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PARTISAN REVIEW
Poems,
they transferred him to Boniato prison instead of releasing him.
In a letter dated Boniato, September 1979, he wrote to Mrs . Pita:
"If
the chances of seeing you soon are becoming increasingly more dis–
tant, it is because they are taking revenge, venting their anger and
injustice against me under false pretenses." Under a constitutional
provision giving retroactive effect to penal laws favoring prisoners,
Cuadra is entitled to be set free; according to that constitutional
norm, he has served his sentence. His attempts to secure a court or–
der for his release have, however, failed.
One of the most pathetic cases of poets in prison in Cuba is that
of Armando Valladares. A victim of polyneuritis, he has been con–
fined to a wheelchair since 1974. The onset of his illness was pro–
duced by fifty days of deficient diet imposed on him as punishment.
In 1979 a book of Valladares's poems entitled
Desde mi silla de ruedas
(From My Wheelchair) was translated into French (it was originally
published in 1976 in the United States by his wife, Marta). Mis–
treatment of Valladares by the Castro regime has increased with rec–
ognition of his poetry abroad. Incapable of silencing him, Cuban
authorities have resorted to intimidating his family by blocking their
departure from the country. A letter sent by Valladares to the PEN
American Center in New York in 1979 addresses his and his family's
predicament:
A high official of the political police has notified me that my family's
departure from the country is entirely in my hands; that for it to hap–
pen I have to draft a letter denying my friends among intellectuals and
poets abroad; that I have to forbid everyone, including newspapers
and organizations, to speak or write about me and my literary works
or even mention my name; and that I must disavow and deny every
truth they have spoken in defending my situation . To write that letter
would be to commit moral and spiritual suicide. I shall never write it!
When Valladares became very ill at the beginning of 1980,
frightened prison officials gave him the medical care they had been
withholding, but when the government discovered that the manu–
script of a second book of his poems was about to be published
abroad, the authorities returned him to his prison cell without re–
gard for the effects on his health. In a letter he was able to smuggle
out of prison , dated October 17 , 1980, and addressed to the journalist
Humberto Medrano in Miami, Valladares indicated that his condi–
tion was bound to worsen: "They hope that at a critical moment
