The Cuban poet Heberto Padilla, who died at the end of
September, aged sixty-eight, was among those writers of whom it
may be said that he made history, less by what he
wrote or even thought than by the course of events,
which in his case has in retrospect a dreadful
inevitability.
To understand his life and work,
we
must return to the moment at which his name first came
to global prominence, in 1971, and we must recall the
atmosphere of left-wing sanctity that then surrounded
the personality and reputation of the Cuban tyrant.

Castro and his revolution had burst on a world ripe
for some new apocalypse. The time was reminiscent of
St. Paul’s description of Roman society at Christ’s
birth: “the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in
pain together until now” (Romans 8:22).
The end of the Eisenhower era was symbolized not only
by the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960, but also by
the seizure of Havana by Castro’s bearded bands at the
beginning of the previous year. Castro and his
sidekick Ernesto “Che” Guevara opened up an entirely
new chapter in the epic of radical illusions.
Youthful and charismatic, they had more in common, it
seemed, with Brando, Elvis, and Kerouac than with
Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky.

The Cuban regime retained this magical aura for at
least a decade. Cuban Communism was different, or so
its foreign admirers chose to believe. It was
alleged to be an authentic popular movement, not