CUBA'S HERESY OF WORDS

None but a fool or a fanatic could believe himself in possession of absolute truth, but anyone who would do so must equate dissidence with madness or crime. The recent banishment of Soviet Physicist Andrei D. Sakharov has merely proven once more that totalitarian regimes treat free thought and criminal conduct as synonymous. This has been made clear to writers in Cuba as well, for whom harassment and incarceration are as much to be feared today as they were in the Soviet Union under Stalinism, a revival of which we are now witnessing, according to the statement made in Moscow by Dr. Sakharov's wife to his colleagues in the Academy of Sciences.

The world outside was ignorant about Stalinist repression while it was taking its toll, and it knows no more now —and often seems eager to know less— about Cuban authors who dare to question the socialist man and state, or even to be indifferent to them.

The Cuban government has largely been successful with its pretense that a mere handful of misfits and delinquents challenge its dogma. As the French essayist Jean François Revel observed not long ago, the success is owned in part to the complicity of a disingenuous audience abroad that is willing to be persuaded: "Although an entire body of Cuban dissident literature has now developed, it's voice is still dampened by so many mute voices. The Press, even the independent Press, the media in America and Europe, even Amnesty International, with respect to Cuba still confuse impartiality with credulity."

Visitors to Havana allowed to inquire into literary life generally turn out to be unconditional apologists of government policy who parrot what they learn from officials in charge of cultural affairs or writers who, out of conviction or fear, are submissive in their dictates. But their statements only in part support Cuba's pretense, for perceptive, doubting readers can see through them. What really accounts for the effective blocking of foreign awareness of disaffected Cuban intellectuals is official Cuban government action.

In some instances control of the publishing industry and the State monopoly on employment are used effectively to condemn those who fall from grace to silence and to a precarious existence.

Virgilio Piñera, the most highly acclaimed Cuban playwright of this century, became such a non-person. The details of his last years can now be revealed, since the State security officials can no longer take retaliatory measures against him as they are wont to do to those whose misfortunes are publicized abroad. Piñera died in late 1979, having lived for more than a decade under surveillance and in terror. He and other important writers and artists became the targets of a variety of sanctions in 1968, when Fidel Castro's Declaration of Support for the Soviet Invasion of Czechoslovakia —the definitive gesture of obeisance to Moscow— was followed by a wave of persecution of intellectuals in Cuba like the one that now appears to be underway in the Soviet Union in the wake of the invasion of Afghanistan.

Thereafter Piñera was dismissed from his position, denied royalties from his works, and prevented from accepting invitations to make appearances in Sweden, Spain, Italy and Mexico. Living under miserable conditions, he nevertheless continued to write, although he was unable to publish his works. Judging from letters sent to his friends abroad, the number of his manuscripts of plays, stories and poems was substantial. They were confiscated by the Cuban police upon Piñera's death. Fortunately, he had managed to smuggle out copies of some of the manuscripts, albeit with instructions that they not be published during his lifetime, because of the reprisals that were bound to ensue.

Reinaldo Arenas, who was sentenced when the Cuban revolution came to power became one of the most promising young novelists during the following decade. His talent drew international attention after the publication in Mexico of his novel El Mundo Alucinante ("Hallucinations") in an English translation in 1969. But since Arenas would not adhere to the official cultural line, in 1975 his home was searched, manuscripts were seized, and he was sentenced to prison on trumped-up charges. Since his release he has been living as a second class citizen denied all but the most insignificant work.

His ex-wife, Ingrid Gonzalez, an accomplished dramatic actress like Arenas' is forbidden to leave the country. News of Arenas' current situation was made available last October, when his friend, the poet Vicente Echerri was allowed to emigrate after a seventeen year wait. Through the Spanish Press, Echerri delivered the following message from Arenas to European intellectuals: "If you don't get me out of here soon, I"ll commit suicide."

The case of Heberto Padilla —his arrest and coerced confession— was a cause celèbre in 1971, when Jean Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Alberto Moravia, Susan Sontag, Octavio Paz and Mario Vargas Llosa, to name but a few, decried the punishment and public humiliation of the celebrated Cuban poet.

However, since the end of protests Padilla's creative writing has become dead letter in Cuba. Although he has been permitted to work as a translator —like Pasternak in his disgrace. For the past year he has been seeking authorization to emigrate to join his ailing mother and his wife, the poet Belkis Cuza Malé, who fell from grace at the same time as her husband because of her critical views of the revolution. Notwithstanding support from foreign dignitaries and intellectuals sympathetic to the Castro regime, Padilla's efforts have been in vain.

Another of Cuba's writers to fall victim to unbending official cultural dictates was the universally celebrated poet and novelist José Lezama Lima. Between 1971 and his death in 1976, he too was caught in the impossible bind of being isolated inside Cuba but forbidden to leave. He was among the eight major authors accused in Padilla's forced confession of being disaffected or counterrevolutionary. As a result, he lived thereafter, as he wrote to his sister, "in terror and in the most devastating melancholy." In 1973 he was refused permission to attend a cultural congress in Mexico. The following year he was invited to Italy to the Fourth Congress of Latin American Novelists, and to lecture in Madrid at the Ateneo, but each time he was denied permission to go. The year before his death he received still another invitation to travel abroad, this time to teach at the University of Madrid. Again his request was of no avail. Lezama's letters, which were posthumously published in Spain, reveal his bitterness: "I remain immobilized, albeit angry, because last year and this one I have received some six invitations to travel... and always with the same result: I have to stay home. I am bored and tired." No matter how loudly the Cuban government may now claim Lezama as a glory of the revolution, there is no gainsaying the fact that he was its victim.

However, as might be expected, the most refined cruelty exercised against dissident writers is reserved for those whose works are published abroad, for such works patently refute the government's carefully cultivated pretense that dissidence does not exist. Witness the following passage from a letter sent through clandestine channels by the imprisoned poet Ernesto Díaz Rodríguez: "At midnight on April 4 [1978] I was unexpectedly taken out of my cell to the State Security Department, where I was confined in solitary for a month. During this period I was repeatedly subjected to interrogation, each time about my literary work. As before, they threatened me, warning: 'Your persistence in developing a dissident cultural movement, particularly abroad is intolerable, and we will try to prevent it by all the means we have.'"

Díaz Rodríguez, who is serving a forty year sentence, had smuggled out of prison a number of poems that were published in the United States in 1977 with the title "An Urgent Testimony" (Un Testimonio Urgente).

Like Díaz Rodríguez, Armando Valladares, who has been imprisoned for the past nineteen years, was punished for his literary work while in custody. One of the "Plantados", the prisoners who refused to participate in "Rehabilitation" —Indoctrination) program— he became an invalid as a result of malnourishment in 1974, when the authorities punished the prisoners by cutting off their meager rations and then, in justification, claimed that the prisoners had staged a hunger strike. In 1979 a volume of Valladares' verses entitled Desdem mi silla de ruedas ("From My Wheelchair") was published in French translation and warmly received by critics in Paris. As a result, Valladares was denied necessary medical treatment. Seeing that his new punishment had left him undaunted, the G-2 (the Cuban KGB) sought to intimidate him by holding his family hostage: His mother, sister and other relatives, who had complied with all government requirements for emigration to the United States, were prevented from leaving the island. Last July Valladares sent a letter through the underground network to the P.E.N. American Center explaining: "This was a measure in retaliation against the publication around that time of the French edition of my book and of a letter in which I denounced the pressures, the repression, the isolation, and inhuman treatment to which I am being subjected... A high official of the political police has notified me that my family's departure from the country is in my hands; this if I draft a letter denying my friends among intellectuals and poets living abroad, if I forbid them and everyone else —newspapers and organizations included— to speak or write about me and my works, even to mention my name, if I disavow and deny every truth they have spoken on my behalf, then my family can leave. To write that letter would be to commit suicide. I will never write it!"

Another poet, Ángel Cuadra, was legal adviser to the Cuban Institute of Musicians, actors and writers at the time of his arrest in 1967 after he unsuccessfully sought permission to emigrate. Charged with conduct "against the security of the State," he served two thirds of a fifteen-year sentence and was paroled in 1976. Then Impromptus, an anthology of his elegiac, apolitical poetry, was published in the United States and in consequence his parole was revoked. In May 1979 he wrote to a friend, the exiled poet Juana Rosa Pita: "There was no legal basis for this new reprisal against me. Only that I am a poet; that the world speaks my name; that I do not renounce my song, I do not put it on bended knees, nor do I use it for other political or partisan ends, but only literary, universal, timeless ones." Back in prison, Mr. Cuadra submitted to the "rehabilitation" program and was to be released last July.

However, then it was discovered that he had managed to smuggle out a new manuscript —"A Correspondence of Poems" (published early this year [1980] in English translation by Donald D. Walsh)— instead of being released, he was transferred to Boniato Prison, the harshest one in Cuba. In a letter dated September 1979 in that prison he wrote to Mrs. Pita: "If the chances of seeing you soon are becoming increasingly more distant, it is because they are taking revenge, venting their anger and injustice against me under false pretenses. And you must make this absolutely clear, you and our friends."

Cuadra's plea led to a protest of his treatment, together with that of other Latin American dissidents, at the conference sponsored by the Freedom to Write Committee of the PEN American Center, held in New York on February 7-8, 1980. But there are many others who, fearful of the consequences, have not tried to make their art known outside Cuba and inside the island only dare create and circulate literature clandestinely.

Their fears are well founded: Current Cuban penal law prescribes sentences of up to twelve years for those who "create, distribute or possess" written or oral "propaganda against the socialist order." The chilling effect of that statute is only aggravated by the discretion given the censors upon whose opinion application of the law turns.

The Cuban regime can decree words of poetry and freedom heretical, branding them as treason and libel, and it can imprison and humiliate their authors, but nothing it will do can subtract from their merit. Indeed, if there were no other proof of the importance of this dissident literature, the elaborate system of repression used to crush and hide it would suffice.