On December 31, 1958, Fidel Castro overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista. The Cuban revolution triumphed to the joy of a large part of the country's large group of intellectuals. Novelists, poets and artists celebrated the departure of the dictator and the arrival of the new political airs, convinced that with the new regime "there was room for criticism and freedom".
But that belief faded in the wake of the Padilla case. The poet Heberto Padilla received Castro enthusiastically. In 1959 he worked for the newspaper Revolución and it did not take him long to settle in the Soviet Union, where he was a correspondent for the Cuban media. He returned to the island in 1966 already disenchanted with the USSR and perhaps also with Castroism. But he remained convinced that the revolution had not ended freedom of expression. And he published a collection of poems, Fuera del juego (1968), which pleased his colleagues and won the Julián del Casal Prize awarded by the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba.
But Castro's government did not share this enthusiasm. On March 20, 1971, after reading his work Provocaciones in public, Padilla was arrested with his wife, fellow poet Belkis Cuza Malé. They were accused of subversive activities. Padilla and Cuza were held in the Villa Marista prison for 38 days. It was never known for sure what happened during that incarceration, but when he was released, Padilla was a different man, a repentant man.
So sorry that he gathered the cream of the Cuban intelligentsia to sing the mea culpa out loud with lights and stenographers. Rivers of ink have flowed over Padilla's self-criticism before the Union of Cuban Writers. It was a long speech (in the best Castro style) that went on for hours, in which the writer repudiated his critical works and once again enthusiastically embraced the regime. It also gave rise to the disenchantment of many Hispanic writers with Castroism.
But of what Padilla said that day in front of the biggest crowd in Cuban literature, we only knew what some of those present had explained and a transcript of his speech. Bye now. A few months ago, the Cuban filmmaker Pavel Giroud received a cassette in Beta format with the recording of Padilla's complete Self-Criticism. "I don't know who sent it to me or where it came from, but yes there were more copies, although no one dared to use it", explains Giroud in an interview with La Vanguardia during his recently passed through Barcelona to participate in the BCN Film Fest.
“I thought a lot about what to do with this material. I could have uploaded it to the internet, but only regular people would have downloaded it, so I decided to make a film about it so that the case would have more impact, and time has proved me right", adds the director who has turned this material received in such a mysterious way into the documentary El caso Padilla, which will be released in Spanish cinemas on Friday.
Giroud believes that this film, which "is going around the whole world", has served to "make the blindfold fall off the eyes of many". And the fact is that the film shows how short the airs of freedom lasted in Castro's Cuba. " Guillermo Cabrera Infante said that censorship arrived in 1961 and he was right. Fidel met with the intellectuals of the island that year at the National Library and there he dictated the rules of the game: against the revolution, nothing".
Castro conveyed that the artists could do what they wanted, but that the contents had a limit. Several intellectuals showed their concern. Rightly so, because they soon began to close some newspapers, then things escalated and the guinea pig was Padilla, since his case was used as an example of public education".
What happened to Heberto during these 38 days in the Villa Marista criminal accident? "Padilla explained that they assaulted him there, but he probably suffered psychological torture with which they destabilized him, instilled fear in him and forced him to send the message to his guild that had to go through the addressee," says Giroud .
But not everyone present at Padilla's lengthy self-deprecation shared the message at first. Norberto Fuentes, another of the writers singled out by the regime, did not want to incriminate himself and rebutted Padilla with a long and controversial speech in which he defended that he was not counter-revolutionary in any way. Giroud explains that Fuentes "came out to speak in search of affection and attention, he had been very close to Fidel and one of the regime's writers, but he ended up in prison and left Cuba thanks to Gabriel García Márquez. He now lives in Miami."
Nevertheless, García Márquez was one of the few writers of his generation who maintained sympathy towards Castroism. The Padilla case marked the disenchantment of "most novelists with the regime, even leftist authors like Octavio Paz or Juan Goytisolo broke forever, the same as Mario Vargas Llosa, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras , Carlos Fuentes, Alberto Moravia, Juan Rulfo, Jean-Paul Sartre or Susan Sontag, who signed a letter asking for the release of Padilla during his internment". A letter written, by the way, at Vargas Llosa's home in Barcelona.
What happened to Padilla after Autocriticism? “They sent him to a farm to keep him away from the foreign press. He could write there and was also a translator, but he had a hard time. He tried to settle in Spain, but Castro only allowed him to go to the United States after reaching an agreement with Senator Edward Kennedy. However, in his American stage it did not go well for him because left-wing writers saw him as a traitor and dissidents did not perceive him as one of their own. He died in 2000".
And finally, how did Giroud dare to shoot a film so critical of the Cuban regime? "I was privileged in Cuba, because I could live off my work, which is not easy at all. There was a moment of more apparent freedom and I shot The Companion, a film that is not kind to the regime. Now, the repression has intensified and I don't dare to go to Cuba, because I don't want to be a martyr", concludes the director of El caso Padilla.
