Many critics, taking Padilla’s “confession” at face value, called him a coward who had betrayed his wife and friends; others recognized the text as purest satire. Left-wing intellectuals divided into one large group (including Mario Vargas Llosa from Peru and Jorge Edwards from Chile) who broke with Castro over the affair, and a smaller group (including Gabriel García Márquez) who forgave his behavior as a regrettable slip. Padilla himself – who, during a similar period of disgrace ten years earlier, had been sent to Moscow to stand next to Aníbal Escalante and translate for him at press conferences – now had to earn his keep in Havana translating literature from English. He was not able to publish his own work, but ten years later, in 1981, he was allowed to go to the United States after Gabriel García Márquez intervened on his behalf. He died in December 2000 in Alabama, at the age of 68, having found a means of livelihood at the university there.
At the First National Congress of Education and Culture in April 1971, held in Havana under the shadow of the Padilla affair, Castro angrily attacked his West European critics for their open letter in Le Monde and described them as “despicable agents of cultural imperialism.” “So they are at war with us,” he mocked. “Magnificent! Our doors remain closed to them – indefinitely.”58 The declaration at the end of the congress was accordingly an “ideological monstrosity” (Tad Szulc). Cuba’s cultural development had to be geared to the masses, it said, “contrary to the tendencies of the elite.… Socialism creates objective and subjective conditions that render feasible a true creative freedom while rejecting as inadmissible those tendencies that are based on a criterion of libertinage and aimed at concealing the counterrevolutionary poison of works that conspire against revolutionary ideology.” In future, “political and ideological reliability should be taken into account” in appointments at universities, the media and cultural institutions. No more invitations should be made to foreign authors or intellectuals “whose work and ideology are at odds with the interests of the revolution;” and “cultural channels may not serve for the proliferation of false intellectuals who plan to convert snobbism, extravagance, homosexuality and other social aberrations into expressions of revolutionary art.”59
“It seems incomprehensible,” Szulc comments, “that Fidel Castro could intellectually tolerate such insults against his beloved revolution on the part of his own ideologues.”60 What comes through here is the Soviet hand in reorienting the Cuban leadership in the sixties and early seventies. “For the Soviet advisers, the freedoms and privileges of intellectuals (so far the favorite children of Castroism) had long been a thorn in the side of the Caribbean revolution,” wrote Walter Haubrich, one of the best analysts of Latin American politics and culture, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
In the army and police, as well as among Cuba’s old Communists who were now gaining influence, criticism grew louder of the privileged living conditions of artists, film people, scientists and writers. The years after the Padilla affair thus became one of the darkest periods for Cuban culture. A Stalinist bureaucrat by the name of Pablón was appointed culture minister. Ruthless operators in the Party and army found a new scapegoat for the mistakes of the revolution and the declining popular support: they were the fault of homosexuals among the artists and intellectuals.61
Only in the mid-seventies was the grip on cultural life slightly relaxed.
In the late sixties and early seventies, however, a veritable laager mentality prevailed against critics in Havana’s political scene. Actually Castro did not need it. Scarcely any politician in the twentieth century, anywhere in the world, had won such a degree of support among intellectuals and artists as that which the revolutionary Fidel Castro enjoyed. Even his critics accorded him open or secret respect. He embodied the dreams of postwar intellectuals and made them a reality, and in death Che Guevara still lent them an air of mystique.
The judgment of intellectuals has always been important for Castro, whose sure feel for the media has led him to make use of them time and time again. At first there was hardly a writer who remained impervious to his fascination and charisma: Cubans such as Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Norberto Fuentes, Armando Valladeres, José Lezama Lima, Jesús Díaz, Pablo Armando Fernández, Alejo Carpentier, Antón Arrufat, Heberto Padilla; other Latin Americans such as Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Julio Cortázar, Pablo Neruda, and Jorge Edwards, as well as countless writers from Western Europe such as Hans Magnus Enzensberger in Germany, expressed their sympathy with him. The affection soon cooled, however, with the growing “Sovietization” of cultural policy (which tolerated only what served the ruling doctrine), the censorship and complete desolation of the media, and the persecution of dissidents, even those who saw themselves as critical supporters. Fidel Castro, still less his brother Raúl or Che Guevara (who counted as the most dogmatic and ideologically rigorous of all), had no idea how to handle the kind of independent mind who was quite capable of making fun of himself as well as others. Many artists who lived in the United States or Europe during the Batista years – for example, the writer Alejo Carpentier or the painter (and friend of Picasso’s) Wilfredo Lam, whose Afro-Cuban surrealism hangs in the world’s great galleries – lived for a short time as guests on the island before returning disappointed into “exile.” The transfer of prominent artists and intellectuals to the diplomatic service, and their assignment to attractive posts as cultural attachés (like Carpentier in Paris) or even ambassadors, was a method for governments to save face that was certainly not invented by Castro.
After the victory of the revolution, Castro and his inner circle believed at first that intellectuals would let themselves be socialized and remodeled as easily as the production conditions in agriculture and industry. This unbalanced attitude to freedom of speech and artistic expression soon made itself felt. On the one hand, Castro promoted intellectual freedoms and scope for creation; the founding of the Casa de las Americas in 1960, under Haydée Santamaría, a comrade since the Moncada days, made possible a broad publication program. But then in 1961, in the wake of the Bay of Pigs operation, he allowed the Communist hardliners of the PSP to act on their fear of uncontrollable ideas, intellectual conflict and subversive humor by officially encouraging a sentence of death on the cultural magazine Lunes.
Lunes was the Monday supplement of Franqui’s newspaper Revolución, the voice of the 26th of July Movement, which for a short while blossomed into one of the most interesting cultural magazines in Latin America, with a print run of around 250,000 copies. The chief editor was the respected writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante (author of Three Trapped Tigers, among others), and he had working with him a number of young poets such as Antón Arrufat, Pablo Armando Fernández, Heberto Padilla, and José Álvarez Barragano. Franqui recalled:
Our thesis was that we had to break down the barriers that separated elite culture from mass culture. We wanted to bring the highest quality of culture to hundreds of thousands of readers.… We published huge editions with pictures and texts by Marx, Borges, Sartre, Neruda, Faulkner, Lezama Lima, Martí, Breton, Picasso, Miró, Virginia Woolf, Trotsky, Bernanos and Brecht.… Even Lunes’s typography was a scandal for left- and right-wing prudes.62
In June 1961, immediately after the victory at Playa Girón, when “the greatest number of writers and artists felt united with the revolution,”63 heated debates took place on three successive Fridays concerning the future role of artists and intellectuals in the revolutionary process. The debates served as a preparation for the first “Congress of Writers and Artists” in August 1961, at which the country’s intellectuals were to be brought politically under a single line and grouped for the future into a National Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC), under the chairmanship of Castro’s favorite Cuban author, Nicolás Guillán.
The Friday meetings eventually degenerated into a grand inquisitorial judgment on the freedom of opinion and intellectual expression practised in Lunes, and of the criticisms it had published of
the crude seizure of power by pro-Moscow Communists. Virtually every Cuban artist of note took part in the proceedings. Seated opposite them were Castro, in the presiding chair, President Osvaldo Dorticós, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, Education Minister Armando Hart, and Castro’s friend from university days, Alfredo Guevara, director of the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). Castro opened the first session with the words: “Whoever is most afraid should speak first.” The one who came forward was Virgilio Piñera, author of tales of fantasy. “Doctor Castro,” he said, “have you ever asked yourself why any writer should be afraid of the Revolution? And since it seems as if I’m the one who is most afraid, let me ask why the Revolution is so afraid of writers.”64
Castro’s answer to the question of what would be culturally permissible in Cuba was tantamount to a death sentence on Lunes. In his closing “words to intellectuals,” he distinguished three groups: those who completely identify with the revolution; sympathizers who associate themselves with the revolution but do not actively contribute to it; and those with whom nothing can be done: the counter-revolutionaries. His call to integrate the sympathizers seemed at first like an outstretched hand:
The Revolution must find a way to these intellectuals and writers. The Revolution must… act in such a way that those sections of artists and intellectuals whose attitude was not from the beginning revolutionary can find a place in the Revolution where they can work and develop, and where their creative spirit – even if they are not revolutionary writers and artists – should have the chance and the freedom to express itself within the Revolution.
But then he drew the boundaries of artistic freedom: “This means: in the Revolution everything, against the Revolution nothing. And there should not be a special law for artists and writers. It is the main principle for all citizens. It is a fundamental principle of our Revolution.”65 The limits of tolerance were clearly defined:
Does this mean, for example, that we will tell people what they must write? No. Everyone should write what they want, and if what they write is no good then that’s their hard luck. We don’t tell anyone what to write about.… But we will always judge their literary work through the prism of the Revolution. That is … a right of the revolutionary government that must be respected, just like the right of every individual to write what they want.66
In practice, this meant that anything which did not look nice “through the prism of the Revolution” would not be published. Since paper was in short supply, moreover, it was not difficult to hand back awkward work to its author. Norberto Fuentes found that out, as did Antón Arrufat, Pablo Armando Fernández, and others.
It was not long before the paper shortage put an end to Lunes, a cultural magazine that was deemed to stand outside the revolution. (Its parent paper, Revolución, kept going for four more years, but its turn would come too.) Defamed as a house journal for intellectuals “mainly opposed to the national cultural heritage,”67 Lunes was alleged to feature “decadent outlooks” and to be under the influence of the 26th of July Movement as well as the United States and France. Finally, in a surprise coup in October 1965, shortly after the founding congress of the Communist Party of Cuba, Castro engineered its merger with the old PSP mouthpiece Hoy (Today) into a new central organ of the PCC Central Committee, Granma (“Grandmother”), named after the motorlaunch in which Castro landed in December 1956 before heading into the Sierra Maestra. The incident was real-life political satire. Castro gave advance notice of its journalistic standards when he said in all seriousness during a trip to the Soviet Union that the Communist Party daily, Pravda (meaning “Truth”), was the best newspaper in the world. So it was that Granma became a kind of official gazette of the Cuban Revolution, as journalistically attractive throughout its decades of existence as the telephone list of an army barracks.
All this throws considerable light on the relationship of forces in Cuba during the period shortly after the victory of the revolution, if one considers the ruthlessness with which the PSP’s pro-Moscow ideologues and their spiritual comrades among Eastern-bloc diplomats systematically denounced the 26th of July Movement, describing it, for example, as a gathering-place for all manner of “partisans, terrorists, anarchists and adventurers”68 – the kind of people with whom an upright Marxist-Leninist would have nothing to do. In so dismissing the true victors of the selfsacrificing struggle against Batista as a “petty-bourgeois radical movement” that had emerged in 1955 from the Ortodoxos party (a “fake opposition” run by “capitulators”), they grossly falsified the historical truth and covered up their own pitiful role during the revolution.
The East European diplomatic version of history, influenced by the PSP, suppressed the fact that the 26th of July Movement was only formally founded after Castro’s release from prison in 1955, and that its real origins went back to his attack on the Moncada Barracks on July 26, 1953. Now, the very people who – as Castro once mockingly pointed out – “hid under their beds” during the revolution were trying to deny any historical credit to Cuba’s only really successful revolutionary movement since the days of José Martí. The chief editor of Revolución, Carlos Franqui, a loyal and fearless if also critical comrade of Castro’s since the fifties, was shamelessly portrayed as a man grouping around him “elements who do not stand on the ground of Marxism-Leninism and wish to distort the emerging revolutionary development.” In 1968 Franqui, feeling thoroughly disillusioned, left for exile in Italy; he was now a persona non grata in Cuba, to such a point that, in line with an old Moscow practice, he was brushed out of an official photograph showing him alongside Castro. And yet, the PSP did not manage entirely to delete the name of the 26th of July Movement from the historical record. Castro himself ensured that that would not happen, by making that day the main national holiday to commemorate the beginning of his revolution – and not the equally important January 1, 1959, the day of his eventual victory.
The Writers’ Union and the Cultural Congresses also eventually put in some practice in cultural allegiance to Moscow. Writers repeatedly landed in prison for acts of insubordination, went unpublished, or were driven out of the country when the State Book Institute declined their work. Especially cynical was the ending of copyright in April 1967 – a socialization of intellectual property which meant that all works now belonged to the nation. Writers and artists received a salary and accommodation from the state; they were no longer supposed to be dependent upon the laws of the market, but only on the Party bureaucrats who awarded a livelihood to “cultural producers.”
Alexander Dubcek’s “Prague Spring” initially aroused some hopes among Cuban artists. But, after Castro’s approval of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia, his brother Raúl – the “Green Olive” – opened fire with a series of articles denouncing “bourgeois” intellectuals and “counter-revolutionary” literature. The occasion for these was the annual prize awarded by the Writers’ and Artists’ Association (UNEAC) and the Casa de las Americas for the best literary works of the year. Despite the opposition of Castro’s favorite Nicolás Guillán and UNEAC officials loyal to the Party line, the jury (which included foreign writers such as Jorge Edwards) chose three authors who were then out of favor: Padilla, Antón Arrufat, and Norberto Fuentes. The Casa de las Americas was permitted to publish their texts, but only on condition that it added a UNEAC editorial note certifying that they were “ideologically in conflict with our Revolution.”
Sheldon B. Liss writes, in his study of Castro’s political and social thought:
Once the revolutionaries took power in Cuba, Fidel … sought to produce and nurture a new generation of intellectuals to analyse Cuba’s past and help guide its future. By the time he took over, Fidel had developed a bit of the moral and intellectual arrogance that causes disdain for others who do not have the benefit of the answers that Marxist analysis provides. He wanted to surround himself with advisers who shared his privileged insights.… Castro endeavored to create an intellectual cadre to become the conscience and the critic of s
ociety. He understood that although intellectuals did not play a major role in the early phases of the Revolution, he needed them as a support group to sustain it. He wanted the new intellectuals either to be, or to appreciate, activists. He wanted them to devise solutions to societal problems and to actively engage in solving them.
In this respect, of course, Castro was hardly different from other politicians who like to have intellectuals as temporary conversation partners, advisers or clowns for intervals in politics, given a freedom to say what they please that would not be granted to others.
Yet there are limits to such freedom, and anyone who goes beyond them can easily see the favors withdrawn – under socialism as under capitalism. It is hardly surprising, then, that since 1959 intellectuals in Cuba have generally been in agreement with government policy. What “critics often fail to realize,” writes Liss, “is that in a socialist society intellectual work is deemed a part of the socialization process.… Castro does not see Cuba as a pluralistic society, whose diverse ethnic groups develop their own cultures. He attempts to unify society by having all people relate to the same cultural composite.”69
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