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There
are two categories of writers in Cuba today: those who police their
own work and that of their colleagues, and those who are silenced,
jailed, and unable to participate in Cuba's cultural life. The
existence of these two categories, indeed the entire course of Cuban
letters since the revolution, can only be understood in the light of
the political events that have occurred since 1959. Minihumanism
vs. Ministalinism The
overthrow of Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship in 1959 brought new
works and vigor to Cuban letters as young writers incorporated
themselves into artistic life and those living in exile abroad
returned. Very soon, however, a struggle began between two forces that
held opposing views about the function of literature: Fidel Castro's
former associates, who advanced ideals of liberty and democratic
pluralism and were eager to open Cuban culture to all contemporary
trends, and the Communists, who sought to bring every aspect of
society under strict control and to press literature into the service
of society. The second group was small in number, but not in
aspirations. The liberal reformers, deceived by their own false hopes,
fell short in the defense of their principles. The
first victories of the Communist ideologues came in the wake of the
severing of diplomatic ties between the United States and Cuba. The
break occurred in 1961 and was accompanied by Castro's declaration
that the Cuban revolution was socialist. It was at this time that the
Marxists decided to make a strategic show of strength by launching an
attack on the newspaper Revolución, the official organ of the government, which antagonized
Marxist orthodoxy by putting out a literary supplement that published
texts of Pasternak, Joyce, Camus, Mao, Lenin, and Trotsky together
with speeches by Castro and Che Guevara. The opportunity for attack
came when the government convened the so called "conversations
with the intellectuals" to define the role of culture within the
new society. Old quarrels were renewed at these discussions and
ultimately the reformist cause and the humanistic spirit that had
flourished briefly were dealt a crushing blow: the literary supplement
was terminated, and Castro, notwithstanding his defense of artistic
freedom during the discussions, summed up his ideas about the rights
of artists in the ambiguous phrase, "Within the revolution,
everything; against the revolution, no rights at all." Subsequent
events confirmed that the Marxist view had triumphed. Its influence in
cultural matters was immediately demonstrated at the First National
Congress of Writers. In the Final Declaration issued by the Congress,
writers were told that they must participate "in the great common
task of enriching and defending the revolution," and they were
warned that literature would have to be purified through "the
most rigorous criticism." This was a Caribbean echo of the
criteria established at the Congress of [Soviet] Writers in 1934 by
Andrey Zhadanov, Stalin's commissar of cultural affairs. Shortly
after the foreboding pronouncements of the writers' congress in
Havana, the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) was
founded in imitation of the Union of Soviet Writers. UNEAC's role was
not, as some had hoped, to protect the interests of artists but rather
to protect those of the state in its bid to control the arts. The
means of control were put in place with the nationalization of
publishing houses and the institution of government monopoly over the
press and electronic media. March
1962 found the liberal reformers and the Marxists debating over
solutions to the administrative problems that had come to plague the
country, and a few months later the rift between the factions widened
as a result of the announcement of Khruschev's decision to withdraw
Soviet missiles from Cuba. Humiliated by the pull out, Fidel Castro
reacted by adopting policies and views that came to be known as the
Castroite heresy. In
the next five years both factions, liberals and Marxists, scored
victories in the realm of the arts, but neither could claim to have
prevailed. For example, Che Guevara eschewed socialist realism, but at
the same time the only remaining group of writers who had openly
repudiated committed literature, the circle known as "El
Puente," was disbanded because the government found its members
to be "dissolute and negative." A short while later, the
UNEAC hierarchy decided that Pablo Neruda should be condemned for
having visited the United States, and Cuban writers were obliged to
chime in, but contrary to the wishes of the Communists, Castro
authorized publication, albeit in a limited edition, of the novel Paradiso,
by José Lezama Lima, notwithstanding its depiction of acts of
sodomy among some of the homosexual characters. And so ground was
gained and lost by both sides. Then
in 1967 political events seemed to give the liberals the upper hand.
In that year Castro publicly berated the Kremlin for its foreign
policy, its failure to support the Guevara expedition to Bolivia, and
its interpretation of the doctrines of Marx and Lenin in general. At
the time, the Cuban President, Osvaldo Dorticós, said with more than
a hint of pride, "We have our little heresy." This political
challenge was carried over into the cultural arena and culminated in
two important events. First, in late 1967 the Salon
de Mai of Paris was invited to Havana to display the ultra-avant-garde
of Western European art. Castro was making an obvious show of
independence and a play for leadership in cultural affairs by being
host to a collection of works that could be considered far more
"decadent" and "bourgeois" than those included in
the "modernist" exhibit of paintings held six years earlier
in Moscow to Khruschev's great displeasure. Second, foreign writers
and artists were invited to participate in a highly-publicized
Cultural Congress in Havana at the beginning of 1968, and Castro
seized the opportunity to taunt Moscow again. To the resounding
applause of his international audience, he repeated his criticisms of
Soviet foreign policy and contrasted the solidarity shown by
intellectuals from all over the world with Guevara's adventure to the
indifference and hostility to it shown by the Soviet Union. In
literature the period of the heresy was very productive. It seemed as
if Stalin had just died in Havana; 1967 was reminiscent of the
"Year of Protest" (1956) in the Soviet Union, when Vladimir
Dudintsev succeeded in publishing Not
From Bread Alone and Pasternak presented his manuscript of Dr.
Zhivago without being punished. In Cuba, as a consequence of a
similar relaxation of censorship, awards were given in 1968 to three
works that would soon after be criticized for their "ideological
elements frankly opposed to revolutionary thought": Fuera
del juego, by the poet Heberto Padilla; Siete
contra Tebas, by the dramatist Antón Arrufat; and the short story
collection Condenados de
Condado, by Norberto Fuentes. From 1966 to 1968, the peak of the
"little heresy," Cuban writers were able to experiment with
language and narrative structure untrammeled by the constraints of
socialist realism. Their imaginative achievements in prose fiction
were such that, between the publication of Paradiso
(1966) and that of El mundo
alucinante (1969), by Reinaldo Arenas, the Cuban novel seemed to
be in the vanguard of the experimental "boom" that was going
on in Latin America. However,
while the intelligentsia celebrated the Cuban challenge to Soviet
dominance and the creative freedom that it had fostered, behind the
scenes Moscow's reaction was sanguine, for Soviet control over the
Cuban economy was such that it could be used to bring Castro to his
knees at any moment. As was learned later, a high-level official of
the Soviet embassy in Havana had said as much shortly before the
Cultural Congress of 1968, boasting, "All we have to do is say
that repairs are being stalled at Baku for three weeks and that's
that." Indeed, all that was necessary to bring Castro's heresy to
a halt was a lowering in the quota of oil shipped to Cuba; months
later, when tanks were necessary to eliminate the heresy in
Czechoslovakia, Castro defended the invasion. In the cultural arena
the end to the Cuban heresy brought a swift and sweeping wave of
repression the effects of which are still being felt. The
rebellions in Hungary and Czechoslovakia had begun with restive,
dissatisfied intellectuals. The experience the Kremlin had had in
these situations dictated stricter vigilance of artists in Cuba. In
reality Castro himself had been the heretic; others, nevertheless,
would have to go to the pyre. In
1968 Cuba's Stalinists loudly denounced the awarding of national
literary prizes to Padilla and Arrufat and condemned the publication
of unorthodox works by others. Their views were again expressed at the
Congress of Writers and Artists held in October of the same year, when
writers were reminded of their duty "to contribute to the
revolution through their works." Dissidents abroad and on the
island were attacked in Verde Olivo, the magazine of the armed forces, in a series of five
articles deploring "the low political level in art and
criticism." It advocated "cleansing" Cuban culture of
"counterrevolutionaries, the extravagant, and the soft "by
means of "politically alert criticism" and concluded that
the enemies of the Cuban revolution were the "false apostles who
decided to leave the country" as soon as they were confronted
with their "dishonest counterrevolutionary games." Many
writers had already left: among the older ones, Jorge Mañach, Gastón
Baquero and Lino Novás Calvo; among the younger ones, Guillermo
Cabrera Infante, Severo Sarduy and Carlos Franqui. After the charges
in Verde Olivo, the doors of
emigration were shut tight. To
demonstrate what was expected of cultural institutions, the political
leadership of the armed forces organized a literary contest in which
works were judged on the basis of political merit, not artistic value.
The first awards, in 1969 and 1970, went to Tiempo
de cambio, by Manuel Cofiño López, and Relatos
de Pueblo Viejo, by Juan Angel Cardi, both collections of short
stories that simplistically contrast Cuba's corrupt past with its
presumably heroic and exemplary present. The
Union of Writers followed suit, conferring its 1969 award on a novel
by Alcides Iznaga, Las cercas
caminaban, an unimaginative critique of capitalist society
combined with the obligatory heroic portrait of the Cuban guerrillas
in the Sierra Maestra. At the awards ceremony the president of UNEAC,
Nicolás Guillén, warned that any writer who failed to fulfill his
political duty "would receive the most severe revolutionary
punishment." At that session (during which the executive
committee expelled José Lorenzo Fuentes, winner of honorable mention
in a contest the previous year, as a "traitor to the
country"), the members of the Union were exhorted to
"redouble their revolutionary vigilance, to avoid all forms of
weakness and liberalism, and to denounce any attempt at ideological
penetration." In 1971 the Casa
de las Americas prize went to La
última mujer y el próximo combate, a novel by Manuel Cofiño López,
praised as "revolutionary for its "clear political
objective" in presenting the development of a "socialist
conscience." The
First Congress on Education and Culture, in April of 1971, officially
ushered in the Stalinization of art which has prevailed in Cuba ever
since. In preparation, a campaign was waged to terrorize the
intellectual community. It culminated with the arrest of Heberto
Padilla, who was made to denounce his friends and colleagues. He had
failed to follow the basic guidelines recommended by Soviet writers in
Stalin's time: "Don't think. If you think, don't speak. If you
speak, don't write. If you write, don't publish. If you publish, don't
sign." As a result, he had to obey the last of those rules:
"If you sign, recant." Against the backdrop of Padilla's
public embarrassment and forced confession, the Congress proclaimed
that culture, like education, was not and could not be "either
apolitical or impartial," and in a speech delivered at the close
of the proceedings, Fidel Castro stated: "We, a revolutionary
people in a revolutionary process, value cultural and literary
creations with only one criterion: their utility to the people. Our
valuation is a political evaluation." That was to be the
governing precept for Cuban art thereafter, and because the Communist
party of Cuba has always considered itself the embodiment of the will
of the masses ("the highest leading force of society," as
the Constitution says), in the final analysis Castro's remarks meant
that the government would judge cultural activity and literary
creation on the basis of usefulness to the party. The
purges of intellectuals intensified immediately after the disastrous
1970 sugar cane harvest and continued in succeeding years. All those
who did not conform to "parameters" established by the
Department of Culture as standards of conduct, morality, thought, and
preferences were to be excluded from a variety of occupations and
professions. Numerous members of the faculty at the University of
Havana were dismissed in the early 1970s for failure to fit the
prescribed mold. Several of those singled out were professors of
philosophy who were also editors of Pensamiento
Crítico, the only remaining journal permitted to print
interpretations of Marxist-Leninist doctrine that deviated from the
official line. With the purge of its editors, Pensamiento
Crítico ceased to exist. Similar purges were carried out at
cultural institutions and government offices, in theatre and dance
companies, and in the student body at the University of Oriente. At
the same time, the persecution of writers continued. Once labeled
"parametrados" (misfits), some were expelled from cultural
organizations and dismissed from their jobs. Others were denied
permission to publish their works and shunted into obscurity. Still
others landed in jail. In
this atmosphere, those who wished to continue writing professionally
had to submit to official directives. As editors and judges in
literary contests, they could not express their reservations about the
quality of the works presented as long as those works satisfied
requirements of subject and taste. To secure their professional
survival, many felt obliged to keep watch over and inform on their
colleagues, since such behavior was considered the best proof of
revolutionary conscience. Those
who chose not to submit or whose past did not clearly bespeak loyalty
to the government were excluded from cultural life. The number of
writers who were restricted in varying degrees or silenced altogether
is easily gleaned from a review of Cuban bibliographies from the 1960s
on. Gosizdat,
Samizdat and Tamizdat In
Communist countries writers generally have three ways of making their
works known: "state publishing,"
"self-publishing," and "publishing abroad"―gosizdat,
samizdat, and tamizdat―as they are called in the Soviet Union. In
Cuba writers are prepared for state publishing in talleres literarios, literary workshops scattered throughout the
island and patterned after the literary studios promoted by
Lunacharsky after the Bolshevik victory. There, works are read and
discussed in the presence of watchdogs from the State Security police.
If an author decides to enter his manuscript in a literary competition
or submit it for publication in one of the literary periodicals or by
a state publishing house, he must present it with a detailed
description of his background ―identifying his immediate family,
his political activities, community service, participation in
voluntary work projects, etc.―and a recommendation from his
place of employment, which must refer to his political attitude, his
revolutionary conduct, and his performance as a worker. The
juries and editorial committees consist of party members and yes-men
whose loyalty to the government has been clearly demonstrated. They
judge works according to established criteria and the political
background of the author. Those are the appropriate standards
according to an official statement handed down by the Second UNEAC
Congress, which was held in 1977. At the Congress, Cuban writers were
told that the Union would only promote "the creation and
dissemination of literature that serves to mold the thinking of the
general public through its ideological content and aesthetic
quality." Members of UNEAC, they were told at that time, are
expected to continue their studies of Marxist-Leninist doctrine
"so that their works may reflect the essence of social phenomena
with the greatest possible depth." Given
these standards and strictures, the works accepted by the state
publishing houses have much in common. To please the authorities, they
strip reality of its gray areas for the sake of clear, easily
digestible contrasts, or they dress official slogans and catchwords in
thin fictional disguise to serve an overriding didactic aim. They bear
out the fears for literary creativity expressed by Che Guevara in
his criticism of "the rigid forms of socialist
realism," which he described as a kind of "straight-jacket
on artistic expression" with which one can give only "a
mechanical representation of a social reality that one would like to
see, the ideal society nearly devoid of contradictions or conflicts.
"To achieve this vision, Guevara added, "one looks for
simplifications, what everyone can understand, which is what the
bureaucrats comprehend. This approach nullifies authentic artistic
exploration and reduces culture to a mere representation of the
socialist present and of the past which is dead and therefore
safe." Whether or not the literary standard imposed on Cuban
writers for the past ten years is referred to as "socialist
realism" the stultifying interpretation of culture and the
results are the same. Token
exceptions are occasionally permitted to appear in print, but on the
whole, Cuban literature has been forced into this mold. Novels, plays,
and poetry alike praise the builders of socialism and describe the
process of overcoming bourgeois prejudices. Or they satirize the mogollón,
the antisocial character who is uninspired by revolutionary
shibboleths, complains of shortages and sacrifice, misses work, and
fails to meet his goals. In sharp contrast with these wooden figures
are the familiar and equally flat personajes
positivos (positive heroes), whose attitudes and deeds the reader
is encouraged to emulate. The language is always simple and
straightforward, preferably colloquial, even in verse, so that the
masses can easily assimilate the message and better identify with the
characters. This
is particularly so in writing intended to popularize and draw support
for the latest government program. During the campaign to eradicate
illiteracy, UNEAC gave one of its 1962 awards to such a novel: Maestra voluntaria, by Daura Olema
García. Since then similar tendentious works have often been favored
in literary contests and by the editorial committees of the state
publishing houses. At the time of the drive to produce a
ten-million-ton sugar cane harvest, Casa
de las Américas honored Sachario,
the story of a heroic, Stakhanovite cane cutter who renounced
everything, even his wife, in order to carry out his work. More
recently, when the government sought a rapprochement
with the exile community, prizes went to Contra
viento y marea, by Grupo Areíto, and De
la patria y el exilio, by Jesús Díaz, books which praised Cubans
in exile who support the Castro regime. Etiopía:
la revolución desconocida, a volume of essays by Raúl Valdés
Vivó, and the short story collection La
sangre regresada, by Arnaldo Tauler, about the campaign in Angola,
were among the works accorded special commendation when the government
was seeking mass support for intervention in Africa. With
the publication of Enigma para
un domingo, by Ignacio Cárdenas Acuña, in 1971, a new kind of
detective novel became very fashionable in Cuba. The critics have
classified it as "socialist and revolutionary" and are
intent on pointing out that it is devoid of "the sickly
sensationalism and the cult of violence, sex, and individualism"
that characterize the genre in capitalist cultures. This socialist
version of the mystery emphasizes the efficiency and honesty of the
State Security police and related agencies and the cooperation given
them by the people. The plot typically revolves around struggles
against spies and infiltrators from the CIA, counterrevolutionary
elements abroad, and delinquents on the island. The
Ministry of the Interior has been promoting these socialist thrillers
through a competition for the best such story of the year. According
to the official guidelines, the winning entry must "have a
didactic character and be a stimulus for prevention of and vigilance
against all acts that are antisocial or against the people's
power." In 1979 the award went to the novel Aquí
las arenas son más limpias, by Luis A. Betancourt. As ludicrously
described on the book jacket, it is The
genre has become so popular among the censors and contest judges that
it has recently been introduced to the theatre. While
these forms have developed in response to the party line on the
function of literature, others have become popular as safe harbors for
those who wish to avoid conflict with the censors. Anthologies of
Cuban classics and biographies, for example, as well as collections of
documents and historical essays have for this reason attracted some
writers. However,
literary criticism has since 1970 been the handmaiden of official
policy on culture. The function of criticism has been reduced to
spotting books that will serve as tools for mass-indoctrination and to
presenting them in a favorable light with the appropriate sprinkling
of remarks on style or aesthetic achievement, real or imagined, even
though such considerations are lip service to values that no longer
really matter in Cuban literature. Thus, prefaces and reviews are
little more than a series of clichés adapted to suit the genre and
work in question. If it is prose fiction, the critic may stress the
author's "socialist, scientific and revolutionary
consciousness" and his "devotion to the people" in
presenting an "epic of the vanguard's revolutionary zeal in the
face of the new socialist duties and objectives." In discussing
poetry, drama, and essays, the critics tend to dwell on the presence
of "revolutionary signs," the writer's "testimony of
personal and emotional involvement in the struggle," "the
simplicity and directness of the language" with which the work
succeeds in moving readers and spectators. Another
now-customary approach is to compare Cuban writing with the
"reactionary nature" of works by "commercial
artists" in capitalist countries. Without mentioning names, the
critics take "bourgeois writers" to task for their
immorality, escapism, irrationality, formalism, lack of social
conscience, etc. When foreign works are analyzed, they are generally
far removed from any controversial subject or written by authors
sympathetic to the Castro regime. Others are excluded from the
critics' view, just as they are from stores and libraries on the
island. Cuba
has no samizdat. Because the
punishment for unauthorized publication and even possession of
unauthorized literature is severe, works not published by the state
are not reproduced and circulated clandestinely except in the most
intimate circles of friends. As a result, there are many young writers
who have never seen their works in print and others whose writing was
published during the early years of the revolution but who have
effectively been silenced since. Some
find themselves cut off after an encounter with the censors. Among the
more pitiful cases was that of Virgilio Piñera, the most highly
acclaimed Cuban playwright of this century, who died in 1979. Piñera's
misfortunes began with his dismissal from his post for failure to
conform to the "parameters" for political culture
established in 1971. Thereafter Piñera was prevented from accepting
invitations to speak abroad, reduced to living in miserable
conditions, and kept under surveillance for the rest of his days.
Although unable to publish his works, he nevertheless continued to
write and, judging from his letters to friends abroad seems to have
left a substantial number of plays and poems. Unfortunately, all of
the manuscripts were confiscated upon Piñera's death, which itself
was apparently seen as a potentially subversive act, for the State
Security police sequestered his body until the moment of his
perfunctory funeral. Another
case that illustrates the measures taken to prevent the development of samizdat
in Cuba is that of Amaro Gómez Boix, a journalist for the Cuban
Broadcasting Institute in Havana who was dismissed several years ago for
disaffection with the regime. In leisure moments at home he wrote works
criticizing the Communist system without, of course, thinking of
publishing or circulating them or sending them abroad. But in Cuba
neighbors are obliged to spy on each other and denounce any abnormal
activity they observe. Fulfillment of this revolutionary obligation
earns one merit points from the authorities. Thus someone may have
reported frequent typing or a light burning late at night in Gómez
Boix's home. In any event, for some undetermined reason the Department
of State Security became suspicious of Gómez Boix and searched his home
in late July 1978. Having found manuscripts of his poems and a novel,
they kept him incommunicado at State Security headquarters for
forty-five days. Thereafter Gómez Boix was sentenced to eight years in
prison, the maximum penalty under the Cuban penal code for
"possessing propaganda against the socialist order." As
a result of such repression, there is no real samizdat in Cuba. Those who have tried self-publishing have ended up
in jail, where literature is clandestinely circulated among the
prisoners because they feel there is little more they can lose. With the
forms of dissidence common in other totalitarian states today foreclosed
to Cuban writers, dissenters in Cuba find themselves in a situation
reminiscent of that of writers in Stalinist Russia. Like them, Cuban
dissidents have received little attention from the free world, which now
serves as the protector of Soviet dissidents. Once Stalinism took
definite hold on the island early in the seventies, impartial
intellectuals and journalists were kept away. Those who have been in a
position to denounce the plight of Cuban dissidents have generally shown
indifference if not complicity with the Castro regime. Thus the Cuban
dissenter has felt forgotten and isolated and has been easy prey for
government persecution and abuse. Watched
over, threatened, forbidden to write, many authors have left the country
in the past year. Some have sought asylum. Others have simply escaped.
Among them are Heberto Padilla (winner of the UNEAC prize for poetry in
1968); Reinaldo Arenas, author of the novel Hallucinations
(1969), which was a best seller in Europe; Rogelio Llopis, whose
short stories in La guerra y los
basiliscos (1962) have been translated into English, German, Polish,
and Hungarian and have been published in various anthologies; Edmundo
Desnoes, author of Memorias del
subdesarrollo (1968), which was made into one of the best Cuban
films produced since the revolution; Antonio Benítez Rojo, whose
stories won a 1967 Casa de las Américas prize and a 1968 UNEAC prize and who, until he
sought asylum in Paris in mid-1980, was the director of publications for
Casa de las Américas; José
Triana, recipient of a Casa award
for his play La noche de los
asesinos (1965), which has been highly acclaimed abroad. Other
unknown young writers who have refused to compromise their art chose to
escape during the mass exodus in 1980. The
only theoretical option for those who cannot escape is tamizdat, or publishing abroad. But because nothing alarms the Cuban
authorities more, the measures taken to prevent it have been extreme
and, as a result, largely successful. Few works by dissident Cuban
writers have been printed abroad. The
poet Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez succeeded in sending the manuscript of his
book Un testimonio urgente to
the United States. When it appeared the police took him out of prison,
where he was serving a sixty-year term, to interrogate him. In a letter
sent through the underground he recounts the experience: "At
midnight last April 4 [1978], I was unexpectedly removed from my cell
and taken to the Department of State Security, where I was confined to
the torture chambers for thirty days. During that period I was forced to
present myself for numerous interrogations, all related to my literary
work. Once again I have been threatened. 'Your continuing to develop a
dissident cultural movement, especially abroad is intolerable, and we
will try to prevent it by all the means at our disposal,' they assured
me. For my part, I am not prepared to give in, and yes, to pay whatever
price may be necessary. To confine a man, to mistreat him, destroy him
for printing poems, is like destroying a gardener for the 'horrendous
crime' of growing roses..." Angel
Cuadra is an internationally celebrated poet whose works have been
translated into English, German, and Russian. He was arrested and
charged with conduct "against the security of the State" after
unsuccessfully seeking permission to emigrate from Cuba in 1967. Having
served two-thirds of a fifteen-year sentence, he was paroled in 1976,
but then an anthology of his elegiac, apolitical poetry entitled Impromptus
was published in the United States and, as a result, his parole was
revoked. From prison he wrote to the exiled poet Juana Rosa Pita in May
1979, "there was no legal basis for this new reprisal against me.
Only that I am a poet; that the world speaks my name; that I do not
renounce my song. I do not put it on bended knees, nor do I use it for
other, political or partisan ends, but only literary, universal,
timeless ones." After participating in prison "rehabilitation
programs," Cuadra was to be released again in July 1979. However,
when the authorities learned that he had managed to smuggle out the
manuscript of a new collection of his poetry which appeared in English
translation under the title A
Correspondence of Poems, they transferred him to Boniato prison
instead of releasing him. In a letter dated Boniato, September 1979, he
wrote to Mrs. Pita: "If the chances of seeing you soon are becoming
increasingly more distant, it is because they are taking revenge,
venting their anger and injustice against me under false
pretenses." Under a constitutional provision giving retroactive
effect to penal laws favoring prisoners, Cuadra is entitled to be set
free; according to that constitutional norm, he has served his sentence.
His attempts to secure a court order for his release have, however,
failed. One
of the most pathetic cases of poets in prison in Cuba is that of Armando
Valladares. A victim of polyneuritis, he has been confined to a
wheelchair since 1974. The onset of his illness was produced by fifty
days of deficient diet imposed on him as punishment. In 1979 a book of
Valladares's poems entitled Desde
mi silla de ruedas (From My Wheelchair) was translated into French
(it was originally published in 1976 in the United States by his wife,
Marta). Mistreatment of Valladares by the Castro regime has increased
with recognition of his poetry abroad. Incapable of silencing him, Cuban
authorities have resorted to intimidating his family by blocking their
departure from the country. A letter sent by Valladares to the PEN
American Center in New York in 1979 addresses his and his family's
predicament: A
high official of the political police has notified me that my family's
departure from the country is entirely in my hands; that for it to
happen I have to draft a letter denying my friends among intellectuals
and poets abroad; that I have to forbid everyone, including newspapers
and organizations, to speak or write about me and my literary works or
even mention my name; and that I must disavow and deny every truth they
have spoken in defending my situation. To write that letter would be to
commit moral and spiritual suicide. I shall never write it! When
Valladares became very ill at the beginning of 1980, frightened prison
officials gave him the medical care they had been withholding, but when
the government discovered that the manuscript of a second book of his
poems was about to be published abroad, the authorities returned him to
his prison cell without regard for the effects on his health. In a
letter he was able to smuggle out of prison, dated October 17, 1980, and
addressed to the journalist Humberto Medrano in Miami, Valladares
indicated that his condition was bound to worsen: "They hope that
at a critical moment complications will develop from which I will die in
an apparently accidental manner. It is common knowledge that medical
treatment is used in Communist countries for coercion or elimination of
unwanted prisoners. My own is just one case among many. I am being held
incommunicado. In addition to all this I have not seen the Sun in six
months. Conditions are such that it will be even more difficult to stay
alive." Analyzed
in its totality, Cuban literature since the revolution reflects the
ideological changes that have occurred in the government. If literature
is understood as having permanent value, as an expression of the human
soul, as a means to explore new paths and analyze the world, and not
merely as an instrument of propaganda or instruction, Cuban literature
has unquestionably grown and diminished with the increase and reduction
of official tolerance for the creative act. Although some critics
struggle to search for traditional artistic values in works authorized
by the censors, it is evident that in Cuba the printed word is now
judged as an ideological weapon to change society and alter the course
of history, and that the writer is to be regarded as an engineer of the
soul. |
