Queer Places:
Miami Memorial Park Cemetery
Miami, Miami-Dade County, Florida, USA
Heberto Juan Padilla (20 January 1932 – 25 September 2000) was a Cuban poet put to the center of the so-called Padilla affair when he was imprisoned for criticizing the Cuban government.[1][2]
When the Spanish novelist Juan Goytisolo
went to Havana in 1967,
Virgilio Piñera told him all
about revolutionary Cuba’s persecution of gay men. Goytisolo could not help
thinking of all the gay writers he had met in the early 1960s, who had now
been either prosecuted or otherwise silenced: they included
Reinaldo Arenas,
Antón
Arrufat, José Lezama Lima,
Heberto Padilla and Piñera himself.
Padilla was born in Puerta de Golpe, Pinar del Río, Cuba. His first book of poetry, Las rosas audaces (The Audacious Roses), was published in 1949. After his first marriage to Bertha Hernandez with whom he had three children, Giselle Padilla, Maria Padilla and Carlos Padilla, he married poet Belkis Cuza Malé with whom he had his younger son Ernesto Padilla.
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.[3]
Padilla was released thirty-seven days after being imprisoned, but not before delivering a statement of self-criticism to a UNEAC meeting. In this statement he had confessed to the charges brought against him, describing himself to be what his adversaries accused him of being: a counterrevolutionary, subtle, insidious, and malignant.[8] He had also accused other writers, including his own wife, and urged them to follow his lead of conforming to the Revolutionary society.[1]
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."[1] The affair stirred a schism among political critics across the world, bringing many who had previously supported the Fidel Castro government to reconsider their position.[9]
Though Padilla was released from prison, he was still not allowed to leave the country until 1980.
The negotiations of the senator Edward Kennedy, the editor of The New York Review of Books, Robert B. Silvers, Bernard Malamud and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
organized his departure of Cuba to New York.
He lived in New York, Washington, D.C. and Madrid, before finally settling in Princeton, NJ. Padilla was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Farrar Straus & Giroux published several editions of his poetry, a novel, En mi jardín pastan los héroes (translated as Heroes Are Grazing in My Garden), and a book of memoirs, La mala memoria (translated as Self-Portrait of the Other).
He was the Elena Amos Distinguished Scholar in Latin American Studies at Columbus State University, Columbus GA, 1999–2000. He died on 25 September 2000 while teaching at Auburn University in Alabama.
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