FADE TO BLACK: THE PADILLA CASE
BY 1968, GABO’S LIFE HAD CHANGED DRASTICALLY. THE YEAR before, his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude had circled the globe in many languages. It was a far cry from the hardscrabble days of his youth, when he’d had to sleep in a different room every night in a certain fleabag hotel, in whichever bed the whores didn’t happen to be using, in exchange for manuscripts of stories as payment when he didn’t have any cash. It was quite a switch from the time he spent in Paris in the mid-fifties, when he had had to beg for change in the Métro and spend the cold winter nights on a park bench or huddled over a grating in a station, trying to dodge the police, who always mistook him for an Algerian. The last two years of struggle were still not far behind in Gabo’s memory, right up until the publication of his novel. Between the dawn of the sixties and 1965, he hadn’t written one word of fiction; and during that year, on a trip to Acapulco with his wife, he had suddenly stopped the car and said: “Mercedes, I’ve found the voice! I’m going to narrate the story in the same style my grandmother would use to tell me her incredible tales, starting with the day when the father takes his son to see the ice!”1
That year, there would barely be any vacation. Back in Colombia, García Márquez scraped together $5,000 (savings, proceeds from selling the car, and loans from friends, especially Álvaro Mutis) and shut himself away for fourteen months to write the story of the Buendia family and Macondo. Mercedes had to make lace to barter for meat from the butcher and bread from the bakery, and to placate the landlord while they were nine months behind in the rent. By the end of this period, their total household debt had climbed to over $10,000. But all that ended when the novel was published. From that point on, not only were his financial troubles gone forever, but García Márquez would also be able to navigate much more easily through the treacherous waters of the Latin American political scene. Among other things, he decided to commit himself more fully to the Cuban Revolution. His motivation was clear: Gabo firmly believed that Cuba’s leader was different from the typical bosses, heroes, dictators, and thugs that had figured so prominently in Latin American history since the nineteenth century, and he sensed that the Revolution, still young, could only bear fruit in the rest of the countries in Latin America through his involvement. His political conviction stemmed from the belief that, in time, the entire world would be socialist, in spite of capitalism’s advances in North America and Western Europe.
The year 1968 marked a milestone in Cuba’s history. It was the year of the Warsaw Pact’s intervention in Czechoslovakia and the beginning of the Padilla case. It was a convulsive time in Western society in general, since it also witnessed the start of student movements, touching off a general crisis in the universities. Protest songs were popularized as the Vietnam War intensified (and would last until 1975), and Che Guevara no longer lived to tell the tale. Against that backdrop, an event that initially seemed unremarkable within Cuban cultural politics would shake the Castrist monolith to its very core and would force García Márquez to pick a side in the Revolution.
Taking into account all of the events of those years is necessary for fully understanding the sea change in how Latin American and European intellectuals viewed the Cuban Revolution and its leader. In 1968, Fuera del juego, a collection of poems by Heberto Padilla, won the Julian del Casal prize in poetry. The prize jury was made up of three Cubans—José Lezama Lima, José Z. Tallet, Manuel Díaz Martínez—and two foreigners: the Englishman J. M. Cohen and the Peruvian Cesar Calvo. Shortly before that, Padilla had harshly criticized the book Pasión de Urbino by the Cuban writer Lisandro Otero, in a piece published in the magazine El Caimán Barbudo. In 1964, Otero had hoped his book would win the Biblioteca Breve prize sponsored by the Spanish publishing house Seix Barral, but Guillermo Cabrera Infante had won with his book Tres Tristes Tigres. In his article, Padilla stated that it was a shame that, for political reasons, one couldn’t discuss a novel of such high literary merit as Cabrera Infante’s in Cuba, while a book as mediocre as Otero’s would receive so much attention, since its author was then the Vice President of the National Council of Culture. Padilla concluded: “In Cuba, a writer can’t openly criticize a novelist/Vice president without suffering the attacks of the writer/director and the poets/editors hiding behind the faceless label The Editors.”2
Padilla lost his job as a result of that article, since he had publicly praised the work of Cabrera Infante, one of the Cuban authors who at the time was considered “a traitor to the revolution.” Juan Goytisolo described how he found out about that accusation while in Paris: “On November 8, 1968, it was about two o’clock in the afternoon, I had gone down to Bonne Nouvelle Boulevard, as usual, to stretch my legs and pick up a copy of Le Monde, when a dispatch from the paper’s correspondent in Cuba suddenly caught my eye: ‘The Armed Forces committee denounce the counterrevolutionary activities of the poet Padilla.’” The article, signed with the initials of Saverio Tutino—special envoy from the Paese Sera—included some passages from the committee’s denunciation of the poet, who was accused not only of a number of literary-political provocations, but also—which was much more serious—of having “happily squandered” public funds while he had been director of Cubartimpex. According to the article, Padilla was at the head of a group of Cuban writers who resorted to sensationalism and foreign exposure, “creating works which are a blend of weakness, pornography, and counterrevolution.”3
Shortly before the winner of the UNEAC Prize (Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba) was publicly announced, Raúl Castro had spread the rumor that if Padilla, the counterrevolutionary writer, won the prize, there would be “very serious consequences.”4 Even Los siete contra Tebas, which won the UNEAC prize for drama, written by Anton Arrufat, a writer who had been very faithful to the regime to that point, was labeled counterrevolutionary. The jury for the prize, however, did not consider Padilla’s book to be counterrevolutionary; they judged it to be a critique of extraordinary literary merit. It should be pointed out here (and this is often overlooked) that Padilla’s book included some very heartfelt praise for much of what constituted the artistic world of the Revolution. That is how Manuel Vázquez Montalbán viewed it in his book Y Dios entró en la Habana, when he stated: “Padilla is not only critical, he also praises many Revolutionary works. To Fidel, Padilla can be summed up in two words: dishonest and disloyal.”5
Finally, UNEAC accepted the jury’s decision and published Fuera del juego and Los siete contra Tebas, but they didn’t give Padilla or Arrufat visas for the trip to Moscow or give them the 1,000 pesos that were supposed to be included with the prize. And they added a prologue to the poet’s work that had nothing to do with the author or his ideas, in which they accused the writers of collaborating with the enemy to the north, claiming to base this judgment on strictly artistic grounds. “Our literary conviction permits us to point out that these works of poetry and drama serve our enemies, and its authors are just the artists they need to stow away in their Trojan horse for the time when imperialism puts into practice its politics of military aggression against Cuba.”6 These were considerations that later, paradoxically, would be combined with others less literary, never clearly defined. They only state: “The Directors determined that the prizes have been squandered on works built upon ideological elements that are completely opposed to Revolutionary thought.”7 And therefore, the prologue concludes grandiosely, “The directors of UNEAC reject the ideological content of the prize-winning book of poems and theater script.”8
They reproached Padilla for “his lack of Revolutionary enthusiasm, his criticism, his disregard for history, his defense of the individual in the face of social needs,”9 and also “his ignorance of the moral obligations inherent in the Revolutionary construct.”10 Of course, although the prize-winning works were, technically, “published,” they were not circulated; they were not available in bookstores; and they could only be obtained clandestinely, passed around among the very few people who had somehow managed to get their hands on a copy.
After these events, some writers decided to react: “On Franqui’s advice,” Goytisolo explains, “I got in touch with Cortazar, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa, Semprun, and García Márquez, and through Ugné Karvelis’s office in Gallimard, I tried to reach Heberto on the telephone. Since the phone calls were useless—no one ever answered that number—we decided to send a telegram, signed by all of us, to Haydee Santamaria, in which we stated we were ‘alarmed by the slanderous accusations’ leveled against the poet, we expressed our support for ‘every action undertaken by the Casa de las Americas [headquarters of the National Council on Culture] in defense of intellectual freedom.’ Haydee’s reply—received by telegram two days later—completely stunned us.”11 Here is an excerpt from that reply: “It is impossible to determine from so far away whether an accusation against Padilla is slanderous or not. The cultural policy of the Casa de las Americas is the policy of our Revolution, the Cuban Revolution, and the Casa de las Americas will always be directed as Che had wished: with guns at the ready, shooting cannons into the field.”12
In 1971, Padilla, with his wife, the poet Belkis Cuza Malé, was arrested, because he was “at the time what was popularly known as an ‘incorrigible writer.’”13 His wife only spent a few days in jail, but Heberto remained in prison for several weeks. The poet’s arrest provoked strong responses and protests, especially among the intellectuals who had been supportive of Castro’s Revolution up until then. A cry rose up warning of the imminent Stalinization of Cuba. Some writers immediately cut off all support for and ties with the Revolution forever, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Juan Goytisolo, Carlos Fuentes, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Octavio Paz, Jean-Paul Sartre, and of course the revolutionary Carlos Franqui. He had been one of the main protagonists in the events that brought Castro to power in 1959, yet he had already abandoned the Revolution’s inner circle by the early sixties because of the increasingly Marxist character of the movement (due to the growing influence of Raúl Castro and the radical faction of the Sierra Maestra, after Camilo Cienfuegos had died under suspicious circumstances).
Goytisolo recalls, “The author of Rayuela [Julio Cortázar] summoned me to his home at the Place du General Bueret, and between the two of us we composed what would eventually become known as ‘the first letter to Fidel Castro,’ a letter that won the approval of Franqui, who we had been in contact with as we wrote it. We decided that it should be a private letter, so that its recipient could address our concerns without the inevitable opposite effect that a public broadcast would have. Only in the event that, after a certain amount of time had passed and we got no response at all, would we then reserve the right to send a copy of the letter to the newspapers.”14 In the letter, the signers requested more information on Padilla’s arrest in these terms: “The undersigned, supporters of the principles and objectives of the Cuban Revolution, address you in order to express our disquiet as a result of the imprisonment of the poet and writer Heberto Padilla, and to ask you to re-examine the situation which this arrest has created.”15 Gradually they collected more signatures for the first letter. They obtained fifty-four signatures in all. The only one missing was García Márquez. When all of this was going on, he had been in Barranquilla, Colombia, with his family. When the case had first blown up, he had been in Barcelona, where Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza lived. To avoid harassment from reporters, he decided to leave, along with Mercedes, for a prudent, indeterminate amount of time, retreating to a place somewhere in the Caribbean far away from a post office or a telephone, “to find the scent of ripe guava.”16 They stayed away for a long time. Apuleyo Mendoza tried to call him many times, but it was impossible to get in touch with him. He left several messages and sent a telegram, but never received a reply. He assumed that García Márquez had not received his messages, and since they had always shared the same opinions about Cuba, he decided to go ahead and sign his friend’s name, holding himself personally responsible. He explained the decision later in his book La llama y el hielo:
We had talked about this subject so often, sharing the exact same point of view, because of which I had no doubt whatsoever of what his eventual reaction to Padilla’s arrest would be. I honestly believed that. So when it was impossible to get in touch with him, and we were about to send the telegram, I said to Juan Goytisolo, calmly, without the slightest hesitation:
“Sign Gabo’s name. I’ll be responsible.”
I thought that omitting his name, because of what seemed to me to be merely logistical problems, would give the wrong impression, when all of his friends, the writers of the boom, had already signed.17
But it seems that García Márquez had received the messages, and had answered, but his reply in the mail didn’t arrive in time. Supposedly, he had asserted that he would not sign anything “until I have been fully informed on the subject.”18 Some of the people we interviewed, who would prefer to remain anonymous, assured us that Marbel Moreno, the wife of Plinio Mendoza, told them that Gabo had agreed to put his name on the letter, but later regretted it, and Plinio took the consequences of his friend’s change of heart upon himself.
As Goytisolo observed, “With his consummate skill in avoiding confrontation, Gabo would discreetly distance himself from the critical position of his friends, without directly facing them: the new García Márquez, brilliant strategist of his enormous talent, coddled by fame, astute observer of the great ones in this world, advocate on an international stage of supposedly ‘advanced’ causes, was about to be born.”19 We’ll never know the truth for sure, since Gabo insists that he did not sign, Mendoza covers his back, and other people closely involved attest that he did lend his name, but later wanted to obscure his earlier decision because of how Fidel would react. Vázquez Montalbán told us that it is a question that will always remain shrouded in mystery.
In early April, a letter of self-accusation written by the poet began to circulate, but the real intent of the author has been subject to debate. Most of the intellectuals agree that the letter was actually not written by Padilla. One of them, Manuel Díaz Martínez, states that “Our poet is as much the author of this letter as he is of The Divine Comedy.”20 Padilla probably did physically write it, but under threat, since methods of intimidation were prevalent in the Cuban Revolution’s system of repression. Based on accounts from his closest friends, there were too many political errors to which Padilla confessed to make his sole authorship credible. In 1992, in a conversation with Carlos Verdecia, Padilla himself confirmed: “That self-accusation was written in part by the police, and in part by other people. There are some paragraphs in which I wanted to identify who had been the original writer. In some passages, the level of detail is so pronounced that the hand of Fidel Castro himself is clear. I wish I had the text here right now so I could show you.”21
A few days after the crucial false confession, the poet was released—but with one condition, which led to the event that would erupt into the biggest scandal yet: the UNEAC organized a meeting where Padilla had to read his self-accusation aloud, in front of the members of that organization and many of his friends. The act took place on April 29, 1971, as a corollary to the letter itself. At that time, in addition to publicly admitting his own guilt, he accused other writers, his own friends, of “counterrevolutionary behavior” in their works. On this eclectic, substantial list, he included his own wife Belkis, Norberto Fuentes, Pablo Armando Fernández, César López, Manuel Díaz Martínez, José Yáñez, Virgilio Piñera, and José Lezama Lima. Most of the people named got up to stand in front of the microphones to say something in their own defense. Diaz Martínez’s chilling words on that portion of the meeting require no further explanation: “Padilla’s self-accusation had been made public, but it’s one thing to read it, and something else entirely to have heard it read that night. That moment was one of the very worst of my life. I’ll never forget the expressions of total shock—while Padilla read—of those seated around me, much less the shadow of terror that glazed the faces of those Cuban intellectuals, young and old, when Padilla began to call out the names of his friends—several of us were of corpore insepulto—whom he presented as virtual enemies of the Revolution. I was sitting directly behind Roberto Branly. He compulsively turned and gave me a look of sheer horror, as if they were already carrying me off to the gallows.”22
Spanish intellectuals like Félix Grande have weighed in on the event, with analyses focusing on the senselessness of repressing Padilla in particular, but also on the absurd spiraling effect that the case set off for other Cuban writers at the time—for example, with Norberto Fuentes, who, years later, outside of Cuba, has written works which bitterly recall those singular moments. “Could they have imagined,” asked Grande, “on April 29, 1971, during that infamous self-accusation that the Cuban political authorities forced on Heberto Padilla, one of those pointed to by Padilla’s finger (an imaginary finger, that hid the real finger of Castrist repression against intellectuals in Cuba, Latin America, and the entire planet) would just happen to be the writer Norberto Fuentes?”23 As Nadia Lie explained in her article “Las malas memorias de Heberto Padilla,”24 Norberto Fuentes was one of the few intellectuals present at the self-accusation who ventured to defend himself right then, rejecting the “counterrevolutionary” label, the magic word that then justified, and still does to this day, any kind of political repression. Fuentes was a young writer then, active within the Revolution’s cultural scene. Later, he would write Hemingway in Cuba,25 which deeply resonated in Cuba and was lauded by Fidel Castro, prompting a closer relationship between them. After that, he covered several military campaigns as a war correspondent, along with other Cuban internationalists. With Fidel’s support, in 1989 Fuentes received the trophy of the Order of San Luis and the “Medal of National Culture.”
In his self-accusation, Padilla accused himself of introducing counterrevolutionary thought into literature, and thanked his friends, “responsible for the State and the healthy functioning of the Revolution,” for the generosity shown him in giving him the opportunity to rectify his mistakes. The new Padilla confessed: “I have made many mistakes, really unforgivable, really censurable, really unspeakable, and I feel truly relieved, truly happy after the experience I have had, that I can now start my life over with a new spiritual approach. I requested this meeting. […] I have defamed and constantly injured the Revolution, with Cubans and with foreigners. I have gone very far with my errors and counterrevolutionary activities. […] That is to say, a counterrevolutionary is a man who acts against the Revolution, who hurts it. And I acted against and hurt the Revolution.”26
The hara-kiri culminated in a histrionic display, when Padilla was obliged to confess his disloyalty to the island’s leader and to make a public display of his pain, to inspire all the other counterrevolutionaries to reject their ideas, get back on the right track, and maintain unity (uniformity?) in the grand project to save the Cuban people. Like a lost sheep returning to the fold, staring at the ground with a chastised child’s expression, he recited: “And we won’t go into the times when I have been unfair with and ungrateful to Fidel, which I will never cease to regret.”27 The self-accusation not only dealt with the verses of his poetry that had won the unlucky prize, and the hurt Padilla had caused the Revolution’s supreme leader; it also gave critical interpretations of some of his articles and literary essays, and declared the politically correct way that solidly Revolutionary figures should be treated in front of those who have deserted the cause. On that subject, he had to retract the criticism he had launched against Lisandro Otero, and completely reject the defense—literary only, of course—that he had once voiced for Cabrera Infante, at the time when he had been exiled in London: “The first thing I did when I returned to Cuba a few months later was take advantage of the opportunity that the literary magazine El Caimán Barbudo offered me to write about Lisandro Otero’s Pasión de Urbino, unfairly, cruelly assailing a friend I had had for years, a true friend like Lisandro Otero. […] The first thing I did was attack Lisandro. I said horrible things to Lisandro Otero. And who did I defend? I defended Guillermo Cabrera Infante. And who was Guillermo Cabrera Infante, whom we all know? Guillermo Cabrera Infante has always been a bitter, resentful man, no longer with the revolution, a social outcast, a man from the very humblest origins, a poor man, a man who for whatever reason has been deeply bitter since adolescence, and a man who has been an irreconcilable enemy of the Revolution from the very beginning.”28
Many intellectuals were incensed by Padilla’s self-accusation, and increasingly distanced themselves from Castro and his Revolution. The number of open letters addressed to the leader grew, but the patriarch, not having yet slipped into the autumn of his reign, was as undaunted as ever. At the First Congress on Education and Culture, which took place just three days after Padilla’s self-criticism, “Fidel Castro delivered the most vitriolic speech against the intellectuals that he has ever given.”29 That triggered the immediate division of the group of intellectuals that had been so unified in their support of Castro’s Revolution until then. A second letter was later sent by the same general group that had sent the first open letter, written on May 4 in Mario Vargas Llosa’s apartment. Harsher in tone than in their first letter, the more than sixty signers expressed their “shame and anger” in reaction to Padilla’s self-accusation, and their alarm at the signs of radicalization, warning of isolationism and the negative repercussions for dialogue with the Cuban government. Vargas Llosa later confirmed that he had written the letter himself: “We believe we have a responsibility to make our shame and anger known. The damaging confession that Heberto Padilla signed could only have been obtained through methods which are the very negation of legality and Revolutionary justice. The content and form of that confession, with its absurd accusations and wild affirmations, and the act performed in UNEAC, in which Padilla himself and his friends Belkis Cuza Malé, Manuel Díaz Martínez, César López, and Pablo Armando Fernández were subjected to a painful charade of self-accusation, recall the most sordid events of the Stalinist era, with its show trials and witch-hunts. With the same vehemence with which we have defended the Cuban Revolution from the very beginning, as it seemed exemplary to us in its respect for the human being and in its fight for freedom, we now entreat Cuba to avoid the dogmatic fog, the cultural xenophobia, and the systematic repression that Stalinism imposed on the socialist states, from which manifested many flagrant examples of events similar to what is now taking place in Cuba.”30 He continued: “The disregard for human dignity presupposed in forcing a man to ridiculously accuse himself of the worst betrayals and infamy alarms us not because the person in question is a writer, but because any Cuban comrade—a peasant, laborer, technician, or intellectual—could also fall victim to similar acts of violence and humiliation.”31 With this letter, the group requested the Cuban regime to put an end to the violation of human rights, and to return to the original spirit of the Revolution, which “made us think of the Revolution as a model of socialism.”32 That is, it wasn’t a question of enemies of the Revolution seizing on a moment of weakness to try to destabilize the system; rather, it was a group of political comrades, just as committed to socialism’s future in Latin America, who couldn’t ignore the obvious or condone gratuitous violence and the trampling of certain inalienable rights.
This time, Cortázar did not sign. After having read the first few lines, he exclaimed: “I can’t sign this!”33 Julio Cortázar was one of the strongest defenders of the Caribbean island’s political and cultural aspirations. He had always actively participated in all the demonstrations of support for the Revolution, and he frequently traveled to Cuba. After the first open letter was sent, he tried to reconcile with the Cubans. At one point, when he was asked to write something in a magazine about Vargas Llosa, he politely declined the request in his strong Argentinian accent: “You know about all of the efforts I have made to make amends with the Cubans, constant efforts that have unfortunately been only minimally successful….”34 He had to give an explanation to Vargas Llosa, who reacted negatively. But Cortázar’s most thoughtful overture of reconciliation was the letter he sent from Paris to Haydee Santamaria on February 4, 1972, in response to her letter expressing dismay at his inclusion in the list of signatures of the first open missive to Castro, and threatening that he should decide once and for all to be “with God” and not “with the devil.”35
Cortázar seemed to harbor regrets because of the seeds of doubt that had been planted in Cuba over his signature on the first letter, asserting that it had been impossible for him to have made any other decision at the time, since the information available in Paris about events in Cuba described torture, concentration camps, prisons, Stalinism, Soviet domination, and so forth. Cortázar, who had taken the trouble to ask the staff at the Cuban embassy in Paris to provide him with an official version of events, and stalled so that Goytisolo did not send the letter off to the Caribbean shores until they had the full truth, did not get any response from the Cuban diplomats other than silence, so circumstances had obliged him to sign that famous polemic text. He writes: “After weeks of waiting in vain, which was equivalent to Cuba ignoring or disparaging the love and concern of its supporters in France, it seemed impossible for me not to associate myself with a request for information, which a group of writers believed they had every right to make of Fidel. It was impossible; it was a friendly way, from comrade to comrade, to say: ‘There are some things that can be endured up to a certain limit, but beyond that, there is a right to an explanation,’ because the contrary implies disrespect or guilt. Eight or ten days passed after that, without anyone at the embassy being able to understand that, in spite of the warnings, the first letter had come to signify a right. […] Cuba’s image was tarnished, jeopardized by its regrettable conduct of consistently declining to address the issue.”36 He maintains that he chose the harder path: signing the first letter, then not putting his name to the second; as he explained in another essay, titled “Policrítica a la hora de los chacales” (Political criticism at the hour of the jackals), this was his way of sincerely continuing to support the Revolution and offering his help wherever it was most needed.
Goytisolo described how some others reacted to the second open letter to Fidel: “On my walk around Argel a few weeks before, I ran into Régis Debray, who, after having been released from his imprisonment in Bolivia thanks to pressure from Western Leftist intellectuals, had just made a quick visit to Cuba. When I asked him what he thought of Padilla, whom he had praised in particular as a ‘beautiful example’ of an intellectual revolutionary in an article published in El Caiman Barbudo, he replied that he was nothing more than a CIA agent and he deserved whatever he got. Later, in Paris, Simone de Beauvoir told me indignantly that she and Sartre had been walking down Raspail Boulevard and had seen Alejo Carpentier, and he, clearly rattled, panicked by the thought of merely being seen greeting them, turned in the other direction so abruptly that he smacked his nose against a shop window. According to some friends, the Cubans were spreading around the rumor that Sartre was a CIA agent too.”37
Cortázar’s reaction to the Padilla case was predictable, but García Márquez’s reaction was much less clear, since it continues to be an enigma to this day, even for Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, one of his closest friends. In Mendoza’s previously cited book, El caso perdido: La llama y el hielo, phrases like the following frequently appear: “We had dinner on three occasions, always talking obsessively about Cuba and the Padilla case, never able to come to agreement.”38 At one point, Mendoza admits defeat: “Years ago, due to irreconcilable differences, we stopped discussing the subject altogether.”39 Curiously, most of the writings dealing with the Padilla case that have been published tend to assert that García Márquez signed the first letter to Castro. For example, in Les quatre saisons de Fidel Castro, Jean-Pierre Clerc writes: “An initial letter, respectful, is sent to the leader by fifty writers, French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin American, including Beauvoir, Calvino, Cortázar, Fuentes, García Márquez, Mandiargues, Moravia, Sartre, Vargas Llosa.”40 And one writer maintains that “while Blanco Amor—not differentiating among the various stars of the boom—implies that García Márquez denounced the Castrist regime on that occasion, Benedetti asserts that he only signed one of the two famous letters sent to Castro, and Collazos declares that he didn’t sign either. The three conclusions cancel each other out; the lie is a sign of the case’s importance.”41
In our opinion, it’s more a lack of reliable information than a lie, but it is certain that the ambiguity demonstrates the particular importance of the Nobel Prize winner’s position in this matter. In an article published in Colombia in the magazine Semana, Jon Lee Anderson lays all the responsibility on Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, affirming that “since García Márquez was on a trip and there was no way of communicating with him, Plinio took the liberty of adding his name to the list of petitioners.”42 And regarding the second missive, he writes: “A second open letter of protest was signed by all of those who had signed the first one, except for Julio Cortázar and Gabriel García Márquez.”43
The success of the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra and the triumphant march into Havana in those first days of 1959 had heralded the beginning of a time of hope unprecedented in the history of Western civilization. A small Caribbean island had faced off against international capitalism as symbolized by the United States, and in the following years had consolidated an alternative that could extend throughout Latin America, and that had begun to bear fruit with the Chilean elections bringing Allende to power. But the Padilla case signified the first crack in the system, resulting in a general disenchantment with the Revolution among a segment of the population that until then had been uniformly supportive of the Cuban project: the intellectuals. The political transcendence, the impact, and the prestige of the writer in question within the Spanish-speaking world was beyond doubt; and although the international profile of Heberto Padilla wasn’t at the level of a Borges, a Darío, or a García Márquez, what’s certain is that—as fate would have it—the international resonance of the case would deliver a harsh blow to the evolution of the Cuban Revolution.
The first consequence, disastrous for Fidel Castro and his followers, was the disintegration of the group of Latin American writers known as the boom, a breakdown in the group’s unity that had been intimately tied with the Cuban experiment. José Donoso expressed it very well in his Historia personal del boom: “I think that if the boom was almost completely unified in anything, it was in the firm belief in the cause of the Cuban Revolution; I think the disillusion caused by the Padilla case destroyed that, and destroyed the boom’s unity.”44 Many writers from many different countries, including Spain, shared Juan Goytisolo’s view when he said that by 1968 Cuba had ceased to be a model for him.45 Many personal relationships also came apart, many friendships, such as the intense, deep bond between Vargas Llosa and García Márquez. The wife of the Chilean writer José Donoso affirmed that, before those events, “Friendship, true friendship, with real affection, mutual respect, and admiration, was what bonded Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez. […] They admired each other, enjoyed each other’s company, their endless conversations, the walks they would take together around the city, and Mario wrote about Gabo.”46 María Pilar Donoso was referring to the book that Vargas Llosa had published about the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude, titled Gabriel García Márquez: historia de un deicidio, which had been his doctoral dissertation at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and was one of the best essays ever written on the work representing the pinnacle of the Colombian’s success, not reached again over the next thirty years of the twentieth century. However, the two great friends grew apart for political reasons, among other things. García Márquez remained loyal to Castro, but the writer from Peru deemed him, from that point on, to be “the great black beast to be battled.”47 García Márquez asserts that at one time the author of La ciudad y los perros “said that the Padilla case had separated him from his best friends, and the entire intellectual community of Latin America had been affected by the incident.”48
Dasso Saldívar also refers to that friendship and its rupture in his biography of García Márquez, Viaje a la semilla: “Until circumstances in their life, friendship, and politics separated them, putting them on divergent, even diametrically opposed paths, the two had honored the extensive parallels in their lives and had cultivated an intense, deep friendship the likes of which has rarely been seen in the world of Latin American letters.”49 In fact, since then, the two have very rarely expressed an opinion about the other, in public or in private. It seems like a mutual pact of nonaggression, reflecting total respect for the other’s literary work (the two best writers, in our opinion, of the boom), and for each other’s opposing political views.
Since that time, García Márquez has been criticized by many, starting with his old friend. Vargas Llosa began to call him “Castro’s courtesan,” Lee Anderson comments, “[a]nd the Cuban-exile writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante accuses him of suffering from delirium totalitarium.”50 Fortunately, he did not break with all his friends. In spite of their different ideas about Cuba, García Márquez still maintains a friendship with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, and with some other Cuban dissidents or exiles such as Eliseo Alberto, author of a hair-raising story on ideological control of intellectuals in Cuba titled Informe contra mí mismo (1997).
García Márquez explains his behavior regarding the Padilla case in terms of his direct, extensive knowledge of the Cuban Revolution, a knowledge drawn from channels that are not publicly recognized, a card up his sleeve that allows him to—as he puts it—judge more objectively. In El olor de la guayaba, Apuleyo Mendoza interviewed Gabo in 1982, and he explained then what his motivations were for not distancing himself from the Revolution. Cautious, and not a big fan of hard facts, García Márquez said that he had “much better, more direct information, and a political maturity that permits me a calmer, more patient, more human understanding of reality.”51 As on other occasions, Gabo’s journalist friend went away without getting the answers he had sought. Also, Gabo could have credibly made that assertion in 1982, by which time he knew the Cuban situation and its leaders very well, but it’s not a valid response for the year 1971, since at that time he had only indirect information on Cuba. In El caso perdido, Mendoza acknowledges the fruitlessness of his efforts, since many of their conversations on the subject went around in circles. Mendoza recalls one conversation:
“The things I could tell you….” Gabo would sometimes sigh.
“If you only knew….”
Yes, he is definitely the repository of certain powerful secrets that he cannot reveal. He must know all about the contentious relationship between Castro and the Soviet Union. Maybe it’s buried there, in secrets, the reasons for his allegiance.52
But the reality is more complex than it seems. García Márquez’s unconditional allegiance to the Revolution—and, subsequently, his refusal to criticize the Padilla case and others that followed—cannot be viewed solely in light of possible consequences from the dictatorship, since there are social and economic factors that seem to trump the attacks on freedom of expression. Mendoza, who declares his opposition to Stalinist methods, nevertheless makes an effort to try to understand his friend’s radical position when he says: “To put it in his own terms: there were only two soups on the menu. One soup probably included a certain amount of freedom, the possibility of writing editorials in the papers, giving speeches from the balconies, getting elected senator or councilman; but the children were starving and illiterate, and the sick suffered everywhere because they couldn’t go to a hospital. The other soup on the menu didn’t have the same kind of freedom that we had experienced before, but misery did not exist, the children ate, went to school, and had a roof over their heads, there were hospitals for the sick, and class differences were overcome. Between these two soups, between these two realities, the only ones on the table of the world, he had to choose. He made his choice. Of course I did not agree with him.”53
Obviously, it’s hard to justify acts of physical and psychological violence in the name of a regime that claims to be egalitarian and aims to solve the basic problems of survival of an enormous, desperately poor population, especially when it’s well known that, basically, their system has failed to achieve equality among all the members of its society. Maybe that is why he has displayed such reticence regarding this case and has always avoided giving clear answers.
Having weathered the initial grief and scandal that resulted from the self-accusation, Heberto Padilla was released from prison. He worked as a translator until, after ten years had passed, he obtained permission to leave the island, thanks to none other than Gabriel García Márquez. We know that the Nobel laureate has used his influence over Fidel to help political prisoners leave the island on numerous occasions. Mendoza attests: “His friendship with Castro has allowed him to effectively intervene to win the freedom of a great number of political prisoners. Three thousand two hundred, it seems. Thanks to him, to Gabo, Heberto Padilla could leave Cuba. Padilla called him at the hotel where he was staying in Havana. He went to see him. He asked for his help; he got it.”54
The last hurdle that Gabo had to get over was winning in the court of public opinion. Fidel Castro would never make very extensive statements on an issue of relatively minor importance at a time when the Cuban economy was in dire crisis because of the failure of the plan that Castro had formulated himself to radically increase sugar production, dubbed the “crop of ten million.” On the other hand, for a time, as we’ve previously described, García Márquez avoided any public appearances while the Padilla case was being resolved, so he wouldn’t be harassed by impertinent questions from a certain stripe of sensationalistic journalist. So the first time García Márquez discussed the subject at any length was during an interview he gave in Barranquilla to Julio Roca, a Colombian journalist from the Diario del Caribe. It was published in the magazine Libre at the end of 1971 as part of a compilation of writings (interviews, letters, texts from Castro’s speeches, and so forth) related to the Padilla case. Almost perfectly coinciding with the final events of the case, Roca had the opportunity to pose some very specific questions. He went right to the heart of the matter and waited for García Márquez to lay his cards on the table.
In the first part of the interview, Roca asked García Márquez what his position was going to be within the group of Latin American intellectuals who had clearly separated themselves from Castro’s Revolution. García Márquez, far from answering directly, denied that there had been any break. He ventured that “the conflict between a group of Latin American writers and Fidel Castro is an ephemeral triumph of the press agencies.”55 According to García Márquez, there was no conflict. It was the media that planted the seeds of the alleged problem and radicalized the positions, manipulating the speech that Castro gave at the First Congress on Education and Culture (from April 30 through May 6, 1971), only making the most inflammatory passages public. Still, he admitted that there were some strong statements in the speech, acknowledging that “actually there are some very harsh paragraphs.”56
So the situation could be blamed completely on the press, according to García Márquez. “The foreign correspondents—he insists—picked a few disconnected phrases out of context and strung them together to make it seem like Fidel had said things that in reality he did not say,”57 a blanket defense of the dictator that attempts to soften the general context of the confrontation with the intellectuals. Now, we know very well that Castro’s words were crude and cruel and his intention clear. According to César Leante, specifically referring to this situation, “Castro’s speech was one of the most vicious attacks on intellectuals that has ever been given.”58 In spite of his friendship with García Márquez, another of the implicated, Apuleyo Mendoza, in his book El caso perdido: La llama y el hielo, bitterly laments “that Fidel, in a speech delivered at the Congress on Culture in Havana, unleashed against the signers of the telegram […] such a barrage of vilification, describing us as a privileged elite, who frequented ‘the salons of Paris’ (as if we were living in the times of Proust).”59
In that interview, García Márquez stated that he hadn’t signed either of the two letters sent to Castro: “I didn’t sign the letter of protest because I didn’t think they should send it.”60 In the eighties—in 1982 and 1984, to be exact—he explained his constant support of the Cuban Revolution to Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza. However, at the time when the Padilla case had unfolded, Castro and García Márquez had not yet embarked upon the relationship, so much deeper than mere cordiality, that would bond them for so many years. In view of that, his explanation holds a certain mystery. How does he justify his faith in the revolution’s “vitality” and “good health,” and what really kept him from signing a letter of disagreement and protest? The ultimate motivation for those letters cannot be summarized as simply an abrupt criticism of the Revolution, but rather it represented above all an effort to guide the movement back onto the right political path, from which it had begun to stray. Also, at that time, especially regarding the first letter, the signers could not have predicted Castro’s reaction; proof of this is Julio Cortázar’s signature on the first letter.
In the last part of his explanation, García Márquez adds that “At no time would I ever question the intellectual honor and the revolutionary vocation of those who signed the letter.”61 García Márquez’s gesture, supportive of Castro while simultaneously supportive of the signers, allows him to navigate between two loyalties: maintaining unconditional service to the Revolution while respecting his own position as a leading member of the boom, a phenomenon beyond mere literary importance that had taken on a significance previously unseen in Latin American culture, transporting the written narrative of Nuestra America to the pinnacles of world literature in the latter half of the twentieth century. Gabo was aware of the damage that a complete polarization of positions could do, both to the Revolution itself and to the future of socialism in Latin America. He believed in the signers, and still considered them Revolutionaries, perhaps to mitigate Castro’s contempt for those who signed the letters of protest. The texts are very clear, and at no point do they indicate intent to destabilize the principles of the Revolution. In the first letter, for example, from the opening it is very clear that the signers are completely “supportive of the principles and goals of the Cuban Revolution”;62 and, in the second, the signers oppose Castro and his actions, but still consider themselves to be uncompromising Revolutionaries. And they concluded by expressing a sincere, transparent desire: “We would like the Cuban Revolution to go back to being once again what it had been at one time, and what made us consider it a very model of socialism.”63
It was not they, but Castro’s government, which was beginning to act in a manner completely opposed to the principles that originally drove the project. The signers of the letters did not understand this “Stalinist” infusion, nor were they about to accept it; and that is why they fought so emphatically for freedom of expression. Unfortunately, from then on, it became increasingly clear that what existed in Cuba was, as Manuel Díaz Martínez put it, “a government conspiracy against freedom of thought.”64 And, referring to Castro’s famous words “for the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing” from his speech to the intellectuals in 1961, he adds: “We finally knew, at last, that which was, in Castro’s view, for the Revolution and that which was against.”65 When the dictator affirmed that “to be judges, here you have to be true Revolutionaries, true intellectuals, true fighters,”66 he was clearly referring to those who are, in his opinion, false intermediaries, cloaking themselves in political and cultural authority, which only really belongs to him personally and his team of government, a small circle comprised exclusively of those who submissively follow the directives of their leader.
To complete the picture, the slant of García Márquez’s position on freedom of expression in his 1975 article “Cuba de cabo a rabo”67 is very revealing. In that text, Gabo expressed his hopes for the complete success of three upcoming events: the First Congress of the Communist Party; the exercise of the people’s power through universal vote by secret ballot; and the enactment of the Socialist Constitution. He added that during this institutionalization process, he would pay “special attention to the problem of freedom of creative expression and free speech.”68 That is to say, García Márquez admitted that the issues of creative expression and free speech represented a serious problem on the island, but in a sense they wouldn’t do so for long because “in their Constitution, the Cuban people have solved the problem with a stroke of the pen: all forms of artistic creativity are free.”69 However, when it came to content, the control was still as iron-handed and discouraging as it had been in the most difficult early days of the Revolutionary process. “But the next article,” the Colombian writer added, “isn’t quite as encouraging, as it refers to not the form, but the content of artistic creativity. This content—according to the proposed article—cannot oppose the principles of the Revolution in any way.”70 The following paragraph further accentuates the discord between García Márquez and the position of the Cuban government: “The limitation is alarming, especially since it assumes the existence of a functionary authorized to prejudge a work’s viability. But it’s also inconsequential, because it goes against the Constitution’s overall spirit, which is open and human, and it also goes against the wonderful sense of creative liberation, of unbridled imagination and critical happiness that permeates every aspect of life in Cuba today.”71
García Márquez was well aware of the role writers played within Latin American societies, and of freedom’s importance in stimulating artistic creativity and of the esteemed position literature held throughout the continent at that particular point in time. Consequently, the restrictions at work within the heart of the Cuban Revolution led to what became known as “the gray period” in the literary scene, during the early seventies, due to the notable absence of high-quality works being produced then on the island, in contrast to the blossoming of contemporary literature in other places such as Mexico, Peru, and Argentina. García Márquez, in his zeal to protect writers in the face of censorship, but also out of respect for the Cuban leader’s decisions, tried to identify positive aspects within some very alienating cultural policies. “The curious thing, and the most unfair,” he muses, “is that at the root of these policies is not contempt for the artist, but just the opposite: an exaggerated estimation of his importance in the world.”72 That is, an intellectual’s importance is relative because, since his mission to raise a country’s critical consciousness is crucial, he will never be a decisive destabilizing factor in a political or social system, unless that system has already begun to unravel. Regarding the exaggerated estimation of the intellectual’s role, Gabo stated: “This conviction implies the belief that a work of art can topple a social system and imperil the destiny of the world. If that had ever been or ever could be possible, it wouldn’t have been because of the destructive power of the work of art, but because of the internal, invisible erosions of the social system itself. After traveling all over Cuba from one end to the other, I haven’t the slightest doubt that the Revolution is safe from the subversive firestorms of the artists.”73 It seems that Fidel was not so sure, then or to this day, since there are still writers who are prohibited or censured on the island, the black sheep and the ostracized; and the repression has not stopped; but, in spite of that, internal dissidence continues to grow. García Márquez’s faith in the Castrist political machine and in socialism’s natural triumph in Latin America is such that any artificial control of the world of culture is simply unnecessary. If the Revolution works, the Revolution itself will naturally discharge any incongruous elements without violence. That is why, he insists, “any writer who dares to write a book against it, has no reason to run up against the Constitution. The Revolution will simply be mature enough to digest it.”74
The conclusion is clear: if, back in 1971, he had not been equipped to defend Castro’s Revolution and had disappeared for a time, and if his earlier answers had been vague, four years later, his faith in socialism in general, and in Castro’s system in particular, had been consolidated. He believed it was a viable system, because it would not only succeed in liberating the lower classes from the oppression they had been subjected to, but it could also assimilate internal criticisms, incorporating them into the various forces that comprised the framework of social balance, and even use them as opportunities to strengthen the island’s development and progress.
The question about the Padilla case from the 1971 interview with Julio Roca could not have been more clear: “Do you agree or disagree with Castro with regard to the poet Padilla’s case?”75 As was by now the norm in public opinion, Cuba-related issues were always framed in a way that did not allow for any nuance. To the Cuban traveling abroad or living in exile in any country, his next-door neighbor, his seatmate on the train, his thesis adviser, someone he sees every morning having breakfast at the same coffee shop, someone behind him in line at the movies, and so on, everyone always instinctively asks him, “Are you from Cuba, or from Miami?” This gross simplification always, understandably, provokes Cubans’ anger in knowing that, at the outset of a conversation, before they have even opened their mouths, an ill-fitting label has already been slapped on them, no matter which side they are on. García Márquez, who has a special affinity for Cuba, is, nevertheless, incapable of expressing a solidly decisive opinion on the case, either due to a genuine lack of detailed information, or to an inability to openly oppose Castro on a matter that, in the harsh light of day, was a significant political error and an abuse of power. With his response “I, personally, am not convinced of the spontaneity and sincerity of Heberto Padilla’s self-accusation,”76 or when he says “the tone of his self-accusation is so exaggerated, so abject, that it seems as if it had been obtained by devious methods,”77 or when he acknowledges that Padilla cannot be properly defined as a counterrevolutionary writer, his position seems clear and his discordance with Castro obvious. He would never refer directly to who was ultimately responsible for the process, much less would he insinuate that there was a failure in the ideological system that sustains the Revolution. He would only venture to allude to the negative effect that the censured poet’s position could have on the future of the country: “I don’t know if Heberto Padilla’s attitude is actually damaging the Revolution,” he said, “but his self-accusation is damaging it, very seriously.”78 That is to say, Padilla, according to García Márquez, while not an enemy of the Revolution, was perhaps the cause, unconsciously, of certain prejudices that could damage, in untold ways, Castro’s ability to construct a better society.
Then, as an almost direct outgrowth of what they had just talked about, the interviewer asked if García Márquez could comment on suspected Stalinist influence within Cuba’s domestic politics, to which García Márquez replies that this would all become clear soon because, if that were the case, “Fidel himself will admit it.”79 His total confidence in the supreme leader is made clear once again, but the most revealing thing here is that he does not deny Stalinism’s possible presence within Cuba. He could have offered his own opinion, issued a flat denial, or sidestepped the question. Still, his answer shows how Gabo believed that he had extensive insight into Castro’s strategy to emerge unscathed from the serious problem that had been growing over time. So when Roca asked if García Márquez was going to break with the Revolution, his answer could not have been more clear: “Of course not.”80 He went on to insist, once again, that there had not been any rupture between the Latin American intellectuals and the Cuban government: “Of the writers who protested the Padilla case,” he assured, “none have made a break from the Cuban Revolution, as far as I know.”81 With the advantage of hindsight, thirty years later, we can analyze these texts within the context of knowing how events actually unfolded. We know, for example, that in the wake of the Padilla case, a considerable disbandment of the intellectuals as a group did take place. Perhaps it was not so obvious at that time, but neither could it be credibly said that nothing at all had happened that could indicate a possible disbandment. So it is reasonable to assume that Gabo was aware of the consequences his decision could have and, although his position was not entirely without criticism, the interview ended with a vote of confidence for the Revolution and a clear expression of his continuing solidarity with it, which “cannot be affected by a glitch in cultural politics, even if that glitch is as considerable and serious as Heberto Padilla’s supposed self-accusation.”82 He played his hand, but the bluffs went around the table so much that public opinion had no idea what he was holding—like a suspenseful scene out of The Sting. García Márquez, who had not set foot on Cuban soil since his stint working at Prensa Latina, tried to draw closer to the bearded men in power, through his public statements and using his personal contacts. Over time, Gabo has become one of the best ambassadors of the Revolution and socialism on the world stage, while Castro has gradually become one of the most decisive literary critics for the Nobel Prize winner’s work.