Heberto Padilla

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Heberto Padilla (1981).

Heberto Padilla (born January 20, 1932 in Puerta de Golpe , Pinar del Río province , † September 25, 2000 in Auburn , Alabama ) was a Cuban poet whose arrest as a counterrevolutionary in 1971 led to the break of many international intellectuals with Fidel Castro . After 1980 he lived and worked in the USA .

Life

Writing, arrest and Padilla affair 1971

After attending elementary and secondary school, Padilla began studying law at the University of Havana , but did not finish it. His first collection of poems was published as early as 1948 under the title Las rosas audaces . Between 1949 and 1952 and during the final years of Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship from 1956 to 1959, he already lived in the USA. After the Cuban Revolution of 1959, he returned to Cuba, where he published another volume of poetry , El justo tiempo humano . In the following years he traveled to Europe as a representative of the Ministry of Commerce and as a correspondent for various newspapers .

In 1967, Padilla was banned from leaving the country and lost his position as editor of the Granma newspaper when he praised the novel Tres tristes tigres by Guillermo Cabrera Infante , who had previously been exiled and classified by the authorities as a counterrevolutionary, in the cultural magazine El caimán barbudo and was preferred by the official cultural establishment Factory La Pasión de Urbino by Lisandro Otero called superior. His volume of poetry Fuera del juego was awarded the annual poetry prize of the National Association of Writers and Artists UNEAC ( Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba ) in 1968 , but appeared with an afterword that classified him as a counter-revolutionary . In 1971, Padilla and his wife, the poet Belkis Cuza Malé , were arrested on charges of “subversive activity”, which led to violent protests from private individuals, organizations and foreign governments. Numerous former supporters of the Cuban government criticized it because of the Padilla affair, which was named after him, and the controversy ultimately led to a bipartisan split between intellectuals and artists from Latin America .

Padilla was forced to read a public confession accusing himself and others of vaguely defined attitudes and activities against Fidel Castro's regime . This has now also led to protests abroad. This mobilized writers from Susan Sontag , Marguerite Duras , Simone de Beauvoir , Jean-Paul Sartre , and Hans Magnus Enzensberger to a letter of protest, but Castro wanted nothing to do with these “shameless pseudo-lefts”. After five weeks and the obligatory, dubious self-accusation, Padilla was released and from then on lived and wrote in seclusion.

In 1971, Fuera del juego was published in a German translation by Günter Maschke under the title Outside the Game and in 1972 excerpts from El justo tiempo humano and Fuera del juego in an English translation under the title Sent Off the Field: A Selection from the Poetry of Heberto Padilla . In 1972, Hans Magnus Enzensberger also published an edition of Padilla's poems, Poesías para los que no leen poesías .

Emigrated in 1980, worked as a writer and teacher in the USA

In 1980, after mediation by US Senator Edward Kennedy , Padilla was allowed to leave the United States, where he was received as a hero by US President Ronald Reagan . He then taught at various colleges and universities such as Princeton University and the University of Miami .

In 1981, En mi jardín pastan los héroes, an autobiographical novel about his life in revolutionary Cuba, was published, as well as El hombre junto al mar , an edition of collected poems that was published in 1982 in a bilingual edition under the title Legacies: Selected Poems with English translations by Alastair Reid and Andrew Hurley appeared.

After his 1989 memoir La mala memoria , he published A Fountain, a House of Stone again in 1991 , a Spanish-English edition of his poems with translations by Alastair Reid and Alexander Coleman . Most recently, he taught as a lecturer at Auburn University .

Padilla married the poet Belkis Cuza Malé in 1971 . The marriage had four children, including the graphic artist and cigar manufacturer Ernesto Padilla , who was born in 1972 .

Publications

  • Las rosas audaces , 1948
  • El justo tiempo humano , 1959
  • La hora , 1964
  • Fuera del juego , poems, 1968
  • Subversive poetry: the Padilla affair , 1972
  • Poesía y política. Poemas escogidos de Heberto Padilla = Poetry and politics: selected poems of Heberto Padilla , 1974
  • En mi jardín pastan los héroes , novel, 1981
  • El hombre junto al mar, poems, 1981
  • Legacies: Selected Poems, Poems, 1982
  • La mala memoria, autobiography, 1989
  • Self-portrait of the other , 1990
  • A Fountain, a House of Stone , 1991
in German language

literature

  • El caso Padilla: Literatura y Revolución en Cuba. Document collection, edited by Lourdes Casal, Ediciones Universal & Nueva Atlántida, Miami and New York, 1971 (Spanish)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Marga Graf: Civil death or court dog of the dictators. The role of the writer in Latin American society as reflected in censorship and self-censorship. P. 250 , in: Censorship and self-censorship in literature. Edited by Peter Brockmeier and Gerhard R. Kaiser, Königshausen and Neumann: Würzburg 1996, pp. 241–262
  2. ↑ EL ENCARCELAMIENTO DE LOS POETAS HEBERTO PADILLA Y BELKIS CUZA MALÉ EN LA CUBA DE FIDEL CASTRO
  3. ↑ EL ENCARCELAMIENTO DE LOS POETAS HEBERTO PADILLA Y BELKIS CUZA MALÉ EN LA CUBA DE FIDEL CASTRO
personal data
SURNAME Padilla, Heberto
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Padilla, Herberto (wrong name form)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Cuban writer
DATE OF BIRTH January 20, 1932
PLACE OF BIRTH Puerta de Golpe , Pinar del Río Province
DATE OF DEATH September 25, 2000
Place of death Auburn , Alabama