Cuba: The Dictator and the Poet
Howe, Irving
The case of Herberto Padilla is of great importance, first as a reflection of the increasing Stalinization of the Castro regime, and second as a test of the responses that are elicited among...
...11 LET US STOP for a moment's reflection...
...For the 60 intellectuals tell us proudly that from the first they were defenders of the Castro regime and "considered it exemplary in its respect for the human being...
...The central lesson of politics in our century has been that any regime that suppresses democratic liberties has no right, political or moral, to the designation of "socialism"—and still more, that such a regime, through its arbitrariness, its manipulation of workers and intellectuals, its inherent brutality, can only end as the very opposite of socialism...
...During the past decade we were told that, true as this might be in respect to Stalinism in Russia, it was "mechanical" and "unimaginative" to say the same thing about Cuba...
...Yet it would be too easy and far from honest to let the matter go at that...
...Is the skin of Matos any the less precious than that of Padilla...
...Very well...
...At the Writers' Union meeting] he called COMMENTS AND OPINIONS on others writers—among them his wife BelkisCuza Male, Pablo Armando Fernandez, Cesar Lopez, Manuel Dias Martinez—to overcometheir weaknesses which "could lead them to political and moral degradation," and Le Monde reports that at the meeting each of thesewriters arose and confessed his faults...
...It therefore comes with special force that Yglesias should now write: In his statement of self-criticism last month, Padilla adopted—with what anguish one can well imagine—the image that his adversaries offered: he described himself as an Iago, coun ter-revolutionary, subtle, insidious, malignant, the source for all the criticism of Cuba that foreign writers like K. S. Karol and Rene Du mont have published...
...On April 27, in a ceremony of public humiliation, he read this statement before a meeting of the Cuban Writers' Union...
...Karol is a writer who has defended Castroism and Maoism...
...The case of Herberto Padilla is of great importance, first as a reflection of the increasing Stalinization of the Castro regime, and second as a test of the responses that are elicited among what, I suppose, must be called the "Left" intellectuals...
...Does the Cuban experience prove us to be wrong...
...And that is where sharp criticism must be directed against the signers of the letter criticizing the Castro regime...
...but how many times must we repeat the experiences of a Communist oneparty dictatorship, how many times must we relive Stalin and Zhdanov and all their imitators on all the continents before people like Sartre, Sontag, and Moravia will come to grips with this crucial reality...
...recall the most sordid moments of the era of Stalin ism, with its prefabricated verdicts and its witch hunts...
...Reading this account, anyone endowed with historical memory will be forced to make a comparison with the circumstances under which an endless array of Russian writers, ready enough to bow to the Stalin dictatorship but still hoping to salvage a fraction of their integrity, were brought to submission...
...But Yglesias gives us a good enough taste of it: In his statement, Padilla began by reproachinghimself for his literary vanity and political andintellectual fatuity and went on to confess thathe had defamed every project of the revolution...
...The statement, as printed in the New York Times, continues: The contents of this confession, with its absurd accusations and delirious assertions...
...Years, they now tell us, that they still consider as a "model in the realm of socialism...
...They are right, of course, in protesting the Stalinist brutality with which Herberto Padilla was treated, but having done so, they also have an obligation to reconsider their belief that the one-party dictatorship which made this brutality possible merits description as "a model in the realm of socialism...
...No one with even a minimal attachment to the values of liberty will fail to be pleased by the vigor of the statement issued by the 60 intellectuals, especially in their entirely justified comparison between the methods used by the Castro regime to break Padilla and the methods used earlier by Stalinism...
...It turned out, meanwhile, that on April 25 Padilla had been released, after having written or at least signed a statement of "self-criticism" while in jail...
...Portions of this book were translated in DISSENT, September-October 1970...
...it is a significant comment on the American intellectual climate that this important book has not been published here...
...They fail to raise the question of the authoritarian nature of the regime itself...
...We would want the Cuban revolution to re turn to what made us consider it as a model in the realm of socialism...
...Have they managed not to hear about Huber Matos, the former close friend of Castro and fellow-guerrilla in the revolution, who now languishes in jail because he dared to criticize the policies of the Maximum Leader...
...Exemplary, no less...
...We need to go a step further...
...Yglesias continues by quoting from Le Monde a report that Castro boasted that he "had personally ordered the arrest of Padilla" and had added—I now quote Yglesias—"that other Cuban intellectuals could suffer the same fate...
...Yglesias then provides a detailed account of the circumstances that led to Padilla's disgrace...
...Dumont is a French agronomist who for some time worked as an adviser to the Cuban government and who later published a book, Cuba: Est-Il Socialiste?, in which he criticized the bureaucratic deformations of the regime...
...In response to this ghastliness, there appeared on May 21 a statement signed by 60 intellectuals, among them Jean Paul Sartre, Susan Sontag, and Alberto Moravia, expressing their "shame and anger" over the treatment of Padilla...
...We take these details from an article in the June 3 issue of the New York Review written by Jose Yglesias, a writer who has composed a good many celebrations of the Castro regime...
...their letter was reprinted in the May 6 issue of the New York Review of Books...
...The signers of the Sartre-SontagMoravia statement, like Yglesias in the New York Review, and by implication, the New York Review itself—all confine themselves to a criticism of Castroism from within its own premises...
...And have the 60 intellectuals managed not to read the profoundly moving appeal that was released last year from the inmates of Castro's prisons (reprinted in DISSENT, May–June 1970...
...A group of European and Latin-American intellectuals, who had been supporters of the Cuban revolution, issued a letter expressing their dismay at this act...
...Where have these people been the last few years...
...Nor is this merely one of those "ideological nuances" or hair-splitting quarrels that keeps recurring in intellectual life...
...How, one must ask oneself, after the experiences of the last decades is it possible for people who have gained distinction through the use of their minds to speak of any one-party dictatorship as "a model in the realm of socialism...
...In a word, might they not add to their indignation some reflection on their failures to be publicly indignant during all these years that the Cuban regime has suppressed dissident voices...
...The entire text of Padilla's "confession"— which his old friend, the Cuban novelist Joan Arcocha, declares in Le Monde "could only have been extracted under torture"—is not yet available...
...At a gathering of university students Fidel indirectly replied to the intellectuals' letter with the statement that Cubans would see now who are really the friends of Cuba, accusing those who have interested themselves in Padilla's case of imposing conditions on their friendship...
...It is the central question, the overwhelming question, of modern politics...
...According to Yglesias, it is probable that Padilla never even met Dumont: in any case, the bulk of Dumont's criticism had to do with Cuban agricultural policy, a matter on which he needed no one's advice, let alone that of a poet...
...Perhaps they felt that this was not an appropriate occasion...
...For readers unfamiliar with this case, let me present a brief factual summary: On March 20, 1971, Herberto Padilla, a prominent Cuban poet and supporter of the Castro regime, was arrested on unspecified charges and imprisoned in Havana...
...How far-fetched—yet, to those who have lived through the last few decades, how sickeningly familiar—all this is...
...For our part, however, we have stubbornly persisted in the conviction that without democracy, socialism is inconceivable...
Vol. 18 • August 1971 • No. 4
