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ARTISAN REVIEW
Game
won the annual Writers' Union competition in 1968. And three
years later, when Padilla read excerpts from the yet to be published
Provocations,
the Writers' Union audience was enthusiastic. Clearly there
were those who saw Padilla's poems not as counter-revolutionary but as
cautionary: welcome additions to the debate on the role of the arts
within the society they hoped to create.
Two months after that reading, Padilla was arrested. Upon his release
the Writer's Union presented an evening of self-confession featuring
Padilla and four other writers. He spent nine more years in Cuba, largely
shunned by fellow writers, and unable to publish. Finally, he was able to
leave the island for the United States in 1980. Some cultural historians
claim his elaborate
mea culpa
alerted the international community to
what had become, at least for a time, the neo-Stalinization of Cuba.
But on the island, the Padilla affair, as it came to be called, inaugurated
an unprecedented period of self-censorship. Cuba has yet to recover.
During the 1970s, Virgilio Pifiera and Jose Lezama Lima tried to go
on as before, but none of their late work was published in Cuba during
their lifetimes. (Both died on the island late in the decade.) A few im–
portant poets, like Eliseo Diego and Dulce Maria Loynaz ( who in 1992,
at the age of ninety, received Spain's prestigious Cervantes Award) did
manage to stay on the island and away from
officialista
writings, but they
were the exceptions. During this period the work of major international
figures such as Borges and the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gassett
were banned in Cuba. "During those years," says Sanchez Mejias, "the
Ministry of Culture published and published - but what they were trying
to create still fell apart."
"The 1980s were to be a return to the 1960s - that was the hype,"
says Omar Perez. "Everyone was supposed to be able to publish and
travel." "During most of the decade," insists Reina, "the Ministry of
Culture did try to support Cuban artists." Many of the young poets
agree, even if some see that support as political expediency. Indeed, the
decade is full of stories of highly placed Cultural Ministry officials forced
to sign on for the so-called "pajama plan" (instant retirement), after
agreeing to certain readings and exhibitions. In perhaps the most notori–
ous case, at an art opening in 1989, a young painter gave performance
art a new twist by defecating on a copy of
Granma,
the Party newspa–
per, in the middle of his show. He was sentenced to six months in jail.
"Far more than the 1970s, the 1980s brought out the deep contra–
dictions of the revolution," says Perez. "The powers that be in Cuba so
love talent, they're obsessed by it," says a poet who prefers to remain
anonymous. "The institutions of the regime have done a great deal to
