News of his arrest spread around the world in March 1971. Heberto Padilla, one of Cuba’s best-known poets, who returned to the country full of hope after the Cuban revolution, had finally become suspicious of Fidel Castro’s regime. Intellectuals from all countries saw this as a test of artistic freedom – prominent figures such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Susan Sontag and Hans-Magnus Enzensberger expressed their solidarity.
The Cuban State Security Service was to interrogate Padilla for 37 days. Then he appeared at the Institute of Writers and Artists, the Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba (Uneac), to publicly accuse himself before the conscripted Cuban fellow writers. This self-criticism was so harsh that it could only be a spectacle for those in power. It went on for five hours and ended with Padilla denouncing several of the writers present as enemies of the revolution, including his own wife.
So far, so well known. But what nobody knew and what you can now see at the Munich Film Festival: The film material with which the spectacle was documented at the time survived in the archives of the Cuban state. It mysteriously came into the possession of the Cuban filmmaker Pavel Giroud, who lives in Madrid. His documentary, The Padilla Affair, consists largely of this original material, which was sealed away for half a century.
Two cameras are filming what is happening, presumably for Fidel Castro, who was not present. The evening is intended to show how the Cuban revolution converts a cheeky writer, tames a dangerous savage, brings a lost man to his senses, leads a blind man to enlightenment through careful one-to-one conversations in solitary confinement. “When Castro saw the footage, he probably thought it would do me more harm than good,” says Pavel Giroud on the phone from Madrid. “I don’t understand why these recordings still exist at all, why they haven’t been destroyed long ago.”
Giroud cannot reveal how he suddenly got hold of these images, he must protect his source. He says, however, that they came into his hands by accident and were incomplete. He got three hours of material and edited the documentary from it. He tried to place the story in a historical context with as little comment as possible.
“To present the self-criticism and then to use archival material to show how this man got to this point” – that’s what he wanted from the beginning, he says, “to tell the story and not to interpret it. I didn’t want to ask anyone today, even if there are living eyewitnesses. You don’t always have to explain everything in the film. You can read for yourself on Google what people who were there that evening said and wrote. It’s all there.”
The poet speaks in a kind of code – he’s begging for help
So you can now see Padilla sweating more and more as he speaks, bending, squirming, writhing like a battered animal, and frantically defending the revolution in a kind of performance designed to show his exaggerations as one Art Code understands, a secret language that he actually uses to plead for help. Right at the beginning of his confession, Padilla crumples up the paper he had laid out as a template in a theatrical gesture. “I’m not here to write, I’m here to speak freely,” he proclaims. “These notes mean absolutely nothing. This is for cowardly people who fear forgetting a date.”
Thanks to the conversations he had with the state security service in the “past few days,” he finally found the courage and self-confidence to speak out freely. Padilla repeats several times that this conference was his idea, nobody forced him to do it, and he thanks his interrogators for their generosity in giving him this chance.
As Padilla talks and talks, seemingly mimicking Fidel Castro’s speeches, the viewer soon finds himself writhing and writhing like the worn-down poet who also wrote his famous 1968 book of poems, Fuera del juego / Outside the Game through the dirt. In 1968, Uneac, the same institution he now speaks to, had awarded Padilla’s book its annual literary prize and published it. However, the edition was presented with a prologue in which the board stated that it did not agree with the jury’s decision and accused the poet of “attacking the Cuban revolution”.
In essence, the poems in “Outside the Game” deal with the relationship between poets and intellectuals and state power. Padilla dedicates the chapter “The Iron Birch” to persecuted Russian intellectuals. He wrote parts of the book in the Soviet Union while living there for a while and realizing the danger communism posed to artists and freedom of expression.
The fact that Padilla was not arrested until 1971, three years after the publication of this provocative book, was due to Fidel Castro’s belief during the 1960s that he did not have to submit to the Soviet Union and could build his own independent Cuban communism. But in 1970, a sugar harvest that he had hoped for did not reach the amount he had hoped for, and an economic crisis was choking him more and more. He had to accept the Russian subsidies, Cuba became a satellite state. The artists paid the price.
The self-accusation triggered a mass panic – other poets had to follow
By the end of his speech, Padilla’s shirt and the handkerchief he uses to wipe his forehead are soaked with sweat. He tries in vain to clean his glasses, which have fogged up from the heat of the night. It drinks the glass of water. He is thirsty. He is tired. He hardly slept the night before. “I brought resentment, bitterness and pessimism into being,” he says, and once again thanks State Security for allowing him during his time in prison to think about the wrong path he had taken with his work.
In this suffocating climate, Padilla’s self-indictment reaches its climax as he names other writers and brings them forward to follow his example and accuse themselves. “It triggers a kind of mass panic. Everyone has to go forward and flog themselves so that they are not suspected of being an enemy of the state,” says Florian Borchmeyer, the program curator of “The Padilla Affair” at the film festival invited Munich. “Padilla’s hyper-performance is also perfidious because he puts all Cuban writers to the knife. He even denounces his wife. He manages to cause an international scandal, but at the same time he excludes his colleagues from the cultural scene for a whole decade, including himself.”
The transcript of Padilla’s speech was published at the time and was also read abroad. Many intellectuals and writers around the world then distanced themselves from the Cuban Revolution, even though they originally supported Fidel Castro. Pavel Giroud shows a newspaper report with the headline: “By order of Castro the poet and his wife were transferred to an agricultural plantation”. In 1980 Padilla was able to emigrate to the United States, where he was officially welcomed by President Ronald Reagan on Independence Day. His wife, the poet, journalist and painter Belkis Cuza Malé, had escaped to the United States a year earlier. Padilla died in 2000 at the age of 68 in Auburn, Alabama. He had been expelled from Miami because they could not forgive his self-accusation and betrayal there.
“It was less about what Padilla did or intended to do,” says Pavel Giroud, “and more about what you did with Padilla.” The last images of the film show a demonstration in front of the Ministry of Culture in Havana on November 27, 2020. The current number of political prisoners in Cuba is 1037 today, including 35 minors. “Fidel Castro’s greatest success,” says Giroud, “was his good marketing strategy. Nothing sold better than the lie of freedom in the Cuban revolution.”
“El Caso Padilla / The Padilla Affair” will be screened on June 24th and 29th at the Munich Film Festival.