The Soul of a Poet: Raúl Rivero
Berman, Paul
THIS PAST NOVEMBER, the Cuban poet and journalist RAI Rivero made what I believe was his first public appearance in New York City. Rivero was for awhile a leading journalist of the Cuban...
...The imprisonment of these dissidents aroused a protest around the world, or, at least, in those parts of the world that still give a damn about the struggle of dissidents against dictatorships...
...And, of course, he was detained by the police many times...
...In 1991 he formally broke with the regime and founded an independent Cuban news agency...
...PAUL BERMAN is a writer in residence at New York University and the author of, most recently, Power and the Idealists: Or, the Passion of Joschka Fischer and its Aftermath...
...Vaclay Havel in the Czech Republic protested, together with a number of other people from the old anticommunist dissident movement in the East Bloc...
...Jose Maria Aznar, the prime minister of Spain, took a hard line in favor of the Cuban dissidents, and when Aznar was succeeded in office by Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the new prime minister took a soft line...
...He taped some of these reports and distributed the tapes in Cuba—a tape-cassette samizdat, to use the old Soviet word for underground literature...
...The protests, the hard line, the soft line, all of them together, evidently influenced the Cuban regime...
...So Rivero moved into dissident opposition...
...The betrayal of a revolution...
...DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 33...
...The Cuban Cultural Center of New York and a few friends put together a meeting to welcome him, presided over by the television journalist Rafael PiRoma.n...
...Pablo Medina presented an essay...
...And yet, in the case of Cuba, the betrayal of the revolution turns out to be a story that, even now, remains invisible to vast numbers of people around the world...
...And he departed Cuba for an exile's life in democratic Spain...
...He wrote reports of what was actually happening and sent them abroad for publication...
...Rivero was for awhile a leading journalist of the Cuban state—the Moscow correspondent during the 1970s for Castro's press agency, Prensa Latina...
...He wrote poems...
...A number of people spoke—including Ana Dopico and Ada Ferrer of New York University, the champion of liberty Nat Hentoff, and the literary scholar Lourdes Gil...
...He is someone who wanted to believe in the promise of the Cuban revolution—wanted to believe in what he has called "the dreams of human redemption sung by the bearded victors of 1959...
...An old story, you say...
...And, when that day occurs, the poetry and journalism of Ratil Rivero will turn out to be central elements of the living literature of the unique and magnificent culture that is Cuba's—a culture that has been suppressed for many decades but is bound to flourish anew, in an age of freedom...
...In November 2004, the dictatorship released Rivero from prison, even while continuing to hold a large number of other dissidents...
...But he came to recognize that, in Cuba, the dreams of human redemption had ended up sacrificed to the monomania of a dictator...
...I hope that the readers of Dissent will understand, as they examine Rivero's poems and Medina's essay, that someday Cuba will be a free and democratic republic...
...Here are those translations, followed by Medina's essay...
...His recordings were biting and ironic...
...My own role was to read a number of Rivero's poems, which I have translated from the Spanish...
...His visit to New York aroused a genuine excitement...
...Yes, an old story...
...In the spring of 2003, Rivero was officially charged with "undermining the independence or territorial integrity of the state" and condemned to twenty years in prison—he and a large number of other dissidents in Cuba...
Vol. 53 • April 2006 • No. 2
