On April 27, 1971, the UNEAC met. The meeting was packed with writers. The intellectuals were in a panic. They already knew that, the night before, Padilla had been set free and that he was going to explain what had happened. Nicolás Guillén, the UNEAC's " very elderly president, opted to stay at home. Maybe, that was due to some stirring of his conscience. Nicolás was not a bad person. The session was presided over by José Antonio Portuondo. A mixture of fear and curiosity prevailed. Padilla began his lengthy and tiresome speech. It was a perfect genuflection. He described his own degenerate morals, he attacked Guillermo Cabrera Infante, he reconciled with Lisandro Otero, he sang the praises of the generous Revolution, he flattered the boundless cordiality of the fraternal police officers who interrogated him during an unforgettable month of political education, he celebrated Fidel's wisdom.

How much farther can one go? You'd be surprised. Padilla denounced the ideological weaknesses of other writers: Lezama Lima, César López, Belkis - his own wife, Pablo Armando Fernández, Manuel Díaz Martínez, Norberto Fuentes. In the eyes of the public, he had turned into a pathetic and cowardly informer. Not to those in State Security, who knew perfectly well his critical political stance with regard to those writers; they took the poet's accusations as an excuse to launch a sinister warning. Padilla ended his deposition with the ritual clamors of the Castroist tribe: "The homeland or death! 'We shall triumph!"

The nauseating ceremony had its consequences. In Paris, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Marío Vargas Llosa, editors of the magazine Libre (Free), wrote another letter, far harsher this time, referring to the trials in Moscow when the Stalinist police extracted the most incredible confessions and self-criticism from detainees. They collected 100 signatures. Susan Sontag, Alain Resnais, Valerio Riva, Juan Marsé, José Angel Valente, Jose Miguel Ullán, Carlos Monsiváis, and Jose Emilio Pacheco, among many others, lent their names to the overwhelming denunciation.

Padilla's declaration had the effect the poet had intended, and it multiplied. His case was turning into a breaking point for a large proportion of the intellectual left, which until that moment had supported the Revolution. That rupture has lasted until today. Sacrificing his own honor, he dealt a heavy blow to the image of the Revolution abroad.

But none of this mattered much to el comandante. For Castro, it was vital to maintain tight control on power and to restrain his wayward intellectuals. On April 30, he closed the Congress and launched a ferocious attack against the foreign intellectuals who had dared to ask his government to allow Cuban intellectuals the freedom to express themselves. He warned that, from that moment on, the standards would be even stricter. "There are books," he said, "of which not a word, not a comma should be published." He ended the text with a definitive phrase: "Within the Revolution, everything; outside the Revolution, nothing." There was not the smallest of spaces allowed for dissidence. The nervous intellectuals applauded. The UNEAC was not a forum for open debates, but an institution by which to receive orders and instructions. The "Padilla case" was only another turn of the screw.

It's not strange to find that a society organized in such a rigid manner - in which "everything that is not prohibited is obligatory", as they say - generates huge numbers of disaffected or disillusioned people, who are executed, sent to jail, live in ostracism in what they call "the exile within", or find themselves obliged to flee the country. Throughout these last 40 years, how many Cubans have been condemned for political crimes that range from real or imagined conspiracies to the sale or purchase of meat, in the black market, to sustain their family? Literally, tens of thousands of people.

And you did not have to be a well-known poet like Padilla to go to prison for intellectual whims. When he was an adolescent, Juan Manuel Cao (today a star reporter for Channel 51 in Miami) suffered two years of confinement because the political police - weapons drawn and yelling "Nobody move!" - confiscated some Beatles records, a book by Jorge Edwards, and a few humorous political verses ("I shit on communism/on Fidel and on Marxism/and on any strange word that ends that way"). Lazaro Lazo, turned in by his brother-in-law, was sentenced to prison for having written to a friend an "irreverent" letter against Castro in which he called the dictator "Comandante Guarapo" - the name of the popular sugarcane juice. During the ensuing house search, they found the manuscript of some old unpublished stories by the writer Jose Antonio Zarraluqui, wherein Zarraluqui made veiled criticisms of the regime - so he, too, ended up in prison for a good number of years.

How many Cubans have been in this Kafka-esque situation? Probably some 150,000, scattered in more than 100 prisons and "re-education" farms, says Arnoldo Müller, who became an expert on the unfortunate topic of the Cuban Gulag. He was one of its prisoners for an entire decade, during which he alternated between working like a slave and enduring constant surveillance. And how many Cubans have been executed for actively opposing the regime? There are many numbers. The smallest estimate is 5000; the highest is 18000. In any case, the number is painfully high. Pinochet is condemned, justly, for assassinating a little more than 3000 opponents. Castro has killed at least twice that amount.

And when the comandante defends himself, saying that in Cuba there has been "not one case of torture or of missing people," he lies without shame, or he disguises the truth until it is unrecognizable. In addition to the many moving denunciations, like Armando Valladares' book Against All Hope, year after year Amnesty International, Pax Christi, Of Human Rights, and the Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States report on the terrible abuse suffered by prisoners in Cuban detention centers. Juan Valdés de Armas, a student sentenced to twelve years, remembers that the student leader Alfredo Carrión Obeso, Francisco Noda, Danny Crespo, Diosdado Aquit, Ernesto Díaz Madruga, Julio Tang, and Eddy Alvarez Molina were as assassinated in jail - to name just a few. So many prisoners have received horrific beatings, among them Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, Alfredo Izaguirre, Juan Antonio Muller, Emilio Adolfo Rivero Caro, and Miguel Torres - who became a paraplegic. There are also those who endured many years without visits, isolated in tapiadas, enclosed cells in which they had to sleep on the floor, on top of their own excrement, with no other company but the rats and cockroaches. This was the fate of the poets Angel Cuadra and Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez, and of Angel de Fana, José Pujals, Nicolás Pérez, Ramón Mestre and the architect Salvador Subirá. And while it may be true that cases of "missing" opponents are exceptions, not the rule, unlike what happened in the military dictator ships of the Southern Hemisphere, this is only due to the fact that in Cuba it is legal to assassinate opponents. In the Argentina of Jorge Rafael Videla or the Chile of Agusto Pinochet, the law did not permit this barbaric treatment. Why stop your opponents, under cover of night and anonymity, shoot them in the head and leave them in a ditch - as happened frequently in South America - when it is perfectly possible to arrest, try and execute them in 24 hours, as has been done in Castro's Cuba an infinite number of times?

If there is a difference in the degree of bestiality prevailing in the conventional dictatorships of Latin America and Castro's - forgetting the lamentable fact that the Cuban regime has gone on for twice as long as that of Pinochet's and four times as long as Argentina's - it is in the treatment of women. The truth is that Castro has not executed women, he has not kidnapped their children, and he has not applied electric shock torture to their genitals. But those self-imposed limits have not stopped his government from treating female political prisoners with prolonged and extraordinary cruelty, unseen in the history of Latin America and absolutely unknown in pre-Castro Cuba, even during the Machado or Batista dictatorships.

Hundreds of Cuban women have survived for years in infectious dungeons, their guards have beaten them until they passed out, they have suffered hunger and malnutrition, or have been prohibited from contact with their families, children included. All of this has been related in detail by testimonies such as that of Dr. Martha Frayde - once a collaborator, friend and ambassador to UNESCO for Castro, and later political prisoner - in books like Todo lo dieron por Cuba (They Gave Everything for Cuba) by Mignon Medrano, or the shocking biography of Ana Lázara Rodriguez, Diary of a Survivor; a brilliant medical student who went into prison at age 20 and came out, destroyed, at 40.

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