‘What They Least Kill Is Writers’ : The silencing of Cuba’s artistic and literary community under Castro : MEA CUBA, <i> By Guillermo Cabrera Infante</i> . <i> Translated from Spanish by Kenneth Hall with the author (Farrar, Straus, Giroux: $23; 503 pp.)</i>

For the first two years after Fidel Castro’s triumphant entry into Havana, Cuba’s artistic and literary life bubbled vigorously. It had not really been stagnant under Fulgencio Batista, who took no interest in what artists did unless they engaged in political resistance; nevertheless, the dictator’s overthrow released an exuberant energy.

It was an energy of the left, of course, since that was where most writers, painters, musicians and film-makers placed themselves anyway. It was also libertarian, ungovernable and unrestrained. Its voice was found most particularly in “Lunes de Revolucion,” the weekly literary supplement of the newspaper Revolucion, whose director, Carlos Franqui, embodied the violent idealism of the revolution’s first years.

In its brief life, “Lunes” was a meteor, and by far the most vital literary publication in Latin America. Its editor, a young novelist, critic and hopeless Hollywood buff, thought of himself as an “anarcho-Surrealist.” That amounts to cultural gourmandizing; the equivalent to sitting through a triple feature with chocolate peanuts as well as popcorn and butter.

It took less than two years for the chill of repression to be felt in other aspects of the Cuban revolution; for Castro’s totalitarian elan to devour his revolutionary elan--allying itself at first with the Communists and then devouring many of them as well. Guillermo Cabrera Infante writes in “Mea Cuba” of the months in early 1961 when the freeze reached the artists and closed down his “Lunes.”

His brother and a collaborator had made a short feature, “PM,” that toured the smoky bars and dives of Havana in the best bittersweet film-noir manner. The authorities banned it as decadent. “Lunes,” with the support of dozens of artists and writers, was about to publish an indignant protest when the government organized a three-day meeting to forestall it. President Osvaldo Dorticos urged the intellectuals to speak their minds without fear; Castro made a speech assuring them that “within the Revolution all things are possible.”

Virgilio Pinero, a timid, shrunken, flamboyantly gay writer, made his way hesitantly to the microphone. “I only want to say that I’m very frightened. I don’t know why I’m so frightened but that is all I have to say.”

As it turned out, there was not much more to say. “Lunes” was shut down, ostensibly for a shortage of newsprint; Revolucion lasted only a little longer. Franqui went to live in Paris, Cabrera Infante was given a diplomatic job in Brussels, and a number of “Lunes” writers found brief employment in the government cultural agency.

It was gradual but relentless removal from the intellectual and artistic life of the country. Except for homosexuals--among whom were a number of the most talented Cuban artists--there were few harsh individual measures (the jailing of the poet Heberto Padilla was a notable exception). The punishment was exile or silence.

“Mea Cuba” gives the silence a clamorous voice: eloquent and powerful at times, and at others wordy, repetitive, strident and eventually hoarse. It is steadily obsessed with the wreckage of Cuba’s material, moral and cultural values by one man’s will-to-power; whose various manifestations the author refers to with such epithets as “Castro Convertible” and “Castroenterology.”

Cabrera Infante, who has lived in London since breaking with Castro and publishing his satirical novel “Three Trapped Tigers” (a favorable review was one of the things that landed Padilla in jail), is addicted to puns and word games. It energizes him, perhaps, but it depletes the reader.

There are more serious weaknesses in “Mea Cuba.” It is a collection of some 60 articles written over a quarter-century and printed in a number of different periodicals. Many of them borrow or repeat from each other; no effort has been made to edit the repetitions out. Furthermore the translation, in which the author took a hand, is clumsy; at times ludicrously so.

It is a pity because it makes Cabrera Infante’s strengths less accessible. Through the personal recollections, portraits, polemics and accounts of the recent and more remote past, he has put together something of a history of the Cuban imagination and character.

There is an exploration of Cuban suicide, for example. Castro’s hopeless attack on the Moncada fortress early in his revolutionary career was virtually a kamikaze action. The author mentions the suicide of an opposition politician as climax to a radio speech (he didn’t realize that the station had already switched to a commercial), and of a mayor unable to fulfill a campaign promise. He writes of the suicides of Haydee Santamaria, one of Castro’s closest associates, and of Dorticos, whom Castro had deposed. Could 35 years of putting up with Revolutionary decline amount to a national suicidal instinct? Far-fetched, perhaps, but suggestive.

His polemics range from petty--his anger at the pro-Castro Gabriel Garcia Marquez is such that he calls him an inferior writer--to splendid. Even better are some of his portraits.

He gives evocative accounts of Lezama Lima, the defiantly decadent writer whom the government all but starved, of Pinero and his timid valor, of Nicolas Guillen, proud of his official favor until one day Castro, perhaps in passing, called him lazy. “He’s worse than Stalin,” the shocked Guillen complained to the author, who was still in Cuba at the time.

The most memorable portrait is of Gustavo Arcos, the man who would not bend. He fought with Castro during the Moncada assault, joined him in Mexico to prepare the Sierra Maestra campaign; today, after many years in prison he is one of the country’s much-persecuted civil rights leaders.

It is an extraordinary story of a man who lost favor with Castro because of his insistence on speaking his mind. Named ambassador to Belgium, to get him out of the country, he was being considered for the Rome embassy when he was arrested. Released, he tried to leave Cuba to see his desperately ill son in Miami. He was sentenced to 14 years more; at the same time, Castro brought his family back, lodged them in a luxury hotel and got the finest available medical care for the son. At one point he offered Arcos his freedom if would promise not to try to leave. Arcos refused and served many years longer.

In exile, Cabrera Infante worked hard but in vain to enlist literary and intellectual figures in a fight for Arcos. The trouble was that he wasn’t a writer, an artist or an intellectual. And Cabrera Infante concludes brilliantly with an account of refusing an invitation to a London human rights conference entitled, with would-be mordancy: “They Kill Writers, Don’t They?”

“I told them that the title was not true. I told them that in totalitarian countries like Cuba, the last thing they kill is writers. They kill workers, peasants, leaders of the clandestine movement, Jehovah’s witnesses, whites and blacks. Everyone. But what they least kill is writers. Those shut up or get scared or their silence is bought with a house and a car and several trips to Europe. Or they leave the country as exiles. They don’t kill writers. They kill, precisely, men without imagination like Gustavo Arcos. They kill their heroes.”