Background

Heberto Padilla was born on January 20, 1932, in Puerta de Golpe, Pinar del Rio, Cuba.

Education

After elementary and secondary education in his native province of Pinar del Río, Padilla studied law at the University of Havana but did not finish a degree.

Career

Padilla fell in love with poetry when he was very young and his first book was published when he was just 17 years old. The Audacious Roses came at a time when the prospect of revolution was still in the distance but beginning to grow in Cuba as the dictatorship of Batista came towards its end. When Castro’s revolutionaries swept to power in 1959, like many of his intellectual compatriots, Padilla supported the move believing it signaled a fresh start.

Padilla soon began to take a more critical view of life in Castro's Cuba. Writers were warned as early as 1961 that their efforts should be directed towards supporting the revolution - "with the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing" was Castro's stark definition of their responsibilities.

Throughout the 1960s, there were many attempts to bring Cuban intellectuals into line. In 1968, however, the judges in the national poetry contest decided to award their annual prize to Padilla's collection, Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game), which contained such obvious revolutionary skepticism as the following lines: "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 ..."

When, in 1968, Padilla’s work Out of the Game was awarded the national poetry prize, largely against the wishes of Castro, the book was published with an addendum railing against its anti-revolutionary message. Padilla soon found himself arrested and confined to his home. By 1971, the situation had become worse and he was again arrested by the secret police and for a whole month was put under intensive questioning.

In April 1971 Padilla was released after a month of brutal interrogation during which he was forced to make a humiliating 4,000-word public confession.

His jailing and the ''confession'' that followed set off an international protest as writers around the world, from Jean-Paul Sartre to Alberto Moravia to Susan Sontag, rose to his defense: for some left-leaning authors, it was the event that forever changed the way they viewed Castro's Cuba.

In 1980 Padilla was among a group of dissidents allowed to leave the island, and he moved to the United States. He published Linden Lane magazine, a place where Latin American writers could have an outlet for their work, and he taught at the University of Miami as well as New York and Princeton universities. Padilla’s novel Hemes Graze My Garden was published in the United States in 1984. Other books include Poesia y politico: Poemas escogidos de Heberto Padilla/Poetry and Politics: Selected Poems of Heberto Padilla, El hombre junto al mar (“The Man by the Sea”), and Legacies. His memoir, Self-Portrait of the Other, was published in 1990. Shortly before his death, he joined the faculty at Auburn University as writer-in-residence.

Achievements

• In 1968 Padilla's book of poems, Fuera del juego (“Out of the Game”) was awarded the yearly poetry prize offered by the Writers’ Union, but the book appeared with an afterword denouncing it as counterrevolutionary. Selections from El justo tiempo humano and Fuera del juego were published in English translation as Sent Off the Field: A Selection from the Poetry of Heberto Padilla (1972). Padilla was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

Works

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  • Fuera del Juego 1968
  • Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden 1984
  • Self-Portrait of the Other
  • El hombre junto al mar
  • A Fountain, a House of Stone 1991

Politics

Although Padilla initially supported the revolution led by Fidel Castro, by the late 1960s he began to criticize it openly and in 1971, he was imprisoned by the Castro regime. After Padilla's statement of self-criticism, a number of prominent Latin American, North American, and European intellectuals, including Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar, Susan Sontag, and Jean-Paul Sartre, spoke out against Padilla's incarceration, and the resulting controversy came to be known as "the Padilla affair."

Padilla was made to read a public confession accusing himself and others of vaguely defined attitudes and activities contrary to Fidel Castro’s regime, which increased the protests abroad. In 1980 Padilla was allowed to leave the country for the United States, where he taught at a number of colleges and universities.

Connections

Padilla was married to Bertha Hernandez with whom he had three children, Giselle, Maria, and Carlos Padilla. He married for the second time to poet Belkis Cuza Malé in 1972. His son, Ernesto Padilla, was born in 1972.

Spouse:

Belkis Cuza Malé

former spouse:

Bertha Hernandez

Son:

Ernesto Padilla

Daughter:

Giselle Padilla

Daughter:

Maria Padilla

Son:

Carlos Padilla

References

• Contemporary Authors, Vol. 189
  2001