Nostalgia of Cuba

“The knock at our door came around seven in the morning.” Thus Cuza Malè recounts the moment of the arrest of her husband, the Cuban poet, of the Castilian language, Heberto Padilla.

After Padilla’s collection of poems “Fuera del juego” won the UNEAC prize in 1968, the book was considered counter-revolutionary and published with an appendix stigmatizing its content as anti-Castro. Padilla was arrested in 1971 and, in order to regain his freedom, he was forced to appear before the college of writers and make public abjuration of himself, of his writings, “confessing” alleged crimes of him and his wife against the Revolution. So Padilla expressed himself regarding his “self-criticism”:

“The procedure was devised by Lenin to recover revolutionaries in the ranks of the Communist Party and perfected by Stalin as a tool to morally destroy those who expressed critical positions. I accepted to recite the self-criticism to obtain freedom and to be able to leave Cuba, which had now become a prison. “

Many personalities, including Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag, Mario Vargas Llosa, Federico Fellini, Alberto Moravia — with some illustrious exceptions such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez — signed a petition to ask for his release. The Padilla affair marked the end of the support of left-wing intellectuals for the Cuban Revolution, which had lost its libertarian connotations to transform itself into an authoritarian, Castroist and castrating regime.

Padilla’s verses are simple, discursive but only in appearance. They talk about concrete things, about everyday life, about the irruption of history and politics into the private sphere of the citizen who would like to ignore it but cannot.

“I have always been out of the game, perhaps it is the condition of a poet that does not allow us to stay inside, for us it is not possible, we are destined to tell an unpleasant truth in the face of the tyrant. It is better not to have a poet around, he is a sad character who always finds fault, who is never happy, above all he is of no use to power. “

As the translator (and editor) Gordiano Lupi says, “Padilla is not a dissident but a revolutionary who wants to keep thinking for himself.”

Fuera del juego “is a song of freedom”, “the symbol of revolutionary disillusionment” (again Lupi).

Padilla was part of a dream, he believed in it but saw the expectations of a better world collapse, he understood that what he saw in progress was no longer “his” revolution, he wrote verses “that hurt the dream”, which denounce the violence behind the hope spread by the heroes.

Around the heroes

The heroes

They are always expected

Because they are clandestine

And they upset the order of things.

They appear one day

Fatigued and hoarse

In the war chariots, covered by the dust of the road,

making noise with their boots.

Heroes don’t talk,

but they design with emotion

the fascinating life of tomorrow.

Heroes lead us

And they place us in front of the astonishment of the world.

They even grant us

Their part of Immortals.

They struggle

With our loneliness

And our insults.

They modify terror in their own way.

And in the end they force us

The violent hope.

His “fault” was

“Do not listen to those who said that there are books not to be written and above all not to be published, because they hurt the dream and only within the revolution can there be freedom, but for those who are called out there are no rights.”

Cuban poets no longer dream

Cuban poets no longer dream

(not even at night)

They go to close the door to write in solitude

When the wood creaks suddenly:

the wind pushes them adrift;

some hands take them by the shoulders,

they overturn them

they place them in front of other faces

(sunk in swamps, burning in napalm)

and the world flows over their mouths

and the eye is obliged to see, to see, to see

Fuera del juego is also a hymn of love to the homeland, to Cuba, always carried in the heart. “Cuba is my land, my hot and wild island.” “I have always lived in Cuba even when I was leaving.”

I have always lived in Cuba

I live in Cuba. Always

I lived in Cuba. Those years of wandering

For the world they have talked about so much,

they are my lies, my falsifications.

Because I’ve always been in Cuba.

And it is certain

that there were days of the Revolution

in which the island could have exploded in the waves;

however at the airports

and in the places where I’ve been

I heard them calling me

with my name

and when I answered

I was on this shore

sweating

walking,

in shirt sleeves,

drunk with wind and foliage,

when the sun and the sea climb onto the terraces

and sing their hallelujah

Above all, there is a powerful sense of nostalgia, more than any other human, social and political consideration. Nostalgia that embraces everything: love, sex, homeland, the revolutionary dream, the memory of dilapidated neighborhoods, of torn billboards, of decaying yet loved houses.

The return

You have woken up at least a thousand times

looking for the house where your parents protected you from pain

time, looking

the cesspool where you listened to the crowd

of frogs, the moths that the wind made fly

at any moment.

And now that’s impossible

you scream in the empty room

when even the tree of the field

sings better than you

the air of lost years .

You were already the character who observes, the resentful,

taken, irremediable, for what you see

and tomorrow he will be as foreign to you as you are today

to everything that happened without your being able

to understand it,

and the well will continue singing full of frogs

and you will not be able to hear them

even if they leap before your ears;

and not just the moths, but your own child

has already begun to devour you

and now you’re looking at him dressed in your suit,

pissing behind the cemetery, with your mouth,

your eyes and you as if nothing had happened.