The situation is familiar to any student of socialist revolutions: The revolution is over, and the political apparatus has become authoritarian and alienated from its popular base. The lives of real people become less important than the economic programs and ideological causes of a growing bureaucracy. Then come suspicion, repression, overzealous police vigilance, persecution of independent opinion and intellectual inquiry, summary verdicts, and political detentions or firing squads. Political tensions seep, like corrosive acid, into every aspect of life, even intimate personal relations and the individual unconscious.

This is the central situation de scribed in this novel by one of Cuba’s most distinguished poets. Herberto Padilla lived a version of the story he writes. With the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, Padilla returned to Cuba from the United States, where he had been living for two years. He helped establish the literary magazine Lunes de Revolución and worked for Prensa Latina, the Cuban press agency, serving as its correspondent in London and Moscow. By the late 60’s he was questioning the Castro regime, and in l %8 he was fired from his job and cal1ed home. That same year, the Cuban National Union of Artists and Writers awarded him Cuba’s highest literary prize for a volume of poems. This simply antagonized the authorities, and in 1971 he was arrested, jailed, and released only after issuing a statement “confessing” his errors. These events signaled to many intellectuals in Western Europe and North America who were sympathetic to the Castro government that this regime would tolerate very little dissent. More than 60 foreign writers signed an appeal on Padilla’s behalf.

After nine years of virtual house arrest, he was allowed to leave Cuba in 1980. An afterword describes his detention in a military hospital, an interview there with Castro, who heaped abuse on the world’s literature, and how he managed to preserve the manuscript of his novel and get it out of the country.

The novel, set in Havana in the 60’s, focuses on the demoralization and spiritual deterioration of two writer-intellectuals resulting from repressive politicization and the paranoia it spawns. Dreams and phantasms are merged with the action to convey the disturbing surrealistic aura of life under such conditions. This English version (a faithful translation) reorders the narrative sequence of the original Spanish edition (Barcelona 1981), but this makes little difference. As Padilla admits in the afterword, “The fates of these characters, as well as the situations they are involved in, are inconclusive, because everything written in a suffocating atmosphere is inconclusive and fragmentary. . . . Books written under socialism are generally imperfect; the country’s reigning, or fur that matter clandestine, aesthetics stamps books with a feeling of desperation or neurosis.”

The note of apology is warranted, for the novel, aside from its political interest, its hallucinatory dream elements, and some vividly described scenes, is not distinguished. Granted that repression inevitably blights human morale and relationships, it is difficult to believe that politics has produced all of the meanness and self-pity displayed by the main characters. And the inconclusiveness, acknowledged by Padilla, leaves the reader unsatisfied. Yet as a portrait of intellectual life in Castro’s Cuba, this novel is informed and revealing. 

 

[Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden, by Herberto Padilla; New York: Far rar, Straus & Giroux]