ELIZABETH HANLY
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of religious imagination." Omar Perez agrees, describing a Cuban com–
pulsion "not to be different from one another but from ordinary real–
ity." Ponte adds. "Cubans are always trying to dance with the shadow of
God," or less romantically, "We're given to a kind of schizophrenia, al–
ways looking over our shoulders, trying to talk to God, or to curse
him. Everything is pending in Cuba. A god or hurricane may strike at
any moment. The Cuban earth holds memory for its people. The island
itself knows far more than we do.
It
pulls at us, often giving euphoria,
but never any peace at all."
"At best, many in the government are dismayed by us," says Sanchez
Mejias. "They see even our apolitical writing as amounting to a critique,
but they don't know how or what to do about it."
Despite the constant of political repression in Cuba the revolution
wasn't always so suspicious of its poetry. "Even with their ideological
skirmishes, the sixties in Cuba were a cultural Golden Age," says Omar
Perez. "All the greats were being published: Lezama, Alejo Carpentier,
Virgilio Pifiera, Reinaldo Arenas." Before the revolution created its
string of publishing houses, the industry had been so limited that Cuban
writers, even of the caliber of Lezama, often paid to publish their work
themselves. "During that epoch the magazine of the Casa de las
Americas" - a pan-cultural organization conceived by the revolution -
"was the best that Cuba ever produced. But by the late 1960s it was all
over. What had been, in the best sense of the word, a cultural revolution
was finished . Some believe the revolution itself ended at that time."
There are those who say undercurrents destructive to Cuba's culture
were there from the start. They point to isolated cases of repression in
the arts, as well as persecution of the gay community, which began as
early as 1961. But unlike that of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union,
the mix of Cuban cultural life has often contained powerful competing
factions. And according to Perez, during the 1960s cultural repression
was not yet revolutionary dogma.
"And the seventies?" Perez is unequivocal. "The seventies were the
lead years." In 1971, after a four year cat-and-mouse game, the poet
Herberto Padilla was jailed for over a month. No one in the Writers'
Union had gone further in public criticism of what was fast becoming
the "state literature" in Cuba. His poems satirized the ambience that
permitted it, an ambience that had begun to permeate the island. "One
step forward," he writes "and two or three backwards: but always ap–
plauding." The titles of a 1968 volume of poetry and one from 1971
spell out his position:
Out oj the Game
and
Provocations.
Yet
Out oj the
