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PARTISAN REVIEW
or sending them abroad. But in Cuba neighbors are obliged to spy
on each other and denounce any abnormal activity they observe.
Fulfillment of this revolutionary obligation earns one merit points
from the authorities. Thus someone may have reported frequent
typing or a light burning late at night in G6mez Boix's home. In any
event, for some undetermined reason the Department of State Se–
curity became suspicious of G6mez Boix and searched his home in
late July 1978. Having found manuscripts of his poems and a novel,
they kept him incommunicado at State Security headquarters for
forty-five days. Thereafter G6mez Boix was sentenced to eight years
in prison, the maximum penalty under the Cuban penal code for
"possessing propaganda against the socialist order."
As a result of such repression, there is no real
samizdat
in Cuba.
Those who have tried self-publishing have ended up in jail, where
literature is clandestinely circulated among the prisoners because
they feel there is little more they can lose. With the forms of dissi–
dence common in other totalitarian states today foreclosed to Cuban
writers, dissenters in Cuba find themselves in a situation reminis–
cent of that of writers in Stalinist Russia. Like them, Cuban dissi–
dents have received little attention from the free world, which now
serves as the protector of Soviet dissidents. Once Stalinism took defi–
nite hold on the island early in the seventies, impartial intellectuals
and journalists were kept away. Those who have been in a position
to denounce the plight of Cuban dissidents have generally shown in–
difference if not complicity with the Castro regime. Thus the Cuban
dissenter has felt forgotten and isolated and has been easy prey for
government persecution and abuse.
Watched over, threatened, forbidden to write, many authors
have left the country in the past year. Some have sought asylum.
Others have simply escaped . Among them are Heberto Padilla (win–
ner of the UNEAC prize for poetry in 1968); Reinaldo Arenas,
author of the novel
Hallucinations
(1969), which was a best seller in
Europe; Rogelio Llopis, whose short stories in
Laguerray los basiliscos
(1962) have been translated into English, German, Polish, and
Hungarian and have been published in various anthologies;
Edmundo Desnoes, author of
Memorias del subdesarrollo
(1968), which
was made into one of the best Cuban films produced since the revo–
lution; Antonio Benitez Rojo, whose stories won a 1967
Gasa de las
Americas
prize and a 1968 UNEAC prize and who, until he sought
asylum in Paris in mid-1980, was the director of publications for
Gasa
de las Americas;
Jose Triana, recipient of a
Gasa
award for his play
