Fidel Castro was once the particular pet of Europe’s non-Communist left. Lately, however, El Jefe has come under increasing attack from his erstwhile admirers for his administrative failures and his increasing reliance upon Moscow, which keeps some 30,000 “advisers” in Cuba to help run things. Last week Fidel was smarting as a result of the most intense criticism to date from leftist intellectuals for his Soviet-style crackdown on a Cuban poet named Heberto Padilla.
For some time Padilla’s verse was allowed to circulate freely, even after his critical stance toward the regime had begun to attract attention abroad. But he ran into major trouble in 1968, when an international panel of leftist intellectuals assembled by Castro’s government awarded Cuba’s national poetry prize to Out of the Game, a collection of Padilla’s verse that had been banned by the regime as “revolutionarily unfit.” One poem suggested that anyone who wanted to get along in the new Communist Cuba should learn
…to walk as every member does: one step forward, and two or three backwards: but always applauding.
The award enraged the rigidly orthodox leaders of Cuba’s Writers and Artists Union, and Padilla’s book was published in Cuba only after the insertion of a prologue pronouncing it “full of skepticism, ambiguities, critical philosophy and anti-historicism.” Almost immediately, Verde Olivo, the Cuban armed forces magazine, began a series of anti-Padilla broadsides, accusing him of “assisting the CIA by erroneous writing.”
Under Torture. Last March Padilla was arrested without charges and thrown into dank Campo Libertad, a prison in Havana. In a letter to Castro, a group of prominent intellectuals (among them: Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Alberto Moravia and Carlos Fuentes) protested. But what got him out, five weeks later, were his own words. Padilla abjectly confessed to “a series of insults and defamations against the revolution, which are now—and always will be—my shame.” He accused European leftist Writers K.S. Karol and René Dumont, who recently published critical studies of Castro’s regime (TIME. Feb. 8), of being “unquestionably CIA agents.”
Self-exiled Cuban Novelist Juan Arcocha, an old friend of Padilla’s who now lives in France, insists that the poet’s “selfcriticism could have been signed in only one way: under torture.” That is unproven, but one thing is beyond dispute. Padilla’s evidently forced recantation only further estranged Castro from his quondam admirers. “The pit between Cuba’s leaders and the non-Communist European or Latin American Left is being dug deeper,” wrote Marcel Niedergang, a longtime friend and supporter of Castro, in France’s Le Monde. For his part, Fidel turned his big-bore verbal artillery against the intellectuals. “So they are at war with us,” said Castro in a Havana speech. “Magnificent! They are nothing more than brazen pseudo-leftists who instead of being here in the trenches live in the bourgeois salons 10,000 miles from the problems. They are going to be unmasked and left nude to the ankles.”
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