Cuba’s Samizdat

‘The just and human time is coming,” the renowned Cuban poet Heberto Padilla wrote in 1959, at the beginning of what seemed a triumph of hope for his native land, free at last from the grip of dictatorship: “Dreamer of the stern pupil, destroy your den of fear.” Seventeen years later, after having caused a major rift between Fidel Castro and the international intellectual community, Padilla is a “non-person,” closely watched by the authorities, earning a living as a translator, the same profession sometimes allowed Soviet writers in disgrace.

Padilla’s conversion from enthusiastic supporter of Castro to saddened critic of the revolutionary process is well-known. His “confession,” after a month’s solitary confinement, provoked sixty intellectuals, Susan Sontag, Jean-Paul Sartre, Octavio Paz, and Simone de Beauvoir among them, to express their “shame and anger” in a letter to Fidel Castro. Padilla’s confession, they said, “could have been obtained only by methods which are the negation of legality and revolutionary justice.”

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Frank Calzon

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‘The just and human time is coming,” the renowned Cuban poet Heberto Padilla wrote in 1959, at the beginning of what seemed a triumph of hope for his native land, free at last from the grip of dictatorship: “Dreamer of the stern pupil, destroy your den of fear.” Seventeen years later, after having caused a major rift between Fidel Castro and the international intellectual community, Padilla is a “non-person,” closely watched by the authorities, earning a living as a translator, the same profession sometimes allowed Soviet writers in disgrace.

Padilla’s conversion from enthusiastic supporter of Castro to saddened critic of the revolutionary process is well-known. His “confession,” after a month’s solitary confinement, provoked sixty intellectuals, Susan Sontag, Jean-Paul Sartre, Octavio Paz, and Simone de Beauvoir among them, to express their “shame and anger” in a letter to Fidel Castro. Padilla’s confession, they said, “could have been obtained only by methods which are the negation of legality and revolutionary justice.”