Fidel Castro by Volker Skierka

Author:Volker Skierka
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2014-08-07T04:00:00+00:00

The revolution devours its children

In the late 1960s, after attempts to bring forth the “new man” in Cuba came to an end with the death of Che Guevara, the fearless poet Heberto Padilla, well known for his biting irony, caricatured such efforts in a piece called “Instructions for Joining a New Society:”

One: Be optimistic.

Two: Be well turned out, courteous, obedient.

(Must have made the grade in sports.)

And finally, walk

as every member does;

one step forward

and two or three back:

but always applauding, applauding.54

Padilla’s book Outside the Game, with its criticism of the development of a revolution he had once celebrated, provoked the supreme guardians. But he went on regardless. They left him alone a while longer, partly because he had influential friends at home and abroad, and partly because Fidel evidently held a protective hand over him. In March 1971, however, he suffered the fate he had already predicted in another poem:

Cuban poets no longer dream

(Not even at night).…

Hands seize them by the shoulders

Turn them about.55

Men from the G-2 secret police arrested him and threw him in jail.

Thirty-two days later he was set free, after a sharply worded open letter to Castro from noted European and Latin American intellectuals had been published in the French daily Le Monde.

With the same vigor with which we defended the Cuban Revolution from the first day, seeing it as exemplary because of its respect for human beings and its struggle for freedom, we now ask you to spare Cuba the dogmatic obscurantism, the cultural xenophobia and the repressive system that Stalinism has imposed on the socialist countries, and which bear an alarming similarity to the things that are currently reported to be happening in Cuba.56

Among the signatories were Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Alberto Moravia, Alain Resnais, and Gabriel García Márquez.

Padilla’s release on Castro’s orders had a price: the insubordinate poet had to make a public “self-criticism” and call upon other writers to follow his example. His obsequious confession, however, turned into a parody of actually existing socialism: “I have committed many, many errors, that are really inexcusable.… And I feel … truly happy … with the possibility of beginning my life over again with a new spirit.” His humiliating period behind bars, he now characterized as an opportunity for “reflection.” And what he said about his interrogators has the ring of scorn and derision: “If I have learned anything from the state security comrades, it is because of their humility, their simplicity, the sensitivity and warmth with which they carry out their humane tasks.” He also regretted his description of the Writers’ Association as a “hollow shell of pretentious nobodies,” and castigated the malicious demon that was still within him. He had even been unfair and ungrateful toward Castro, and he would “never tire of repeating this.” Then the poet mentioned “similar errors” he had committed, which, thanks to the “generosity of our revolution,” had not landed him in the same trouble. “Let us then be soldiers!” he concluded.

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