Compañera Haydée Santamaría
Director, Casa de las Américas
Havana
Cuba
Barcelona, 5 April 1971
Dear Compañera
I am sending you my resignation from the Committee of the journal Casa de las Américas, to which I have belonged since 1965, and also my decision not to travel to Cuba in January to give a course, as I promised you on my last visit to Havana. You will understand that this is the only course of action open to me after Fidel’s speech upbraiding ‘Latin American writers who live in Europe’, to whom he has forbidden entry to Cuba ‘for an indefinite and infinite period of time’. Was he so irritated by our letter asking him to clarify the situation of Heberto Padilla? How times have changed. I remember very clearly that night we spent with him four years ago when he listened willingly to the observations and the criticisms which a group of ‘foreign intellectuals’, that he now calls ‘swine’, made to him.
In any event, I had decided to resign from the Committee and not give the course when I read Heberto Padilla’s confession and the bulletins of Prensa Latina on the meeting of UNEAC in which the Compañeros Belkis Cuza Male, Pablo Armando Fernández, Manuel Díaz Martinez and César López made their self-criticism. I know all of them sufficiently well to realize that this unfortunate spectacle was not spontaneous but had been prefabricated like the Stalinist trials in the 1930s. To force comrades, with methods repugnant to human dignity, to accuse themselves of imaginary betrayals and sign letters in which even the syntax seems to be that of the police, is the negation of everything that made me embrace, from the first day, the cause of the Cuban revolution: its decision to fight for justice without losing respect for individuals. This is not the example of socialism that I want my country to follow.
I know that this letter might be greeted with invective — but it will be no worse than what I have received from reactionary elements for having defended Cuba.
Yours sincerely,
Mario Vargas Llosa