By Adam Bernstein. Washington Post Staff Writer.
The Washington Post.
Wednesday, September 27, 2000; Page B05
Heberto Padilla, 68, a leading Cuban writer whose anti-Castro poems piqued
authorities and led to a much-protested jail sentence in Cuba and eventual exile
in the United States, died Sept. 25 at his home in Auburn, Ala. He had a heart
ailment.
He had been a writer in residence at Auburn University since late August.
Literary critics praised Mr. Padilla, once a Fidel Castro supporter, for his
frank and often satiric exploration of his disillusionment with communist rule.
"Spanish and Latin American poetry is full of bombast and easy rhythms and
alliterations," Jose Yglesias once wrote in the New York Review of Books. "Padilla's
has none of that."
He was also considered among the first dissenting intellectuals from inside
Cuba, where authorities and some fellow writers viewed his independent voice as
a danger to nationalism.
In a literary affair that resonated internationally, authorities in 1968
tried to rig Cuba's premier poetry prize so Mr. Padilla would lose. But the
judges of the Julian del Casal Poetry Prize viewed Mr. Padilla's poetry
collection, "Fuera del juego (Out of the Game)," as vastly superior to
other entries and gave him the award anyway. He said in the title poem:
The poet! Kick him out!
He has no business here.
He doesn't play
the game.
He never gets excited
Or speaks out clearly.
He never
even sees the miracles.
In 1971, shortly after presenting a reading of his work at the pro-Castro
Cuban National Union of Writers and Artists--a group that had declared his poems
"ideologically outside the principles of the Cuban revolution"--Mr.
Padilla was arrested for what authorities described as anti-revolutionary
crimes.
He was released a month later after a public confession, which supporters
said could only have been forced. Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Susan
Sontag, among other prominent authors, wrote Castro denouncing what they viewed
as a clearly coerced confession. Their statement did little for Mr. Padilla, but
the incident greatly influenced other Latin American writers' once-sympathetic
views of the Cuban revolution.
For Mr. Padilla, most of the 1970s was spent under government watch in Cuba,
where he did some translation work and largely was prohibited from personal
writing. Still, he managed to send a few poems to the United States that were
published in the New York Review of Books and in the 1982 volume "Legacies."
In 1980, Castro permitted some dissidents to leave Cuba, and Mr. Padilla was
among them, largely because of pressure brought by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy
(D-Mass.) and the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Bernard Malamud.
Over the next two decades, Mr. Padilla started Linden Lane magazine to
publish Cuban American writers and taught at Princeton and New York
universities.
Although his larger body of work encompassed themes of love and life in the
tropics, he was seen principally as a political writer. In 1984, Farrar, Straus
and Giroux published his semi-autobiographical novel, "En mi jardin pastan
los heroes (Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden)," a manuscript he had smuggled
out of Cuba. In 1990, Farrar, Straus published "Self-Portrait of the Other,"
his autobiography.
Mr. Padilla was born in Cuba and attended the University of Havana. He spent
the late 1950s writing in the United States and returned in 1959 after Castro
overthrew the dictator Fulgencio Batista. At the time, he told a reporter that
Castro's regime would signify "an era of enlightenment where the individual
Cuban might be allowed to express himself as he never had done before."
Mr. Padilla held several key government jobs in the early Castro years,
edited a weekly literary journal and reported for a government news agency from
Moscow, where he hoped "to glimpse the outlines of Cuba's future."
He soon came to doubt that future. In his poem "Prayer for the End of
the Century," he wrote:
We who have seen the collapse of parliaments
. . . [and] learned to
distrust glorified myths
. . . know that today we have the error
which
someone will condemn tomorrow.
His marriages to Berta Hernandez and Belkis Cuza Male ended in divorce.
Survivors include his companion, Lourdes Gil; three children from his first
marriage; a son from his second marriage; a sister; and a brother.
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