Breaking Up with Castro
by Raymond Carr
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, July 18, 1991
a review of
Self-Portrait of the Other: A Memoir
by Heberto Padilla
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 247 pp., $19.95
In March 1980 the poet Heberto Padilla, after futilely asking permission to
leave Cuba for some ten years, was summoned by Fidel Castro who told him
that he could now go. "Intellectuals," he told Padilla, "are generally not
interested in the social aspect of a revolution." As early as 1961, at a
meeting with artists and writers, Castro defined the role of intellectuals:
everything was permissible within the revolution and nothing was permissible
against it.
In the early days of the revolution intellectuals such as Padilla were sent
abroad as missionaries to convert the European left to become enthusiastic
admirers of what was happening in Cuba. Sartre led the chorus of supporters
in Paris. But by the mid-1960s there were discordant voices and they found
an echo in Cuba itself among those who could no longer "swallow toads," as
the revolution veered off course and assumed many of the features of a
police state. As the Egyptian economist Raouf Kahlil, an early admirer of
Nasser, told me, there came a time in his country when one could no longer
say, "I admire the revolution, but...." In Cuba Fidel Castro’s brother,
Raul, could not tolerate "buts." Intellectuals, he said, must join the
cultural militia of socialist realism. If they refused they must be
humiliated into submission. He was convinced that the international travels
and contacts with communist intellectuals made them obnoxious because they
privately indulged in criticism of the revolution and damaged its reputation
abroad. On the other hand, when it was useful, they could conveniently be
cast as foreign agents in the pay of the CIA. State Security was the
instrument of what Padilla calls Raul Castro’s "iron-fisted policy."
All revolutions, as Tocqueville observed, provide a repeat performance of
some previous revolution. The Castro brothers were resurrecting Robespierre’s
preferred technique: the use of blanket accusations of treason to eliminate
enemies of the revolution, who would be denounced by neighborhood
committees. The Cuban variant on the Jacobin model was the attack on
homosexuals. Revolutionary puritanism, the cult of austerity cultivated by
the Sea-Green Incorruptible of 1792, became combined with a conviction that
sexual deviants must, by definition, be political dissidents. Even Sartre
was troubled about this. "A society without Jews such as Cuba," he remarked
to Padilla, "will end up inventing them. Perhaps the homosexuals are the
Jews of Cuba." [1]
The Padilla case was the cause celebre of Raul Castro’s campaign against
intellectuals. Padilla was a distinguished younger poet in a country where
poets abound, sanctified by the revolutionary tradition: Jose Marti, the
martyr-hero of the Cuban struggle for independence against Spain, was a
poet. However much his message has been distorted by Castro, he remains the
untouchable father of Castro’s own revolution. (Juan Marinello, the leading
communist intellectual whom Padilla once admired but whom he later dismissed
as a bombastic spokesman for leftist cliches, knew Marti’s speeches by
heart.) A common language gives Latin American poets an audience throughout
the continent: Neruda is read in Mexico, Octavio Paz in Buenos Aires. And
their horizon is not confined to Latin America.
Padilla lacks even a trace of intellectual insularity. Before the
revolution, while briefly living in New York, he translated St.-John Perse
and visited him in Washington. In his Self-Portrait he describes how in the
early 1960s he became a friend of Yevtushenko and other Russian poets when
he was sent to report for Prensa Latina from Moscow. He goes to Juan
Goytisolo’s parties in Paris; he talks at length with Sartre in Moscow. It
is in Europe, not in the Americas, that he hears "the noise of the world,"
and it is there that the ideological battles of the left were fought out
after the denunciation of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress. The central
question when he talks privately with Europeans is what, if anything, can be
rescued from the failure of utopian socialist hopes. He even rejects the
Cuban landscape as suitable for poetic treatment; he finds his inspiration
in Lapland and is moved by the French countryside glimpsed from a train
window on the way to visit Camus.
After several years in Europe and the Soviet Union as a correspondent,
Padilla returned to Cuba in 1963 only to start again on his travels again as
a director general of the Ministry of Foreign Commerce, a witness to Castro’s
habit of capriciously interfering with the regular bureaucracy by sending
his own "special missions" abroad. Back in Cuba in 1964 his troubles began.
First he identified himself as unreliable by defending the novelist Cabrera
Infante, who was on the verge of disgrace before becoming the most virulent
of Castro’s literary enemies. Then Padilla surreptitiously entered the
competition for and won a national poetry prize awarded by an international
jury for his collection of poetry with the irritatingly disengaged title
Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game). Predictably this minor victory made him
detestable to the military bureaucrats, but the communist literary
establishment also could not tolerate so independent a writer getting the
prize and international attention. He was ostracized and constantly
attacked. In fact, his criticism of the regime was usually oblique, ironic,
cautionary; but it was deeply skeptical of the kind of revolutionary
propaganda the literary bureaucrats were promoting. Fuera del Juego, for
example, included the short poem "The Old Bards Speak":
Don’t you forget it, poet.
Whatever the place and time
in which you make or suffer History,
there will always be a dangerous poem to ambush you.
--translated by Mark Strand
Padilla, moreover, made a dangerous friend in Jorge Edwards, the Chilean
ambassador under Allende, and bon vivant in a gray world, a Bohemian
dispenser of liquor to deprived Cuban intellectuals at the Chilean embassy.
In Edwards’s account of his stay in Cuba Padilla appears as a "desperate,
self-destructive being," presumably because he talked openly of being fed up
with the regime, or perhaps because he tried to send out of the country his
novel Heroes are Grazing in My Garden, a book published in Spain in 1981,
which he describes as "not a denunciation or an allegation, not even
testimony..." but "a text through which certain conflicts and certain beings
pass like shadows." He was arrested by state security in 1970, humiliated,
beaten up by jailers to the rhythms of his own poetry, confronted by tapes
of his conversations with Edwards, injected with hallucinatory drugs, and
was paid a gloating visit by Castro himself ("Today I have time to talk to
you, and I think you have the time, too....") This treatment, Padilla hints,
was not so much a crude revenge for his winning the poetry prize as an
attempt to show, as his interrogator put it,
We have to put an end to the problem of intellectuals in Cuba. Otherwise, we’ll
end up just like Czechoslovakia, where the intellectuals are
standard-bearers Fascism....
Padilla signed a "confession" to being a spy, which he recited in public at
a meeting of the Writers’ Union.
The whole affair was a gross blunder on the part of the authorities. The
brutality of the intelligence services, even if milder than that in Eastern
Europe, was matched by their stupidity in imagining that a Stalinist-style
confession would pacify international criticism of the plight of Cuban
intellectuals. The almost farcically exaggerated language of Padilla’s
confession was immediately recognized abroad as being forced and phony, as
he evidently expected. His interrogator, one of the minor bullies who
flourish in authoritarian regimes, harped on Padilla’s international
connections and said sarcastically, "there might be a gigantic international
reaction." There was. Sartre took the occasion of the confession finally to
denounce the regime. Most moving of all was a telephone call--monitored, of
course--from the Spanish communist poet Blas de Otero.
Jose Lezama Lima, the elderly Cuban poet so prestigious that he could not be
touched and who had been instrumental in awarding Padilla the poetry prize,
also stood by him. The social realists of the regime detested Lezama’s
baroque aesthetics--he followed the poets of seventeenth-century Spain, for
whom "the difficult is beautiful." (Lezama’s very obscurities offered state
security little opportunity to entrap him. An informer or wire tapper would
only be bewildered by his complex metaphors and arcane literary allusions.)
Like Virgilio Pi--era, a major Cuban poet who suffered from persecution as a
homosexual, Padilla became a non-person, his voice silenced. He was allowed
to eke out a living as a translator. His only desire was to leave Cuba. In
the end it was his international connections--his crime in the eyes of the
state security--that got him out. His friends, the New York Review editors
among them, enlisted powerful support.
Padilla’s problem was one that, sooner or later, faces virtually all
intellectuals caught up in a revolution. When do you resist the drift toward
tyranny--Padilla does not hesitate to call Castro a tyrant--of a revolution
that initially burst on an unjust society as a liberating force? For Burke,
the moment of truth during the French Revolution came early with the
creation of a unicameral chamber that was determined to cut France off from
its historic past in the name of the abstract principles of "sophisters,
economists, and calculators." For most others it came with Robespierre and
the Terror. When did the Cuban revolution take the wrong turn? Was the
tendency to dictatorship already latent in the televised treason trials of
1959, and did it become patent with Castro’s execution of his old comrades
in arms from the Sierra Maestra? Or with his cruel jailing of Huber Matos
soon afterward, when Matos expressed his dismay at increasing communist
influence on the revolution? Or when another old comrade of Castro’s, Major
Plinio Prieto, was shot to death on the standard charge of being a CIA
agent? Or was it Raul Castro’s "militarization of culture" on the Chinese
model that made the air of Cuba foul and unbreathable?
Padilla writes that when he went on missions abroad in the 1960s he found
the embassies full of "brawling cats"--brawling in part over the growing
failures of communism and the revolution back home. He chose to live in
Moscow, "convinced at the time that in this far-off land I would be able to
glimpse the outlines of Cuba’s future." The glimpse afforded no comfort: he
observed Khrushchev’s outburst against decadent art and then heard it
defended by the Party intellectuals in Paris. He was told how Shostakovich’s
Thirteenth Symphony, with a text by Yevtushenko, was banned at the last
moment by the Stalinist apparat that survived the Twentieth Congress.
Yevtushenko claimed that, appearances to the contrary, after the Twentieth
Congress the Party would continue on to its logical, democratic conclusion.
"I know that one day it will do it. We must not be pessimists." But the
Cuban leaders, Padilla told him, were not interested in the truth about
Stalin. Fidel had already legitimized the "Stalinist authoritarian style on
the pretext that the enemy was only ninety miles away." Padilla had become a
pessimist.
Already in 1959 Camus told Padilla that he was worried about certain signals
coming from the island. "I only wish," Padilla writes "that these signals
which he perceived had been as visible and as alarming to me as they were to
him." The Argentinian novelist Julio Cortazar, later to defend Padilla
against persecution, warned of the shadow of the guillotine. But Padilla, to
his credit, acknowledges that he was still caught in an emotional and
political trap of his own devising: to criticize the revolution was to side
with the evils of Western colonialism.
This was the same trap that ensnared Alejo Carpentier, a novelist whom I
much admired. When I met him, we talked for hours about Proust--like me, he
used the more tedious passages of The Captive as a cure for insomnia. To see
this wonderfully intelligent man, who wrote a novel that describes the
Jacobin degeneration of a revolution, warmly embracing Castro two days later
was a painful experience. But Padilla’s last conversation with Carpentier,
by then a sick and dying man, gives a clue to his thinking.
"I’ve got no choice but to stick with the left," he said, "You are to blame
for everything that has happened to you.... We can’t get into a fight with
the left even though it is lame, one-eyed, and ugly."
When Garcia Marquez came to Havana Padilla appealed to him to put in a word
that might get him out of Cuba. "I should tell you," Garcia Marquez said,
"'that I am the first to criticize this revolution.'
"'But you haven’t been invited here [Padilla told him] because of your
criticism. We would all like to say what we feel, but you have been invited
because you grew closer to the Revolution just as the majority of writers
abroad stopped supporting it.'
"He kept moving his leg up and down. I saw he had on maroon boots of tanned
leather. They were very popular in Spain at that time.
"'You are right in thinking that I can help you,' he said slowly, 'but I won’t.
I think you should think it over. Your leaving Cuba this moment would harm
the Revolution.'"
Padilla finishes his book with such quietly bitter observations. He sticks
to the facts of his own Cuban experiences and says little about life in
exile or his sense of the future. Since he left, the opposition of brave
men, including some of the military heros of the Angolan War, appears to
have done little to shake Castro’s hold on the Cubans--though without free
elections, for which organized mass meetings are no substitute, his real
popularity must, at best, be a matter of guess work. He is still able to
hold on to power in the face of the shock waves from Eastern Europe. His
inflexibility is the despair of advisers who see the disasters of his
economic policies. With the USSR no longer willing to supply fuel and other
products on the same subsidized terms, he demands yet more of the austerity
that has reduced Cuba to a society of empty shops. Austerity based on
continually cutting consumption is not a formula for development. Just as
Cuba was the last bastion of Spanish imperialism it promises to be the last
bulwark of oldstyle communism.
What Castro seems to offer is a very limited version of glasnost without
perestroika. Some criticism of bureaucratic shortcomings may be allowed,
even encouraged, but only within the assumptions of one-party socialism. As
yet there is little sign of popular revolt gathering force in response to
the declining living standards; those who can stomach it no longer have to
take the risks of escaping from the island. Castro’s personality cult
apparently does not need the support of the banks of computer files of the
old East German Stasi. Primitive techniques for bugging apartments and a
host of informers and local "committees for the defense of the revolution"
supply state security with all the information it needs to clamp down on
dissent. Cuba is a face-to-face society where every town and village has
seen the Maximum Leader, and above all heard him--since 1959 Castro has made
on average one speech every four days. He insists on the threat of another
Bay of Pigs and a manipulated war mentality has, as Raul Castro planned,
turned Cuba into a militarized society.
Castro hopes, by attracting US tourists, to provide much-needed foreign
exchange. But the tourists bring with them the attractions of a consumer
society only ninety miles away. The young, as their protest songs reveal,
resent their exclusion from hotels and enjoyments reserved for tourists
precisely because they want a taste of consumerism; the sunglasses, the
jeans, the records that are unavailable at home. It is not that they reject
the doctrines of the revolution but that they resent the restricted style of
life that is the consequence of their application.
Indoctrination in Cuba plays on an intense nationalism that has made Cuba at
times an awkward ally of the Soviet Union. As a compensation for the denial
of the enjoyments of Western capitalist consumer societies, the defenders of
the regime constantly call attention to the neglect of the poor in other
countries of Latin America; and Castro accuses Western intellectuals of
overlooking the social achievements of his revolution which, by the
standards of most Latin American countries, are impressive among the poorer
agricultural workers. According to official Cuban statistics, since the
revolution infant mortality has dropped from sixty per thousand live births
to thirteen by the 1980s, and average life expectancy has risen from
fifty-seven to seventy-four years. Illiteracy has dropped from 24 percent to
2 percent. [2] What the newly literate are allowed to read is another
matter; and what urban Cubans are aware of is a decline in every aspect of
their life.
It is not surprising that a large proportion of the population has chosen to
leave and each week people continue to risk their lives to do so. Among all
the other uncertainties that will affect the country’s future, not the least
will be the fantasies of its exiles.
Notes
1. Fidel Castro seems to have been prejudiced against homosexuals for many
years. In 1954 Batista's minister of the interior accused Castro's wife of
being in the pay of the ministry. Castro's reply was that "Only an
effeminate, sunk in the last rung of sexual degradation, could stoop to such
a step." This prejudice may have been intensified by the macho image Castro
fostered in the guerrilla struggle of the Sierra Maestra.
2. A skeptical view of such claims can be found in Nick Eberstadt, The
Poverty of Communism, Chapter 9 (Transaction Publishers, 1988). He argues
that, in view of the relatively high literacy rates and low infant mortality
rates in 1959, revolutionary Cuba "has not fared better than most other
affluent Caribbean and Latin American societies."
