MIAMI

The International University of Florida invited me to speak at a conference in June of 1980. I entitled my talk “The Sea Is Our Jungle and Our Hope.” This was my first lecture before a free audience. Heberto Padilla was next to me; he spoke first. He was in a really pitiful state; completely drunk and stumbling, he faced the audience and improvised incoherently. The public reacted violently against him. I felt pity for the man, destroyed by the system, unable to come to terms with his own ghost and the fact that he had made a public confession in Cuba. In all truth, Heberto has never recovered from that confession. The system managed to destroy him in the most perfect way, and even now seemed to make use of him for its own benefit.

As soon as I started denouncing the tyranny I had been suffering for twenty years, even my own publishers, who had made enough money from my books, covertly turned against me. Emmanuel Carballo, who had published more than five editions of El mundo alucinante [in Mexico] and never paid me a penny, now wrote me an indignant letter saying I should have never left Cuba, while, at the same time, refusing to make any payment to me. There were countless promises, but the money never came: it was a very profitable way of exercising his communist militancy.

The same thing happened with Angel Rama, who had published a collection of my short stories in Uruguay. Instead of at least writing me a letter to congratulate me for having left Cuba (he knew of my situation, having met me there in 1969), he wrote a lengthy newspaper article for El Universal of Caracas, which he entitled “Reinaldo Arenas on His Way to Ostracism.” In that article Rama stated that my leaving Cuba was a mistake, that all my problems had been only bureaucratic, and that now I would be condemned to ostracism. All this was extremely cynical and, moreover, preposterous, considering that Rama was referring to someone who since 1967 had not been able to publish anything in his own country, and who had suffered repression and imprisonment there and had indeed already been condemned to ostracism. I realized that the war had started all over again, now in a much more underhanded manner; it was less terrible than Fidel’s war against the intellectuals in Cuba, albeit no less sinister.

To top it all, after numerous phone calls to Paris, Sarduy not only paid me a mere one thousand dollars for the French editions, but one day called my aunt in Miami and told her I had lots of money. And my aunt, of course, never doubted that I am a millionaire.

None of this surprised me: I already knew that the capitalist system was also sordid and money-hungry. In one of my first statements after leaving Cuba I had declared that “the difference between the communist and capitalist systems is that, although both give you a kick in the ass, in the communist system you have to applaud, while in the capitalist system you can scream. And I came here to scream.”