And the second hypothesis of those who analyze dictatorships is that the permanent vigilance of organizations like the CDR inhibits, in effect, one of the tendencies that would be most dangerous for any totalitarian state: the spontaneous creation of independent institutions and organizations in the heart of civil society.

One of the most important functions of a totalitarian state is to break down society, to keep people from coming together for any purpose that isn't defined by the government. While open societies are characterized by the free presence of institutions created by people who feel an urge to participate and have an influence on issues of shared concern (institutions that other citizens can join, if they wish to), by contrast, closed societies as a rule offer just a few very narrowly defined avenues for social expression, all of which are under tight supervision. Under the strict control of the ruling apparatus, everyone is assigned an obligatory role for participating in what the Constitution calls "mass organizations", and citizens are forced to participate under the threat of becoming outcasts or being punished. Totalitarian states create stable-like societies and with each one of its organizations, which are nothing more than barns where people congregate according to age, gender or profession, to hear the instructions imparted by the center of power.

And what is that center of power? Fidel Castro, obviously, but he has a whole apparatus at his disposal and service: the Communist Party and its various regional and national tribunals, including the Central Committee, as well as a shadowy Parliament, the National Assembly of the Popular Power, whose function is to meet for 72 hours, twice a year, to unanimously approve the measures taken by the public administration through decrees or simple administrative memorandums.

According to this model, the children are first "pioneros," (literally, pioneers), then they are enrolled in student associations created to control secondary education and college and to start selecting those who will go on to the Communist Youth organization. Later, if they are not "revolutionary" enough to enter the university, they are picked up by the Federation of University Students; the ladies join the Federation of Cuban Women and everybody, through the workplace, becomes part ofthe only and obligatory union that defends. . . not the interests of the workers, but those of the Party; in some sectors, there are special organizations, since artists and intellectuals, for example, tend to be isolated creators; these, too, are carefully supervised by the state, of course. There are other institutions, but there's no value in mentioning them separately, because the role of these structures is not to facilitate citizen participation nor to stimulate their particular initiatives, but to serve as a conduit to transmit orders emanating from the top.

Death to the Intelligentsia

The first inkling the world (including the Left) had of the absolute lack of space allowed for independent thinking in Cuba was what came to be known as "the Padilla case". There were many others, but they went, painfully, unnoticed. Everything started in 1967, with a piece of literary criticism which El Caimán Barbudo (The Bearded Cayman), a Communist Youth publication, asked the poet Heberto Padilla to write. Padilla, a young but already notable Cuban writer, had recently returned from the USSR. He had figured out that if the future of Cuba was what he had seen in Moscow, then the most appropriate course would be to flee that miserable destiny. He was asked to write a piece on Pasión de Urbino, a failed novel by Lisandro Otero, who was then and is to this day the regime's official writer (as his embarrassing memoir, published in 1999, shows). Padilla attacked the book, contrasting Otero with Guillermo Cabrera Infante, a famous Cuban novelist who liked to experiment with language, and who after a period of revolutionary militancy had taken exile in London. In his critique, in addition to outlining the weaknesses of Otero's book, Padilla took the opportunity to criticize Party bureaucrats.

The year after that incident, a year in which articles and public letters had already started to accuse Padilla of aligning himself with the counter-revolutionaries, an independent jury convened by the UNEAC (Union of Cuban Writers and Artists) and including foreign critics gave an award to Padilla's excellent collection of poems Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game). The collection was openly critical of totalitarianism. In that same contest, playwright Anton Arrufat was also honored, for his work Los siete contra Tebas (Seven Against Tebas), in which you could easily read between the lines a rejection of the dictatorship. Alarms went off immediately. In Cuba, no one has license to attack the system. The Revolution did not block the publication of such counterrevolutionary works, but had them appear with a disclaimer in a prologue written by the literary critic José Antonio Portuondo, a meticulous Stalinist of the old PSP.

The incident was highly publicized and Padilla became a noted figure in Havana. In a way, he was the only free Cuban in the country. He said what he wanted to, out loud. He was a critical intellectual and he communicated to visitors everything that everyone else in Cuba was trying to hide: the fact that the Revolution had turned into a nightmare. The poet Belkis Cuza, like many other European intellectuals, visited his house (which he shared with his then wife). The Polish writer K. S. Karol, the Frenchman René Dumont, the German Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the Spaniards Juan Goytisolo and Carlos Barral: all of them visited the island and listened with admiration to Padilla's judgments. He was intelligent and gifted with an extraordinary oral ability. His commentary was bitter. He did not just stick his finger on the wound, he ripped open the wound with the tip of his tongue. The police watched, and took notes. Little by little, he became an enfant terrible... until one day in 1971. In that year - the unfortunate year of the First National Congress on Education and Culture - Castro decided to tighten the screws on the intellectuals, and Padilla was a perfect scapegoat to impart the necessary lessons. The Congress was scheduled to take place at the end of April, and it was high time to start disciplining the always timid ranks of the intelligentsia. By destroying Padilla, humiliating him, forcing him into line, the tight margins of creation allowed by the Revolution would become clear to the rest of the intellectuals. On March 20, his arrest was ordered.

But Castro had not noticed - or he didn't care - that Padilla has developed extensive international relations; numerous intellectuals in the West were prepared to protest his detention. On April 2, the Pen Club of Mexico sent a dry telegram to the comandante, criticizing the arrest of the Cuban poet and urging that he be freed. The letter was signed by people of the caliber of Octavio Paz, Carlos Fuentes, Juan Rulfo, Gabriel Zaid and Jose Luis Cuevas - in total, some twenty of the most important Mexican creative minds, some of them identified with Marxism. A week later, Le Monde in Paris, from a leftist perspective as always, ran a letter expressing the same sentiment. The signatories were, among others, Jean-Paul Sartre, Iralo Calvino, Alberto Moravia. Simone de Beauvoir, Juan and Luis Goytisolo, Jorge Semprún. Marguerite Duras, Carlos Franqui, and Mario Vargas Llosa. These latter were the most indignant and the ones who began to feel the greatest repugnancy for the Cuban dictatorship.

In Havana, meanwhile, in the torture chambers of State Security apparatus, the political police were diligently at work. They insulted, beat and intimidated Padilla until, as they say in police jargon, he "broke." Padilla agreed to publicly retract his "crimes." Security proposed that he read a humiliating text. Padilla "enriched" it with additional vile statements, and memorized it. The police did not realize what a subtle maneuver this was. The poet arrived at the conclusion that the more cowardly he seemed, and the more abject his declaration, the less credible its contents would be.

1 | 2 | 3 | 4