no rights at all.⁵³

Echoing the strictures laid down by Hitler and Stalin about the promotion of a “popular culture” for and by the people, he instructed the artists and writers assembled that

Efforts must be made to reach the people in all manifestations, but everything that is within our soon [sic] must also be done in turn so that the people will be able to understand ever more and ever better. I do not believe that this principle contradicts the aspirations of any artist, and much less so if one takes into account the fact that men should create for their contemporaries.

. . . . .

Some experiments which have been carried out prove the ability of the peasant and the man of the people to assimilate artistic matters, to assimilate culture, and to set himself immediately to producing. There are comrades in certain cooperatives who have already succeeded in forming theatrical groups. In addition, the interest which the peasant⁵⁴ has in all these matters was proven recently with the performances given in various parts of the Republic and the artistic work which the men and women of the people did. Think, then, what it will mean when we have instructors of theater, of music, and of the dance in every cooperative and at every people's farms.

Furthermore, he dismissed the concern that the cultural agencies established to date by the regime, namely the National Cultural Council and the Cuban Institute of Art and Cinema (ICAIC), to “stimulate, encourage, develop, and orient—yes , orient—that creative spirit” would abuse their authority.⁵⁵He claimed that no one could seriously dispute the right of the latter to censor films, to decide what films could be shown to the public. Implicitly, of course, he was claiming analogous “rights” for every other agency put in charge of some aspect of culture, including the National Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC), formed that very summer, to decide what books could be published, prizes awarded, and so on.

As Leante later came to understand, the terms “revolutionary” and “counter-revolutionary,” though repeated ad nauseam by the “maximum leader,” were left undefined. In practice, they were applied by the very agencies Castro had established to “guide” cultural output. “Their multiple and subjective interpretations were transferred to government functionaries, the cultural bureaucrats, and, naturally, over the years it became evident that anything that did not fit the orthodoxy, that did not conform to the Marxist-Leninist canon, and in practice, any expression that was critical of the system, even if only in part, was ‘against the revolution’.”⁵⁶ Or, as Padilla was to put it in Mala Memoria: “The comandante was the sole arbiter of what was to be accepted or rejected.”⁵⁷

At the time, however, Padilla did not take these issues seriously, even as the poet Yevgeny Aleksandrovich Yevtushenko, who was visiting Cuba and attended the meeting, sounded the alarm. “‘I am worried about these debates in the National Library even if no one has been ordered to the firing squad’,” Yevtushenko said. He warned Padilla to be prudent. “‘To safeguard one’s head was the most important thing in a revolution. In my country, during the Stalin era, you would have been sent to a labor camp for less. Lezama Lima⁵⁸ would have been the first to go’.”⁵⁹ Padilla had been given similar warnings by others, including friends among PSP members who were already feeling nervous about the designs of the “maximum leader.”⁶⁰

Shortly after the congress at which Castro had addressed the intellectuals, Lunes de Revolución was buried. Cabrera Infante was sent to Belgium as cultural attaché.

Franqui, too, went abroad; as roving reporter for Revolución, he interviewed heads of states and cultural figures of note until it, too, was closed. For his part, Padilla left for Moscow to work for Novedades de Moscú. Subsequently, he represented the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Commerce in communist-ruled Europe and Scandinavia. These positions afforded him ample opportunities to travel and meet important members of the literary world. In his memoir, he recounts many pleasant soirees in several European capitals, many conversations about politics and poetry fueled with vodka and incensed with the smoke of Cuban cigars, of which he kept Ilya Ehrenburg⁶¹ well supplied.

But as he learned more about “real socialism” in the Soviet Union and its East European satellites—“the lack of liberty, the omnipresence and high-handedness of the political police, the sacrosanct hierarchs of the bureaucracy, the omnipotent hegemony of the Party, the stagnation of literature, the constant presence of the censor and the cynicism of a large part of the writers,”⁶² together with alarming reports about developments back home—the purges and the ever-growing list of executions—he came to doubt that “the Revolution” would live up to its original promises.⁶³ Reflecting on the attitude of his foreign friends, he observed, not without a sense of self-pity:

They could support or deny their support for the revolution without changing their world; not I. My support sanctioned each and every step in the process, and my rejection was equivalent to turning my back on the most ambitious act of defiance in the history of my country. In-between was the concrete practice. To accept it meant having to swallow live toads in full awareness that we were doing it, to borrow words from the Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz. It is a repugnant image for anyone; but a poignant one all the same. Those of us who one day had to swallow those live toads will live the rest of our lives without ever being able to shake the sense of revulsion. Revulsion, especially with illusions, is the worst of all vices, because the latter perverts the true essence of hope.⁶⁴

In 1967, having returned to Cuba for good, Padilla found that in Havana “reserve and fear” were pervasive. State Security stalked the halls of the UNEAC which, along with every other “revolutionary organization,” including the new Communist Party of Cuba into which the purged remnants of the 26^th of July Movement and the old communist party, the PSP, had been folded, were under constant surveillance. Homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, disaffected youth, “above all, students and artists had had no crime for which they could be prosecuted,” were being sent to the Military Units in Assistance of Production (UMAP). The UMAP camps constituted “one of the cruelest institutions that the system invented.” This was the epoch that initiated Castro’s version of “Heil Hitler” in the slogan, “‘Commander in Chief: Wherever, whenever, and for whatever, give us the order!’”⁶⁵

It was in this political and cultural atmosphere that Padilla was invited to review for El Caimán Barbudo “an insignificant little novel by Lisandro Otero,” who had been appointed advisor to the National Council on Culture. Padilla complied. He compared Otero’s novel, Pasión de Urbino, unfavorably with Tres Tristes Tigres, by the exiled Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the former editor of the defunct Lunes de Revolución, that was being read clandestinely.⁶⁶ Upon publication of the critical essay, Padilla came under attack by the regime’s cultural commissars.⁶⁷ Thereafter, he was subjected to “the most absolute marginalization.” His ostracism was complete when, in order to evade the sentinels of State Security, he waited until only minutes before the deadline and then, with the help of a friend, surreptitiously entered his book of poems, Fuera del Juego (“Out of the Game”), into a National Literature Contest sponsored by the UNEAC. He had composed the poems in foreign capitalsover several years, giving them the finishing touches after returning to Cuba.

The book⁶⁸ opens with a poem titled “In Difficult Times.” It is about a man who was asked successively to give of his time, his hands, his eyes, his lips, his legs, his chest, his heart, his shoulders, and then his tongue, “because in difficult times there is nothing as useful to hinder hatred or the lie.” Finally, “they begged him, please, to get going, because, in difficult times, this is, without a doubt, the decisive proof.” “The Old Bards Say” reminds the poet that “anywhere and at any time” that he “make or suffer History, a dangerous poem will always be lying in wait.” The eponymous poem, perhaps defensively and disingenuously dedicated to the leftist poet “Yiannis Ritsos in jail in Greece,” spoke of the poet as a character that has no place in a play or “the game.” He lacks enthusiasm, does not believe in miracles, spends all day in thought, and always finds something to criticize; no one can make him smile at the sight of clowns; he is not a yes man, he won’t dance like everyone else—so dismiss him, he has nothing to do here.⁶⁹ The panel of judges that included the patriarch of Cuban letters, the eminent writer and poet José Lezama Lima,⁷⁰courageously resisted political pressures to disqualify Padilla’s entry, and unanimously voted to award him the prize.⁷¹ It consisted in “a trip to the Soviet Union and one thousand pesos in cash.” He never received it, the very UNEAC that sponsored the contest having denounced Fuera del Juego for ideological deviations.⁷²

Out of a job, Padilla appealed to Castro. Though he received no reply, apparently the comandante intervened, for he was offered a job at the University of Havana. Yet, worse was to come. His situation was aggravated by the arrival in Cuba of Jorge Edwards, the Chilean novelist and career diplomat sent to the Island as Chargé d'Affairs ad interim, tasked with reopening Chile’s embassy in Havana by the new president, the Marxist Salvador Allende. Although not persuaded that he was the best fit for this assignment, Edwards looked forward to spending time with Cuban writers he had met in 1968, including Padilla. That year, while on unpaid leave from the Foreign Ministry, he had accepted an invitation to serve on a three-person panel of judges of a literary contest sponsored by the Casa de las Américas.⁷³ Unbeknownst to Edwards or, presumably, Allende himself, the regime harbored a grudge against him from that earlier visit. At that time, over the lengthy and stubborn objections of the Cuban member of the panel, he had joined an Argentinian judge in awarding a prize to Norberto Fuentes for Condenados de Condado, a collection of stories about the crushing of anti-Castro peasant guerrilla forces in the Escambray Mountains in Central Cuba during the mid-1960s. According to Edwards, the stories inspired by one of my favorite story-tellers, Isaac Babel, a victim of the Stalinist terror in the 1930s, had a dangerousness that had escaped me . . . [they] rejected the Manichean division of characters into worms⁷⁴ and heroes. In effect, José Norberto’s stories, like those of Babel, on the basis of direct experience showed that war corrupts both sides, even as one represents the vanguard of history and the other its rear. Undoubtedly, such approach, especially at that time, could not be to the liking of Cuba’s revolutionary power.⁷⁵

Edwards’ nightmarish experiences during the four months he spent in Cuba became the subject of Persona Non Grata. It is beyond the scope of this article to do justice to this book. No less a literary authority than the Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz characterized it as “one of the truly vibrant classics of Latin American literature.”⁷⁶Suffice to say here that Edwards spent a good deal of time with Padilla, along with other Cuban writers who had fallen in disgrace. His conversations with them, as well as those with others, including one outside of Cuba, in Mexico, hosted by Carlos Fuentes, were surreptitiously recorded and, in some cases, photographed by agents or informants for Castro’s State Security apparatus.⁷⁷ The topics of these conversations ranged widely, from literature to politics, and included references to the reign of terror, marginalization, and penurious circumstances under which all writers that did not do the regime’s bidding lived. As Edwards observed, this situation was driving Padilla out of his mind. Afraid that State Security would confiscate the draft of a novel he was writing, En Mi Jardín Pastan Los Héroes (“Heroes are Grazing in my Garden”), Padilla carried it under his arm wherever he went. Padilla himself acknowledges that whenever he wishes to remember “the desperate and self-destructive being I was then, I read one of those chapters” in Edwards’ book “where I slip away like a burlesque character from whom the author cannot part.”⁷⁸

On the eve of Edwards’ departure from Cuba, Padilla was arrested and taken to the dreaded “Villa Marista,” once the property of a religious educational order, now one of the seats of State Security, akin to the Lubyanka. Charged with “attempting against the power of the State,”⁷⁹ he was told to strip naked and put on the uniform of a prisoner.

“You never thought we would arrest you, did you?,” he was taunted. “You thought you were untouchable, the rebellious and untouchable artist that spends his time accusing us of being fascists? That we were going to overlook all your counterrevolutionary mischief? That you could attempt against the security of the State without being placed at the disposition of the First Military Tribunal at La Cabaña? [A prison where thousands of “counter-revolutionaries” were confined in subhuman conditions, and many were executed by firing squad.] . . . With the poison you spread all around us, you could have your own small history of infamy.”When told that his wife, Belkis Cuza Malé, was also under arrest, his eyes welled up with tears. “Cry if you want, it’s manly; but before declaring war on us you should have asked yourself if you were afraid of bullets. You are intelligent, we have no problem recognizing that; but we had to put an end to the situation of intellectuals in Cuba unless we wanted to end up as in Czechoslovakia, where writers took up the fascist banner, like that friend of yours, Yevtushenko, who is anti-communist and anti-Soviet.”⁸⁰

For the next five weeks and two days Padilla was held in isolation in a narrow cell, usually lit at all times, repeatedly and aggressively interrogated after midnight, insulted, beaten, and drugged. He was left completely alone for five consecutive days in total darkness, after which he became delirious. In one especially ghastly session, a “macrabre rite,” several muscular henchmen took turns reciting his verses as they pushed, punched, kicked and slammed him onto a wooden floor. “The head, the forehead, the legs, all my body became a hodgepodge of pain. The last thing I remember was a bump against my nose and temples. . . . ”⁸¹ He regained consciousness as a “fat and ruddy-faced doctor” forced him to submerge his head into a pan of icy cold water. Taken to the emergency room of a military hospital, he was drugged and began to hallucinate. He saw scenes from his past—from childhood, New York City, airports through which he had passed. Waking up in his cell, he cried in shame. “Oh God, nothing has happened to me,” he cried out. “Everything has been the effect of a transgression of what is real. True suffering is that of those who struggled on behalf of a liberty that was betrayed.” He reflects:

Over the years, I have come to know that definitely I was privileged and to some extent an accomplice to horror. Conscious or unconscious of what was taking place, I made no inquiries to ascertain whether in Cuba people were tortured for insignificant reasons. Afterwards I have thought of Huber Matos, Gutiérrez Menoyo, Sorí Marín, Pedro Luis Boitel, in all those who had joined with Fidel Castro in the insurrectional struggle only to find themselves kicked, tortured andeven executed with a form of sadism that is far more refined and monstrous than that of a typical tyranny.⁸²

At one time, during a stay of several days in a military hospital, Castro came to see him.

“Today I have plenty of time to talk with you, and I think you do, too; moreover, we have a lot to talk about,” said the comandante. Yes, undoubtedly we had time to talk, or rather for him to discourse to his heart’s content, to shiton all the world’s literature, “because to send revolutionaries to fight is not the same as to send writers to fight, who in this country have never done anything for the people, neither in the last century nor in this one; they are always climbing onto the car of History.” The imposing chief haughtily towered across the no less imposing adversary dressed in a faded uniform, with a scar still bleeding on his forehead, with his entire body bruised by the immortal kicks of History.⁸³

To escape his ordeal, Padilla agreed to recite from memory, before important members of the UNEAC, but excluding Lezama Lima, to whom State Security would pay a separate visit, a statement of self-criticism composed while in confinementin which he would confess his errors and that of fellow writers. The statement would serve as the basis of a letter of repentance that would justify official clemency. Padilla surmises that the regime thought that this maneuver would diffuse the storm of protest in international literary circles provoked by his arrest.

Half-way through Padilla’s detention, a collection of prominent European and Latin American intellectuals—including Jean Paul Sartre⁸⁴ and Simone de Beauvoir; future Nobel Prize Laureates Octavio Paz and Mario Vargas Llosa⁸⁵; Carlos Fuentes, Carlos Franqui, plus some two dozen others–wrote an open letter to “Comandante Fidel Castro, Prime Minister of the Revolutionary Government.” Expressing their “concern’’ about the “imprisonment of the poet and writer Heberto Padilla,” they “asked” him to “reexamine the situation that this arrest has created.” They declared that they “feared the return of a sectarian tendency far more violent and dangerous” than one that Castro himself had denounced in 1962, and one that Comandante Che Guevara “had alluded to on various occasions to denounce the repression of the right to criticize within the bosom of the Revolution.” They warned that “the use of repressive measures against intellectuals and writers who have exercised the right to criticize within the Revolution can only have extremely negative repercussions among anti-imperialist forces the world over and, very especially in Latin America, where the Cuban Revolution represents a symbol and a banner.” They concluded by “reaffirming our solidarity with the principles that inspired the struggle in the Sierra Maestra and that the Cuban revolutionary government has expressed so many times by means of the words and actions of its Prime Minister, Comandante Che Guevara, and so many other revolutionary leaders.”⁸⁶

For his part, Padilla had figured that “Against the thug, there is no weapon other than intelligence or astuteness.”⁸⁷ Indeed, although few recognized it at first,⁸⁸ Padilla’s long speech before the UNEAC assembly reads like a parody of the ritual of auto da fé that Stalinist victims performed on the way to their executions.⁸⁹

The speech was permeated with protestations that he was sincere, that he was really telling the truth, that he was truly grateful to “the Revolution” for the generosity of granting his wish to speak to his fellow writers, that he would never tire of making it clear that it was he who had asked for it, knowing very well that writers are distrustful, because he thought that his experience would be instructive for them. He said that he had spent many days in reflection and in conversation— conversations, he repeated, not interrogations—with the true revolutionaries of State Security. His had been an “exemplary experience.” Although it was difficult at first, he had come to accept the truths about his personality, his opinions, his conduct. He had “committed very many errors, errors that are unforgivable, really censurable, really unspeakable.” These errors were the product of his self-importance, petulance, ingratitude. He was enamored of his image as the enfant terrible of “the Revolution.” He had been the first—a sorry priority, to be sure—the first to infuse his writing with “resentment, bitterness, and pessimism, synonyms all of counterrevolution in literature.”But he had learned from the compañeros in State Security, “from their humility, from the artlessness, sensibility, warmth with which they perform their humane and revolutionary task, the difference between a man who wants to serve the Revolution and a man that is a prisoner of his defects of character and his vanities.” In his writings, in his gossiping with colleagues, and in conversations with foreign visitors and interviews with reporters who were agents of the enemy, he had injured and defamed “the Revolution,” “a revolution made ninety miles from imperialism, something that however many times is reiterated does not lose its verisimilitude.” He has seen “a quantity of enemies that come to our country disguised as playwrights, sociologists, photographers, whatever. Why do they come? To admire the Revolution? No!” There are exceptions, of course, but “they come to obtain information for the enemy, and they search for it in the cultural zones” where they can easily find critics. But he had cared more about his international reputation than about “the Revolution.” He repudiated his prize-winning book of poems, Fuera del Juego. “That book is filled with bitterness, filled with pessimism. That book is based on readings of other books, it does not express the experience of life, does not internalize the Cuban experience. We have to admit that. That book expresses disenchantment, and whoever appreciates it is only projecting his own disenchantment.”He spurned his Heroes Graze in My Garden, a novel that is “an embarrassment—I say this sincerely—not only politically but from a moral point of view.” “Fortunately, it will never be published,” “because that novel displays my defects and stains of character, my problems, including my psychological problems, grave problems that, moreover, I have discovered in my solitude in State Security.” “The Revolution,” he repeated, had been “generous” in allowing him to make this speech, instead of committing him to a military tribunal. Despite what skeptics may think, this speech was his own idea. So much the worse for those who refuse to believe that he is being sincere, that he is telling the truth. He wants his fellow writers to learn from his experience, because to understand what he is saying, they would have to go through what he has been through. “The jail that I suffered . . . was not a coat of arms that I could display as a sacrifice against tyranny, but a moral, just jail, because it punished an evil against the Revolution and against our Country.” State Security knows that most of his colleagues have shared his defeatist attitude, his feelings of disenchantment, and “the Revolution” can no longer tolerate “the venomous conspiracy of all the little groups of the discontented in the intellectual and artistic zones.” State Security knows all about their conversations. State Security can treat them all as he was treated. So when he singled out several of them by name,⁹⁰he wasn’t saying anything new. They all should all come forward and make their own confessions of errors, and, like him, become a soldier of “the Revolution.”⁹¹

And several did come forward to make their own acts of self-repudiation,⁹² starting with his wife.

Far from closing it, Padilla’s self-abasement at the UNEAC only widened the breach between Fidel Castro and many among the international literati. The number of signatures affixed to a second letter fired off to the “Prime Minster of the Cuban Government” approached twice the number as the first. Published in Paris on May 20, 1971 and in Madrid the following day, the signatories expressed their “shame and rage” at the spectacle. “The pathetic text of the confession signed by Heberto Padilla could only have been obtained with methods that are the negation of revolutionary justice. The content and form of such confession, with its absurd accusations and delirious affirmations, as well as the event held at UNEAC . . . bring to mind the most sordid moments of the Stalinist epoch, with its prefabricated trials and witch hunts.” The letter went on to “exhort” Castro “with the same vehemence” with which they had supported “the Cuban Revolution,” not to duplicate “the dogmatic obscurantism, the cultural xenophobia, and the repressive system that Stalinism imposed in socialist countries, flagrant manifestations of which were events similar to those that are taking place in Cuba.” Deploring the “contempt for human dignity” that is involved “in forcing a man ridiculously to accuse himself of the worst betrayals and vile acts,” not because he is a writer but because “any Cuban compañero”“may be victim of similar violence and humiliation,” the letter concluded with the wish that “the Cuban Revolution would be once again what in one moment we considered it to be, a model within socialism.”⁹³

But Castro was through with the intellectuals.⁹⁴They had served their purpose. Once they “had constituted the propagandistic spearhead of Havana’s totalitarian regime in the rest of the world.”⁹⁵But he no longer had any use for them. He had made that clear in a speech on May 1, nearly three weeks earlier. What follow are choice excerpts that display Castro in full contempt mode.⁹⁶

Sometimes certain books have been published, the number does not matter. But as a matter of principle not a single book of such kind should be printed, not a single chapter, not a single page, not a single letter!

If you read a liberal bourgeois newspaper in Europe--and in Europe, for

them, the problems of this country are . . . the problems of two or three stray sheep which may have some problems with the revolution because they are not given the right to continue to sow poison, insidiousness, and intrigue in the revolution.

. . .Certain matters regarding intellectual gossip have not been published in

our newspapers. Then, what a problem, what a crisis, what a mystery, that

these things do not appear in the newspapers. The fact, liberal and

bourgeois gentlemen, is that these matters are of too little importance—so

much trash to occupy the attention of our workers and the pages of our

newspapers.

. . . They want us by all means to give importance to such matters because they—these reactionary, bourgeois newspapers which are paid by imperialism, corrupt tothe marrow and a billion [miles] distant from the problems of this

revolution and from countries like ours—thinksuch things are problems.

 

…These matters have always been despised. I have referred to them only as an explanation to the liberal bourgeoisie. So they are at war with us,

magnificent! They are going to be unmasked and left nude to the ankles. . . .

the brazen pseudo-leftists who want to win laurels—living in Paris, London, and Rome. They are really brazen Latin Americans, who instead of being here in the trenches live in the bourgeois salons 10,000 miles from the problems and enjoy some of the renown that they won when they were initially able to express something of the Latin American problems.

As for Cuba, however, they will never be able to use Cuba again—never, not even to defend her. . . . With small lectures here to play the role of judges? No, to play the role of judges it is necessary to be a real revolutionary, a real intellectual, a true fighter.⁹⁷

In order to win a prize in a national or international competition, one must be a true revolutionary, a true intellectual, a real poet, a true revolutionary! That is clear, more clear than water, and the magazines and contests are not open to phonies. . . . There will only bea place for revolutionaries. So now you know, gentlemen bourgeois intellectuals and bourgeois liberals, and CIA agents of imperialism's intelligence and spy services--you cannot get into Cuba.

. . . . .

. . . How many times these gentlemen, these writers of trash, have won prizes. . . .

For a bourgeoisie, anything can have aesthetical value--anything that entertains

him, that amuses him, that helps him to linger in his laziness and boredom

as an unproductive bum and parasite. . . .

Following the Padilla Case, Cuba’s literary and artistic world descended into a “dark age,”⁹⁸ a time when “intellectuals qua intellectuals were suspect. . . . Contempt for independent judgment was institutionalized. All vestige of individual creativity was quashed. Meanness and denunciation were publicly rewarded, and taught to schoolchildren . . . .”⁹⁹ The works of the “witch doctors,” foreign and domestic, were banned, the libraries purged of their books.¹⁰⁰ At the same time, crude specimens of “socialist realism” were awarded prizes.¹⁰¹ Henceforth, “vigilance and repression against the intellectual class was intensified like never before in Cuba; but its particulars would be unknown outside of Cuba. The number of non-persons grew substantially, with the implication that they, too, would be non-writing writers who, marginalized, could only opt for the strange method of ‘publication’ in the voluminous archives of State Security.”¹⁰²

As for Padilla, except for a short period when he was sent to the countryside to witness for himself the wonders that “the Revolution” was doing for the peasantry, for much of another decade he suffered ostracism and marginality, condemned, like Piñera,¹⁰³ to support himself by translating books.¹⁰⁴ Once, he approached Gabriel García Márquez when the latter was on one of his periodic visits to Cuba, asking that he intercede with Castro to allow him, his wife and young son to emigrate. García Márquez told him flat out that he would not do that, that Padilla could still do harm to “the Revolution.”¹⁰⁵

But despite this denial, García Márquez did intercede; that’s what Castro told Padilla in March, 1980, only days before his departure, when he was summoned to the presidential palace for one last conversation with the tyrant. In that meeting, Castro echoed what he had told his Orthodox Party colleagues in that campaign trip three decades earlier. “. . . In a revolution [State Security] is inevitable. In a revolution there may be enemies who are sincerely mistaken, but they are always dangerous. To establish a new society, a front of national unity is required. Marx and Lenin were prototypes of revolutionaries, and were implacable with their enemies.” Padilla recalls what Castro had written to his mistress while in the comfortable confinement that Batista had reserved for him after he was convicted for the Moncada assault: ¹⁰⁶ “Robespierre was idealistic and honest until death. The revolution was in danger . . . it was necessary to be hard, inflexible, severe, to err on account of excess, never on the side of insufficiency when this can mean failure. Months of terror were necessary to put an end to a terror that had lasted centuries. What Cuba needs is many Robespierres.”¹⁰⁷

The next morning, at a meeting in the suite of Havana’s Riviera Hotel where he was staying, Padilla had a conversation with García Márquez in which the latter tells him

“. . . [I]t is embarrassing for me always to carry a list of names for whom to intercede before Fidel. One of these days he will get tired of it; but my question is this: Heberto, to what do you attribute that a country like Cuba has the same problems with writers as the Soviet Union?”

His question surprised me, as I thought he had answered it already in his intelligent reporting on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Noting my surprise, he added, “I assure you, whatever your answer may be, it won’t go any further, I am very discreet.”

“But Gabriel, those very words of yours are part of the answer.”

Still smiling, he told me: “It appears that this dilemma has no solution in any socialist country. The Soviet Union has not solved it in more than sixty years.”¹⁰⁸

Discussion

The question García Márquez posed to Padilla is similar to one that Overy posited in Dictators: Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia. He explained the effort “to exclude any influence defined at the time as subversive, decadent or ambiguous” on the societies under their rule in the following way:

The decision stemmed first from the central utopian ideologies of the two systems, which deliberately constructed a particular version of reality for which there could not be an alternative. The result was a deliberate cultural autarky or self-sufficiency, sheltering both populations as far as possible from external cultural influences and encouraging the development of popular domestic art. Although the lives of many of those who lived through the dictatorships bore little relation to the stated reality, neither system was prepared to tolerate a single violation of the artistic or, by implication, the political norms. The deep fear of exposure to reality explains why the regulation was so thorough and absurd.

. . .¹⁰⁹

But did Hitler or Stalin, or Castro, for that matter,“fear” “exposure to reality”? Reality, after all, is what the population experiences in their daily lives. A case in point: For over half a century ordinary Cubans have endured dilapidated housing, shortages of consumer goods, shoddiness in those that are available and usually after queuing up sometimes for hours, assignments to dead-end jobs at low wages, inadequate transportation, long waits to see a physician, arbitrariness and pettiness by some bureaucrats and imperiousness on the part of others, intrusive meddlesome by neighborhood “defenders of the Revolution,” being excluded from stores, neighborhoods, and resorts reserved for foreigners and members of the ruling elite; having to enroll their children in Communist Party youth organizations if they wanted them admitted to the better schools or the university, to sacrifice some of the little leisure time they have to do “volunteer” labor on this or that project or campaign with nothing to show for it; to attend boring Communist Party or block meetings, recite mind-numbing slogans,¹¹⁰ and listen for hours, either glued to the television or the radio or standing under a boiling sun in a mass rally, there to applaud “the interminable speeches and the infinite and ever more delirious insanities”¹¹¹ of a seemingly eternal tyrant; fear of punishment for laughing at the wrong joke or discussing taboo subjects, waste, corruption, scandalous inequalities,¹¹²injustice, and so on and on. The contrast between the mirages portrayed by the regime and the reality experienced in everyday life cannot escape them. People do not need a novel, play, or film to make them aware of it all.

So what is it, then, that dictators in totalitarian regimes fear, if that is, in fact, the passion that motivates them to control the culture, to wage a war on writers and other members of the intelligentsia who will venture beyond the barbed wires of what the party-state will tolerate? What they fear is public negation of the Lie. These regimes are constructed on a mountain of lies, lies that their rulers not only propagate, but force the population to assent to, to pretend to believe.¹¹³ The principal lie, the lie of all lies that constitutes the keystone of the regime, is the claim that it is not a dictatorship at all, but a real, a true democracy where the people and the government are one, unanimous as they march arm in arm into a happy future that is reserved for them by “History.”How many Cubans could really believe Fidel Castro when he said, as he did in the “First Congress of Education and Culture” (of which there was little of either), held only a few days after Padilla’s farcical self-degradation at the UNEAC assembly, where all “resolutions” were approved by unanimity, that “Various opinions were advanced with absolute frankness, with absolute freedom—such as is inconceivable in any other society except a socialist one”?¹¹⁴

People are forced to live a lie, to adopt a doble moral, as they say in Cuba, to wear a mask of obedience or even enthusiasm that shields expressions of indifference, apathy, weariness, disbelief, frustration, disgust, or anger.¹¹⁵ But because everyone wears a mask, people cannot tell who is telling the truth and who is not, who is for real and who is not, who is a true believer, who an opportunist, and who is simply hiding behind a mask. Suspicion and distrust of one another keep most people isolated.¹¹⁶ Society is atomized. Under those conditions, freely combining with others for political or any other public purpose is very difficult. Nearly everyone is afraid¹¹⁷ to protest or oppose the regime because, in the absence of others joining them in large numbers, the lone protestor faces the certainty of punishment. But if a novelist, poet or playwright, someone for whom almost by definition the expressive need is greater than most, works up the courage to deny or mock the Lie and gets away with it, the myths of representation at the core of the regime, of its self-image and self-justification, are debunked. Suddenly, the emperor is stripped of his clothing. As first a few and then more members of the general public read and talk about a poem or a novel that resonates with their perceptions of reality, they find their own voices and work up the courage to confront the subsidiary lies in their own particular spheres of life, in their neighborhoods, at work, at their children’s school, etc. As they do so, like-minded others are emboldened to speak up, too. The masks start falling away. This can well trigger a snowballing or bandwagon effect.¹¹⁸ Groups assemble, and their combinations multiply their impact. All it takes now is a small event that serves as a catalyst for demonstrations or even disorder, e.g., riots, and consequent loss of control.¹¹⁹

History is recovered, rescued from the commissars that had kept it under wraps, or had mangled, maimed, and disfigured it with distorted versions of the past.¹²⁰

And as truths replace lies in the forming of public opinion, it draws into itself minds up and down the social hierarchy, including those belonging to members of the regime, including at least some in the highest circles, demoralization among its cadres sets in, the result of shame at having been the instruments of the Lie. The very foundations of the regime are shaken, the façade of unanimity cracks, the keystone tumbles, and the regime collapses. It did not take long for Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost to bring about these results in the once mighty empire of the Soviet Union.¹²¹As David Hume said, it is on opinion only that government is founded; and this maxim extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular. The soldan of Egypt, or the emperor of Rome, might drive his harmless subjects, like brute beasts, against their sentiments and inclination. But he must, at least, have led his mamalukes or prætorian bands, like men, by their opinion.¹²²

Conclusion

Over the years, in Cuba as in Russia, a good number of opportunistic scribes and even a few talented writers climbed onto the “car of ‘History’,” ready to compromise artistic integrity for the privileges and security that were to be found “inside the Revolution.”¹²³ Some, abjectly, composed the equivalent of odes to their lord and master. In the worst of cases, they excused or denied his crimes and barbarities, and even lent their pens for the purpose of character assassination or “repudiation” of heretics in the crosshairs of the regime. Still others, willingly or unwillingly but prudently, affixed their names to open letters rejecting criticism of the regime by exiled writers and artists, tarring them as propagandists for “the enemy.”¹²⁴

Nevertheless, a single great writer faithful to the truth is all it takes to deal delegitimizing blows against even the mightiest dictatorship. The impact may not be immediate, but it is sure and lasting. A Pasternak, a Solzhenitsyn, and yes, although not in the same league as these two, even a Padilla, Davids to the totalitarian Goliath, bear witness to this. They had to be repressed because, as Leante puts it in his analysis of the Padilla case, “a Revolution, an enormous lie erected as goddess of truth, cannot survive without imposing coercion and violence, annihilating all that can unmask her, for despite its apparently enormous size its feet are made of clay and is more fragile, vulnerable, and brittle than Licenciado Vidriera thought he was.”¹²⁵

 

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