"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
Showing posts with label Heberto Padilla. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Heberto Padilla. Show all posts
Today remembering Dr. Li Wenliang. The hero who warned about the initial COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan, China. He was grabbed by secret police in the middle of the night & threatened with prosecution for making "untrue statements." He died a year ago. https://t.co/PfbSgLehNQ#Hero
"It is worth recalling in this regard that Cuba once had a vibrant, substantial Jewish community of 15,000, including 20th-century refugees from Hitler’s Germany. Over 90% have been driven into exile by the Castro regime’s anti-Zionism & its use of Holocaust-denial propaganda." https://t.co/3Fb61uPyRM
Totalitarianism continues in Cuba under Raul Castro.
On June 30, 1961 Fidel Castro gave his speech to [Cuba's] intellectuals
where he summed up the limits of artistic expression: 'Within the
revolution, everything; outside of it, nothing,' he told intellectuals
and artists. Nearly a decade later on April 27, 1971 the case of Heberto Padilla underscored the limits of artistic expression in Cuba.
Index on Censorship described the aftermath of Padilla's interrogation and self-criticism stating,
"whatever the reason for his confession, it served as a harbinger of
what was to follow: a period known as the Grey Five Years in which
dozens of Cuban artists and writers were banished from public life."
This was how intellectuals and artists would be dealt with who strayed
out of the prescribed limits imposed by the Castro regime.
The war on artistic freedom is not unique to the Castro regime, or a
mistake, but a feature of communist and fascist systems. Totalitarians
have had a hostile relationship with the arts, and with artists seeking
to control them. In the Soviet Union modern art was declared subversive
by Josef Stalin, and socialist realism with an optimistic tone the politically correct style. Artists destroyed or hid their work that did not accord with the new aesthetic. In Nazi Germany, modern art was declared degenerate
and a style that mirrored in appearance their Soviet counterparts, and
repression was visited upon artists that did not adhere to the official
style.
Sixty years after Castro's infamous speech and Cuban artists and intellectuals are persecuted and jailed for
advocating for greater
political and artistic freedom on the island.
Cuban artist Hamlet Lavastida jailed by secret police in Villa Marista.
Cuban artist Hamlet Lavastida, "a member of Cuba’s 27N movement
of artists, journalists, and activists who advocate for greater
political and artistic freedom on the island, was arrested on 26 June
after returning to the island from an artist’s residency in Germany,
according to 27N members", reported The Art Newspaper on June 28, 2021.
"PEN America and PEN International [on June 28, 2021] condemned the detention of Cuban visual artist and
activist Hamlet Lavastida, calling his abrupt imprisonment following a
residency abroad an unjust, disturbing representation of the alarming
government culture of hostility toward dissenting artists in Cuba," declared the organizations that defend free expression in a joint statement.
On May 18, 2021 Cuban authorities arrested and detained rapper and activist Maykel Castillo. On June 18th, the one month mark of this arbitrary detention, "PEN America, along with CADAL, the Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America, condemned the Cuban authorities for their arbitrary detention of Castillo and called for his immediate release." Julie Trebault, director of the Artists at Risk Connection (ARC) at PEN America stated, “the fact that Castillo has been kept in prison for more than a month—and that his family, friends, and supporters have been kept in the dark as to his condition and the reasons for his arbitrary detention—is simply unacceptable.” Today, June 30th marks 36 days disappeared and jailed for saying what he thinks.
37 years ago the 1984 documentary Improper Conduct outlined how Cuban artists that did not conform, or were deemed to be engaged in “extravagant behavior” were sent to work camps or forced into exile by the Castro regime. The repressive nature of the dictatorship has not changed.
"No one should be deprived of liberty for defending their rights and expressing themselves in the face of injustice.Let us demand this Wednesday # 30Jun that #LiberenALosDeObispo and all those who have been unjustly detained for defending the rights that the Cuban dictatorship constantly violates."
"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."
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.
— 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.
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