JUAN GOYTISOLO
683
the hotel garden where we could talk without being overheard. While
we strolled, he explained in detail the harassment of homosexuals in
Cuba. Because of his homosexuality, Piiiera had become a target for
blackmail and lived in constant fear of being reported to the police
and being shipped off to the UMAP enforced labor camps. Despite
the thick garden foliage he spoke in whispers. His suffering, in
solitude and moral misery, was unbearable.
During my 1967 visit my vision of the revo!.ution creating a free
society had been replaced by what I had already become familiar
with during trips to countries in the Soviet orbit, where there is, as
Rudi Dutschke has so aptly put it, "real socialism- where everything
is real except the socialism." The following year Carlos Franquijoined
the ranks of Cubans in exile. And Cuba had ceased being my politi–
cal model. As I had come of age in Franco's Spain, until this period I
had assumed that a free society was to be found in what was the an–
tithesis to Franco. But now reason led me to abandon "lyrical effu–
sion" for a more sober, prosaic view of the Cuban reality. My time
of political innocence was over.
The next shock came on November 8, 1968, when
Le Monde
re–
ported that the official newspaper of the Cuban Army,
Verde Olivo,
had denounced Heberto Padilla for counterrevolutionary actions.
The paper accused Padilla as the ringleader of a group of Cuban
writers who, brainwashed by foreign decadence, were purported to
have published "soft literary pieces which were a blend of pornogra–
phy and antirevolutionary ideas." And he was said to have misused
public funds during his time as manager of Cubatimpex.
Clearly Padilla's consistently unpopular literary and political
stands had gotten him into hot water. When in 1967 Padilla had de–
fended the literary merits of Cabrera Infante's
Three Sad Tigers
over a
mediocre novel written by a high-ranking Cuban cultural com–
missar, he had exacerbated his suspect position. His strong stand
against official literary mediocrity had caused the Cuban writing
world to split into two camps: those who saw in his stand a necessary
protection of literary values and those who wished to solidify their
position with the literary
caciques
of the Cuban Revolution. Padilla
seemed almost oblivious of the risks he was taking by engaging in a
fight against a closed authoritarian regime.
In addition to arousing the anger of the Cuban Army maga–
zine, Padilla's sarcastic attacks concerning the docility and conform–
ity of Cuban writers provoked a series of rebuttals from a group of
the "young revolutionary writers" of
El Caiman Barbudo,
the
