The Courage of the Poet
Medina, Pablo
IRETURNED TO CUBA in January 1999 after an absence of thirty-eight years, accompanied by the ghosts of a past I had never lived and by my twenty-nine-year-old son, who was curious about the...
...Forgiveness, of the sort this poet writes about, is a necessary step on the road to reconciliation...
...Both were journalists and poets, professions that compel you to tell the truth, your truth, first and foremost...
...He was and he wasn't...
...At the airport, while waiting for the customs officials to approve our entry papers, we were approached by two men, one dressed in street clothes, the other in the beige uniform of the customs service...
...The last name on the list was Ratil Rivero's...
...They arise instead out of what the German poet Novalis called the sober and spontaneous encounter with the world...
...Without the words of the poets the Cuban spirit would have died long ago...
...The poets' words are present in the streets and houses of Havana, like the sun and the salt air, acting as antidotes to the repression every Cuban suffers daily...
...I still remember Heberto saying to me, "Of all these people the most impor36 n DISSENT / Spring 2006 tant is Rivero...
...My son was told to wait in a hall by the baggage claim area and I was led into a small gray room with a desk, a table, and two chairs...
...Bringing Raid Rivero's name with me to Cuba was tantamount to bringing a bomb, at least according to the men who were in that small room with me...
...And yet neither poet is by nature a political writer...
...Say hello to him for me when you see him...
...While the two men hurled questions at me, ranging from why I had returned to Cuba to when I had last appeared on television in the United States, they rummaged through my briefcase and pulled out a sheet of paper containing a translation into English of one of Heberto Padilla's poems...
...After three hours, I was finally let go, with the warning that it would be wise if I did not visit the people whose names were on the list...
...He was somber and severe and asked me many more questions...
...In a similar way Padilla had never left...
...He was an active supporter as well of the independent libraries movement...
...It is a great honor to meet Ratil Rivero and listen to his words, and it is a great pleasure to offer him now the greeting I brought with me to Havana in 1999...
...Rather it is a meditation on different states that one passes through on the way to adulthood...
...And so, those who are directly at fault For my furies, the determined craftsmen of my sorrows Are declared innocent once I finish this poem...
...In 1971 Padilla had been jailed and subsequently forced to make a public confession...
...By 1999 Rivero was considered a dangerous person in Cuba...
...Sorrow and Forgiveness") It takes courage to speak the truth where truth is considered a threat...
...Yesto que cosa es...
...I recited the poem, in Spanish, by heart...
...PABLO MEDINA is the author of ten books of poetry and prose, most recently The Cigar Roller, a novel, and Points of Balance/Pantos de apoyo, a bilingual collection of poems...
...Think about that...
...In Cuba, it means something altogether different, particularly if it bears the names of two poets, both of whom had stood up to the regime with their words and were considered enemies of the state...
...In a few years he would be charged with collaborating with the United States and sentenced to twenty years in prison...
...It is not that they sought out confrontation, but that confrontation was forced upon them...
...Even when Rivero is writing about his cell, it is not his outrage that comes through but his tenderness—"no one knows who you are/sweet, light and serene/prisoner of the air...
...you may ask...
...The man seemed pleased and turned the paper over...
...Then you must reject that demand and be ready to stand behind your words through harassment, repudiation, condemnation and imprisonment...
...The man behind the desk looked at the poem quizzically and asked, "Can you translate it into Spanish...
...Against intransigence, against mediocrity...
...The poem, titled "Exilios," is not one of Padilla's more political ones...
...They wrote facing intolerance...
...the man asked...
...There they proceeded to interrogate me...
...Such are the contradictions of alienation and exile...
...The recognition of my naiveté weighed on me heavily...
...I began writing in the city of New York, enjoying its freedoms, its abundance, its tolerance...
...Words as weapons...
...In the United States a piece of scrap paper is scrap paper...
...Rivero's poems speak of love, of children, of fear, of the sorrow of abandoning his country: Fatherland, you hurt me and it is like a kiss and a wound so sweet and deep so intolerable and tender the pain ("Patria") The refusal to adopt a polemical stance makes Rivero as Cuban a poet as there is: I lived in you and I live in you now controversial land our own miserable traitors denigrate from a microphone or a wicker rocking chair from infamy and its despicable forms from a calumny or behind a desk from death or arbitrariness...
...He teaches at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts...
...they wrote confronting tyranny with only their words as their weapons...
...They wrote out of conviction that the individual right to say and write what one knows and believes is sacrosanct...
...POLITICS ABROAD That is the risk of being a poet: that in speaking the truth you will one day be called to deny your poems...
...Patria") His love for his native land is as passionate and unadorned as José Marti's, Cuba's greatest poet, whose generous spirit Rivero adopts in his unrepentant call to put aside ideology, a game Cubans were never good at to begin with, and let the most human elements in us dictate our actions: love, brotherhood, forgiveness: Now I am determined to forgive everything In order to cleanse my tired heart, Open it only to love's fatigue...
...Neither Padilla nor Rivero had those luxuries...
...It takes greater courage to forgive those who oppress you...
...The man behind the desk made a phone call, and in minutes another man appeared in the room...
...It happens that I often use drafts of unfinished work as scrap paper when making notes to myself or jotting down someone's address or phone number...
...No one told me what to honor or criticize, when to applaud, when to keep silent...
...His independent journalism, published overseas, reported the tribulations of daily life in Cuba the regime wanted kept quiet...
...On the reverse was a list of names and addresses, many of which were given to me by Heberto and Lourdes Gil...
...His themes have no ideological foundation...
...It begins "Madre, todo ha cambiado ya...
...Wasn't Rivero in Cuba already...
...DISSENT / Spring 2006 n 37...
...No one told me what to write...
...IRETURNED TO CUBA in January 1999 after an absence of thirty-eight years, accompanied by the ghosts of a past I had never lived and by my twenty-nine-year-old son, who was curious about the place his father had spoken and written about obsessively...
Vol. 53 • April 2006 • No. 2
