that Fidel’s lack of confidence might create further problems for Chile. In a film of a conversation that Fidel had with Allende, one can see Castro acknowledge that his trip to Chile was a “voyage from one world to another.” Yet there was little indication that he had reached all the possible conclusions from that observation. Of course such conclusions would have implied more modesty than Fidel could probably have mustered.
As a Chilean diplomat, and one accused of hostility toward the Cuban Revolution, I did not think it my place to enter into theoretical discussions regarding a country’s choice of political strategy. Instead, I returned to the subject of my relationship with the dissident writers, since that was the most serious charge leveled against me during that singular conversation with the Cuban head of state at midnight on Sunday, March 21, 1971.
“I refused to turn my back on my friends,” I said. “I knew they were expressing opinions critical of the government, and that their relations with the government had become somewhat antagonistic, but they have been my colleagues and my friends for years. I have probably acted more like a writer than a diplomat. It is quite possible that after this experience, and this conversation, which I am certain I will always see as very important to me, I will leave the diplomatic service and devote myself to literature. I’d like nothing better. I recognize that I’ve been a bad diplomat in Cuba. But I have one excuse: The real relations between Chile and Cuba have been carried on in Santiago. My presence here has been only symbolic. I insist, furthermore, that my writer friends, however much they have criticized the current situation, are neither gusanos nor counterrevolutionaries. And I’ve met with writers of every stamp, you know, not just with the most critical ones.”
“That much is true,” Fidel interrupted. “We know that you have been in contact with writers on our side.”
I had noted that in one way or another one would often be reminded of the efficiency of secret-police surveillance. The little book about the case of the Mexican diplomat, the TV program on the “CIA operative” Olive, the speech by the Dominican journalist in which he publicly confessed that he was a double agent, were all manifestations of that reminder. With this last statement, Fidel had not only demonstrated his personal knowledge of my “case” (for incredible as it might seem to a peaceful citizen of Chile, my stay in Havana had become a “case” within a socialist country), but also that the agents of State Security were very efficient at their jobs.
“But let’s take the case of Heberto Padilla,” I then said. “His criticism is always predicated on a standpoint within the Left. He once quoted Enrique Lihn to me, who said that when one leaves Cuba, the Revolution begins to grow larger and more imposing as one looks at it from a greater distance. Heberto talked to me about a period of volunteer labor he had done on a citrus farm, about a year ago. The leader of the project was, according to Heberto, the perfect example of the revolutionary. He wanted the best for his group, he wanted it to thrive and prosper and to live in the best possible material circumstances, and he had even designed the furniture in the project’s living rooms and bedrooms. He made sure there was fresh orange juice every morning for breakfast. And at the same time he was a theorist, a great reader. Padilla cited that case in contrast to others who think that discomfort, carelessness of details, can be remedied with high-sounding phrases.”
“Excellent!” said Fidel, for whom the mention of Heberto Padilla produced frank displeasure. “Excellent! But I feel I must tell you that Padilla is a liar. And a turncoat! And, and,” said Fidel, raising his eyebrows and his index finger, and looking me straight in the eye, “he is ambitious.”
He fell silent after this last phrase, as though giving me time to draw all the appropriate conclusions. It was true that Padilla was given to suggesting the existence of certain mysterious links between himself and secret higher powers. He had given me to understand on more than one occasion that he stayed afloat relatively successfully thanks to the power struggles between factions within the government. Whenever he made these suggestions, he would laugh uproariously and look very self-satisfied.
I always thought, and continue to think, that Heberto’s ravings were no more than a game of vanity he played, mostly with himself. Fidel’s last phrase, though, intrigued me. It confirmed, of course, that in early 1971 there actually was an underground factional power struggle going on. Had Heberto taken part in this struggle somehow? What fantastic version of things had been reported to Fidel? And how had my own actions, Heberto’s contacts with me, been used?—for one had to wonder whether those contacts had intentionally, and with some mysterious plan, been made easier by that hidden hand which had sufficient power to assign people rooms in the Habana Riviera. The list of mysteries in this book, mysteries for which I can only give the most hypothetical sort of explanations, is already long. The fact is that I had learned no more than a few hours ago that Heberto had been arrested, and I was trying, out of conviction and out of simple friendship, but without much real hope, to help him.
“I insist on one thing, Prime Minister,” I said. “I am convinced that Heberto Padilla is not an agent for anybody. He is a difficult man, I’ll grant you—he is willful, and capricious, and he has a sharp critical bite. But he has never been anything but a man of the Left, and his criticism has come from the Left. And the relationship between the state and the writer has never been anything but troubled, anyway. It can’t help but be. The raison d’être of the State and the raison d’être of poetry contradict one another. Plato said that one should listen to the beautiful words of poets, one should crown poets, anoint them, and then carry them outside the republic’s walls the next day. He knew that if they stayed inside they’d cause nothing but trouble! But Plato intended his words ironically, too, since he was not only a philosopher but something of a poet as well. And socialism will just have to learn to live with its writers. That is important for the writers, but it is even more important for socialism.”
“And you think that there are real poets in Cuba?” the prime minister asked.
He seemed to have serious doubts about that, but he did not consider himself the best person to decide the issue—not because he did not trust his own critical judgment (I suspect, on the contrary, that his was the only critical judgment he did trust) but because he didn’t want to run the risk that an over-generalized and relatively negative pronouncement from him as to the quality of Cuban literature should later be quoted by me.
“We recognize that it has now become quite fashionable in Europe,” he said, “among those that call themselves leftist intellectuals, to attack us. We don’t care about that! Those attacks mean absolutely nothing to us! Until now we’ve had no time in Cuba, faced as we’ve been by the immense amount of revolutionary work to be done—and that needed our immediate attention—to worry about the problems of culture. Now we will begin to work at creating a popular culture, a culture for the people and by the people. The little group of bourgeois writers and artists that has been so active, or at least talked so much, up till now, without creating anything that’s been of any real worth, will no longer have anything to do in Cuba. Look—every socialist country has come at some point in its development to the stage that we have come to now. The Soviet Union first and China not long ago, with the Cultural Revolution. There’s no socialist country that hasn’t passed through a stage like this, a stage in which the old bourgeois culture, which managed to hang on after the Revolution, is supplanted by the new culture of socialism. The transition is hard, but as I say, the bourgeois intellectuals are no longer of any interest to us. None! I’d a thousand times rather Allende had sent us a miner than a writer, I’ll tell you.”
