BOOK REVIEW : Castro’s Long War Against Cuba’s Intellectuals

Self-Portrait of the Other by Heberto Padilla. Translated by Alexander Coleman. (Farrar Straus Giroux: $18.95; 212 pp.)

Heberto Padilla, a distinguished poet, was briefly jailed by Fidel Castro 20 years ago, released, and made to issue a statement of self-criticism for having damaged the Cuban Revolution by failing to understand it properly.

It was the greatest disaster in the long history of Castro’s ruthless, but curiously hesitant, and always convoluted war against the Cuban intellectuals. They had rallied to support him in 1959 in the belief that he was conducting a revolution that would be radical and leftist, but able to permit a kind of embattled freedom at the same time.

It was Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who remains a steady supporter of Castro to this day, who proclaimed the disaster. He did not know whether Padilla had damaged the Revolution, he said at the time. “But I do know that his ‘self-criticism’ is doing damage.” Indeed: It caused the final rejection of Castro by intellectual circles in Europe and the United States who had maintained, despite growing dismay, some public faith in the Cuban Revolution. Castro’s support of the invasion of Czechoslovakia was the last straw; the camel-back collapsed two years later with Padilla’s sad statement.

“Within the Revolution, all freedom; outside it, none,” Castro had told his intellectuals at the start of the ‘60s, nearly 10 years before Padilla’s arrest. They took him at his word. Padilla was one of the fiery and talented circle that put out the remarkable Monday literary supplement to “Revolucion,” the favored newspaper in the early white-hot years. Revolucion’s editor was Carlos Franqui; the editor of the supplement was the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante. Both of these, and Padilla, and many others are exiles today.

Newspaper and supplement both stood for a radical but free-spirited discourse, though sometimes the supplement staff gritted its teeth and devoted an issue to the 1960 cultural achievements of North Korea or China. Everyone understood you needed allies in the struggle against the United States.

The trouble with Castro’s definition was that he was the only one to decide what was “within” the Revolution. “Within” steadily shrank. “Revolucion” was shut down in favor of the subservient and unreadable “Granma.” Even so, the young fire-eaters were not harshly treated, at least at first.

They were sent abroad as cultural attaches or, in Padilla’s case, as a correspondent in Moscow. Later, he was briefly a traveling representative for the Ministry of Foreign Trade. He knew no foreign trade, he told Che Guevara, who helped him get the job. Never mind, Guevara replied; he himself was Minister of Heavy Industry and knew no industry. The important thing was to communicate.

Padilla, who had known Castro when the latter was a student leader in the fight against Batista, was kept in Cuba for 10 years after his “confession.” He worked as a translator and could publish nothing. The police had instructed him to report any of his friends who snubbed him after his self-criticism. The worst thing, he writes with a heartbreaking irony, is that nobody did.

International pressure finally got Castro to let him come to the United States in 1980. Garcia Marquez helped, though not until he had lectured Padilla loftily on his “duty” to stay in Cuba. The writer Alejo Carpentier, aged and much protected, gave him a similar lecture over beer. To leave would be to encourage the right. “We can’t get into a fight with the left, even though it is lame, one-eyed and ugly,” Carpentier cautioned.

“I was ready to hit him on the head with a beer bottle,” Padilla writes.

It has taken him nearly 10 years to publish this memoir. It is a tormented piece of writing; it wanders, it limps, it afflicts itself from time to time with poetic effects that seem to beg the question. A clumsy translation doesn’t help.

Padilla is a poet, not a political fighter. In some profound way, he has not quite overcome the question that held so many for so long in intellectual bondage. Many of those who shared Castro’s vision have struggled to overcome its hold upon them. Understandably, it is not easy. It is not alluring to a Latin American patriot to go for the alternative of American soldiers playing rock music outside the Vatican Nunciature in Panama in order to spook Manuel Noriega.

Some have turned cynical. Padilla has not; it makes his book murkier to read, but in a way, it makes it more worthwhile.

He is, in any case, a man who lives by words. He may have effectively damaged Castro by his “confession.” But he has damaged himself too; and although he doesn’t explicitly say so, the shattered, sometimes hallucinatory style of his memoir seems to confirm it.

In its account of how Castro’s charm, magnetism and mania for personal power corrupted the Revolution’s promise, Padilla’s book lacks the force and detail of other memoirs, notably those of Carlos Franqui. The reader needs patience with some of the byways.

Padilla does not really analyze what made him “confess.” His physical mistreatment was relatively minor; he was not incarcerated for more than six weeks or so, though, of course, he might well have been sent back to jail. He writes about it all almost dreamily; as one might recollect a nervous breakdown.

And yet we sense the main thing. The central part of the book is the limbo-like nightmare of those half dozen years when Padilla and his fellow intellectuals had been displaced but were still being given gilded missions abroad.

It was a long ordeal of hearing the news from Cuba, of trying to explain it, of trying to avoid judgment, but of being inexorably backed into it. It is a profound demoralization; one, for example, that caused two of Padilla’s friends--the military attache in Moscow and the Minister of Foreign Trade--to kill themselves.

Some of Padilla’s portraits are hazy; several are unforgettable. There is a splendid recollection of Fernando Lezama Lima, the grossly fat, decadent, homosexual and utterly courageous poet who was too prominent internationally to be bullied. The police kept trying; he would deflect them with sheer Baroque prolixity. “Prince of resistance and honor,” Padilla--who dislikes his poetry--calls him.

And there are the portraits of Castro. He visited Padilla as a prisoner, remarking offhandedly that “today I have time to talk to you and I think you have time too.” They had another long talk just before Padilla was allowed to leave. Castro used a melancholy charm, which soon turned rotten. He lamented that Cuba’s intellectuals never understood the Revolution. He treated Padilla like an old comrade in arms. Each of them, he implied, was serving History in his own way: Fidel, as dictator; Padilla, as prisoner.

It is a ghastly caricature of Hegelian dialectic. It is also part of Castro’s peculiar need to win over those he talks to. He wants to be admired, even by his victims. If he could arrange it, perhaps, he would have the dead say hello.