TO 40 YEARS OF THE PADILLA CASE
The April 27, 1971 was self-criticism of the Cuban writer Heberto Padilla. Awarded for offside , his collection after counter-qualified by the authorities of Cuba. Imprisoned for just over a month, Padilla later retracted publicly. Case Padilla led to the breakdown of many intellectuals to the revolutionary government. Intellectuals extracts versus Fidel: Letters of a Young Poet , note Panorama magazine , n º 211 of May 11, 1971.
"The April 27 motion picture cameras and television lights returned to pick up in Havana the image of a portly boy hairless moon face and big glasses, language curly hair and polished to a fault. Heberto Padilla returned unexpectedly to enjoy (or suffer, according to their usual set of antinomies) of a large soiree , And if something like the navel of the world, compared to hundreds of writers gathered to listen. Only this time just out of jail.
Contrary to what some newspapers accounted for proliferating countries where electric shocks and pau de Arara , Heberto Padilla was not tortured or perhaps overly bothered in the dungeon - 'not too dark, "he said, where exactly 37 days spent in custody of State Security. According to the Cuban agency Prensa Latina wearing a blue shirt and dark pants, brandishing a cigar that did not turn and at best seemed overwhelmed by the heat. (...) Only at the end of its 100 minutes of exposure departed from his model to point to a number of writers present that he said were threatened by their own mistakes. Among them were his wife, the poet Belkis Cuza Malé, friends, Pablo Armando Fernández, César López and Manuel Diaz Martinez, who stood forth to accept criticism and make amendment purposes.
The unexpected outcome of 'Padilla case' violent imposed editorial touches on the chain which produced the Western press and left hanging over the Atlantic fifty radiograms where European literary celebrities were concerned the fate of the poet, in the footsteps of Jean-Paul Sartre and Julio Cortázar. Padilla personally thanked "the international fuss', but considered unfounded and poured over it a breath commiserate:" They are companions living other experiences and other worlds' that 'unknown to fund my life of recent years', that' have defended a man less important than the Revolution.
Padilla's explanations seemed unconvincing to those who follow Cuban developments far and try to explain by models taken from the Stalinist Soviet non oe the intellectual status of 'rebellious' in the Western world. The inevitable result of these comparisons is the perplexity that only dissipates reinserting the process of culture in the historical process of a country.
(...)
indiscreet friends. The dangerous poems lurking time Padilla in his second book, Out of the game , who won the 1968 award from the National Union of Artists and Writers of Cuba. Part of the book, entitled Birch iron, nothing was a veiled attack on the Soviet Union, its politics, its officers and their way of life. (...) The Cuban government obviously wanted to solve these problems through diplomatic channels rather than poetic, and Padilla's book award in an official competition was at least wrong in the situation.
That was the moment chosen by his friend Cabrera Infante, now in exile in London to publish a magazine of Buenos Aires a violent indictment of Fidel Castro and a "defense" of Padilla. Every time that Padilla recalled, in turn, had defended Cabrera, contrasting the virtues of his novel Three Trapped Tigers the defects found in another novel, Passion of Urbino , written by his former friend and Culture Officer Lisandro Otero. UNEAC decided to publish the book in Padilla, but accompanied by a 'critical introduction' where censored counterrevolutionary tendencies of the poet. A French publisher, Du Seuil, caught the fleeting opportunity on bestseller, and in record time translated and edited the book, accompanied by a band that asked, 'Can you be a poet in Cuba? ". The Paris-based Argentine novelist Julio Cortázar, tried to mediate as a conciliator in an article in the leftist weekly Le Nouvel Observateur , with unusual dishonesty, purged several paragraphs and changed the original title for one that looked like a provocation ' Padilla's defense. " This confluence of friendships
complicated the situation Padilla and the same time, gave him a renown disproportionate to the twenty facets corrido written sum total of his work, and two or three thousand actual readers of this work in a world that cares about some poets but not consumes too much poetry. Padilla now argues that both effects were sought by him. In any case you lost your job, serious thing in Cuba. A year later, he recovered after writing a first letter to Fidel Castro.
unexpected endings. The episode seemed over, even with its trail of bitterness, until the March 20 Security Cuban agents arrested Padilla. What had happened this time? Padilla's confession articulates some hitherto unexplained facts to lead to a plausible hypothesis. Last year appeared almost simultaneously in France two books on Cuba: one, the journalist Franco-KS Karol, Guerrillas in power entitled , another of agronomist René Dumont, who asked: "Cuba is a socialist? The two had been repeatedly in Cuba where they were full of honors and enjoyed the confidence of Fidel Castro that walked around the island. Both works are a devastating critique of the Cuban revolutionary society.
(...)
But when we had to find a person responsible for this trifle that infuses the texts and makes plausible Karol, Dumont, Enzensberger and other sensors, the threads came together in Heberto Padilla, the enfant terrible of the Revolution, as he called the foot of a U.S. photo journalist Lee Lockwood. With all of them now supports Padilla had "countless conversations 'in which' spoke insidiously of all aspects of the Revolution." Hence the prison after his lament.
In any case, the fate of the young poet Heberto Padilla in Cuba today seems less harsh than that of the young poet Javier Heraud, died with the guerrillas in Peru and the young poet (Otto René) Castillo, who died with guerrillas in Guatemala. "
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