The Padilla Affair 50 years later: How a political show trial boomeranged against the Castro regime on April 27, 1971

"The pen is mightier than the sword." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton (1839)

Heberto Padilla's identification permit

The Castro regime has copied many aspects of the Soviet experiment, but on more than one occasion failed to get the desired effect. On April 27, 2021 the world will mark the 50th anniversary of the Padilla Affair. This was a show trial where a poet confessed his counter-revolutionary tendencies, in a 4,000 word confession, but it did not have the effect Havana desired it boomeranged on the communists. 

Oxford Languages defines a show trial as "a judicial trial held in public with the intention of influencing or satisfying public opinion, rather than of ensuring justice." 

Final page of Padilla's confession

Vladimir Lenin called them "model trials", but they would eventually become known as show trials under Josef Stalin with hundreds of thousands executed and millions sent to work camps in Siberia, and they would take place not only in the Soviet Union, but in the East Bloc, and as far away as Cuba. The Nazis also copied the practice, and so have other repressive regimes. 

This blog looked at the 1946 show trial of Milada Horakova, and the price she paid for not going along: "intentionally slow strangulation, which according to historians took 15 minutes." She was 48 years old." The urn with her ashes was never given to her family nor is it known what became of them.  Communists in Czechoslovakia hid her testimony for decades because it cast them in a negative light, and Milada as a heroic martyr.

Arthur Koestler dramatized how this machinery operates on the individual level with the show trial in the novel Darkness at Noon.  In the typical Stalinist show trial the accused pleads guilty to all the crimes he or she did not commit then is sentenced to some sort of draconian punishment and gives thanks to the regime for its generosity.

Heberto Padilla, a Cuban poet, who like many had been an enthusiastic supporter of Fidel Castro ousting Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, became disillusioned when the Castro regime's dictatorial nature became clear, and reflected it in his writings.

In 1968, however, Cuban judges in the national poetry contest awarded their "Julian  del Casal" poetry prize to Padilla's collection, Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game), which contained critical lines such as:

"The poet! Kick him out!
He has no business here.
He doesn't play the game.
He never gets excited
Or speaks out clearly.
He never even sees the miracles ..."

The book was published but an addendum was added that criticized the work as counterrevolutionary, and Heberto Padilla was placed under house arrest. In March 1971 he was interrogated for a month and on April 27, 1971 forced to confess before the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, UNEAC). The New York Times on May 26, 1971 described what had gone on and printed an excerpt of the confession in an editorial. Padilla's wife Belkis has also written about their arrest in March 1971 and the knock on the door, and the search of their home by the secret police.

Heberto Padilla with his wife Belkiz Cuza Malé in Cuba in 1973. Photo

 

This was a disaster for the Castro regime. Intellectuals of the caliber of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Susan Sontag, who had defended the Cuban Revolution, organized to protest Padilla's mistreatment. Mexican poet and Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz and Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, also broke with the dictatorship as did many others.

Half a century later on Tuesday, April 27, 2021, a choral reading of Heberto Padilla’s confession will be streamed via social media over 24 hours. Twenty Cuban intellectuals from the island and the diaspora, directed by Cuban American artist Coco Fusco, are participating in the project organized by the San Isidro International Movement and 27N.

 On April 27, in honor of the 50th anniversary of Cuban poet Heberto Padilla's legendary confession, 20 Cuban intellectuals will present a reading of the confession. Stay tuned! (In Spanish with English subtitles.) https://t.co/unIXTfBnPN@cocofusco1960 @27Ncuba @Mov_sanisidro pic.twitter.com/kK2fpKmo1H

— Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) (@AtRiskArtists) April 23, 2021

Heberto Padilla would suffer ostracism, and harassment until 1979 when he went into exile, and continued his criticism of the Castro regime, and in 1984 appeared in the film "Improper Conduct" where his case was highlighted, and he discussed Raul's Castro visit to Bulgaria and saw that the streets were very clean, without anti-social elements, especially the homosexuals, and that they had been placed in camps. Raul Castro returned to Cuba and instituted the practice with his brother, Fidel's approval in the 1960s.

There had been and would be other show trials in Cuba, and some of the most notorious were the show trial of Huber Matos in 1959 , Ochoa Trial of 1989, and the Black Cuban Spring show trials of 2003, and each left their mark, but the Padilla Affair was the most explicit demonstration that under Castro thoughtcrime would be prosecuted. Read the excerpt of Padilla's confession below to understand why it outraged people of conscience.

The New York Times, May 26, 1971

‘Confessions’ of a Cuban Poet  

The Cuban poet Heberto Padilla was arrested in Cuba in March and released last month after “confessing” to wrong doing and wrong thinking. (His treatment prompted sixty European and American intellectuals to write to Premier Fidel Castro to express shame and anger.) The text of Mr. Padilla's “confession” was distributed in New York by the Cuban Mission to the United Nations with the explanation that the poet had “admitted to counterrevolutionary activities and asked for an opportunity to expose and discuss his conduct publicly.” This article is excerpted from the “confession”:

I have meditated profoundly before deciding to write this letter. I am not doing so through fear of the inevitable and just consequences of my contemptible, well‐known and demonstrated attitudes—demonstrated far beyond what I myself could ever have imagined possible. I am moved by a sincere desire to make amends, to compensate the Revolution for the harm I may have occasioned and to compensate myself spiritually. I may prevent others from losing themselves stupidly.

But, above all, I desperately want to be believed and my action not to be taken for cowardice, although I myself am overcome with shame at my own actions.

For many days I struggled with myself to make the decision to tell the truth. I did not even want my truth to be as it really was. I preferred my disguise, my appearances, my justifications, my evasions. I had become accustomed to living in a deceitful and subtle game. I did not dare to confess how ignoble, how unjust, how unworthy my position was: I really lacked courage to do so.

Under the disguise of the writer in revolt within a socialist society I hid opposition to the Revolution, behind the ostentations of the critical poet. who paraded his morbid irony, the only thing I really sought was to express my counterrevolutionary hostility. Among both Cubans and foreigners I accused the Revolution unjustly of the worst things. Among both Cubans and foreigners I discredited every one of the initiatives of the Revolution, striving to look like an intellectual who was an expert in problems I had no information neither knew anything about; and following this course I committed grave faults against the true intellectual's moral code, and what is worse, against the Revolution itself.

What I wanted was to call attention to myself, to profit from the scandal. I wanted to be the only writer with a political mind in Cuba, the only writer capable of confronting the revolutionary process and to impose my ideas. Hypocritically and contemptuously, I repeated the old theory that politics is too serious a matter to leave to the politicians.

I who had not achieved anything either before or after the Revolution, I wanted fame and looked for it along a road that could only lead to counter revolution.

My ego-centrism was growing by leaps and bounds. The B.B.C. of London did a long interview with me in color for a program dedicated to Cuban education and culture. A Canadian radio station sought me out for more interviews.

Because my vanity then had no limits I carried my disaffected political positions to heights I never should have scaled: to poetry. I was convinced that a poem which would represent a supposed criticism of the Revolution would awaken the interest of certain international circles: the circles of skepticism and hatred toward Revolutions. That's how I came to write insidious and provocative poems which, under the clever appearance of dislocations because of the problems and demands of history, expressed no other thing than the temperament of the unbeliever, the cynic, a verse‐maker trapped by his own moral and intellectual limitations.

I have been tremendously ungrateful, unjust with Fidel, and the deep repentance I feel for having acted that way motivates me to make amends for my cowardly and counterrevolutionary virulence.

When I have mentally reviewed the fragments I wrote, parts of the novel, I have felt extraordinary shame. It seems to me incredible that I could have thought that this sickly bundle of papers—containing all my bitterness—could have had some intellectual and human worth. Not only were they politically negative and deformed, not only did they reflect my ideological and counterrevolutionary vacillations, but they also expressed a profound disenchantment with life, with hope and the poetry of life. The man who wrote those pages was a man who was headed toward his own moral and physical destruction.

Only the vanity and petulance of considering myself worthy of all honors could lure me into such a plan— one that as always was linked to the outside world, to the purpose of giving my prestige a boost in the foreign periodicals, editorial and public. And among my most serious mistakes is precisely this one: to think that I, a Cuban, could live a double life: on the one hand vegetate like a parasite in the shadow of the Revolution, while on the other cultivate my literary popularity abroad at the cost of the Revolution and helped by its enemies.

https://www.nytimes.com/1971/05/26/archives/confessions-of-a-cuban-poet.html

pic.twitter.com/PFP7VSvX0g

— coco fusco (@cocofusco1960) April 25, 2021