Amir Valle

GAGGED

Censorship in Cuba

Translated by Jill Powis

Eva Tas Foundation | Amsterdam

In Difficult Times

Heberto Padilla,

from Fuera del Juego (Sent off the Field) 1968

They asked that man for his time

so they could join it to the time of History.

They asked for his hands,

(…)

They asked for his eyes

(...)

They asked for his lips

(…)

They asked for his legs

(…)

They asked for his chest, his heart, his shoulders.

(…)

Later they explained

that all this giving would be pointless

unless he handed over his tongue,

because in difficult times

there is nothing as useful for stopping hatred and lies.

Ethics versus repression and censorship

This is a necessary book because of the unique analysis it provides of the suppression of freedom of expression in Cuba by Fidel Castro’s “revolutionary” government. From the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 to the “Raulist Era” of today, it offers a chilling survey of the most significant cases of cultural repression and censorship perpetrated by the longest Communist dictatorship in the world.

It is also an important book, because it is written by Amir Valle, who has witnessed first hand the oppressive and painful wounds inflicted by censorship and cultural repression. It is therefore not a text written by someone who has coldly studied the issue but rather the honest reflections of a Cuban intellectual, a victim of this censorship and repression – someone who speaks from experience.

Amir Valle was the natural leader of our generation, the group of writers that literary studies call the “Novísimos” [literally, “The Very Latest”]. He was the first of all of us to win national awards and he had the misfortune to suffer censorship before the rest of us, because his work was always critical. He was also the first of us to publicly oppose the regime – most of us were critical in private, but we told him then that he was wrong, that our role was “to write, not to play politics”. Although the circumstances were traumatic, he had the good fortune to become, of our generation, the author of the most popular clandestine book in Cuba, ‘Habana Babilonia’ (‘Havana Babylon’) about prostitution, and although only around 7 of those 50 writers remain in Cuba, of all of us he was the only one sent into exile in a dirty manoeuvre by the government to remove his bad influence on Cuban intellectuals. He is also one of the exiles most detested by the Castro brothers’ dictatorship, because of his ethical stance, his intellectual honesty, his deep knowledge of the reality of political and cultural power in Cuba, and his tireless work as an author and journalist to reveal the sinister truths Castroism wants to conceal from the world.

When colleagues from the Eva Tas Foundation decided to publish this book, Amir wrote to me. “Dear brother, I’m in a dilemma. I have to write a book about the history of cultural censorship. As you know, my case is considered a key example – it should be in that book, but ethically, I can’t talk about myself”. So we agreed that I would write these words because it is true that any document on the issue in Cuba which excluded the censorship he suffered from his first literary steps until his exile would be incomplete and distorted. I also write these words in gratitude for his generosity. Amir Valle helps any writer who comes to him. Many of the writers of our generation and later generations, well-known today in Cuba and beyond, were his students and a number have even had their books published by international publishing houses as a result of his support. Not only that, when he found out that the Cuban political police had imprisoned me following a show trial to punish me for criticising the dictatorship in my blog ‘Los hijos que nadie quiso’ (‘The children nobody wanted’), Amir, (as well as becoming my unpaid literary agent), joined forces with the Argentinian artist and human rights activist Elisa Tabakman to form a duo to which I owe thanks for raising international awareness of the injustice perpetrated against me and for the vast majority of the expressions of support I have received from cultural and political figures and international institutions.

_ Amir Valle, the trail-blazer...

I met Amir Valle in 1986, at the Alejo Carpentier Centre in Havana, where the Ministry of Culture was holding a National Seminar for Young Writers, which brought together almost all of our generation, the ‘Novísimos’. I was making my first attempts to write when most of those invited had already won awards at the national Literary Workshops. I felt as though I had been plunged into a distant and unknown universe. I had just been released from prison for failing to report my family when they tried to leave the country secretly for the first time. However, what I remember most clearly was my admiration: I regarded them as if they were Nobel Laureates. We had barely introduced ourselves when there was a kind of explosion of affinity, literary interests, emotions. Amir was special: the moment you knew him you liked him. I was very proud to accept his friendship: at his young age, he was already a legend in the Cuban literary world, someone who made you feel that one day soon he would the great figure of Latin American literature that he is today.

I can safely say, because I witnessed it at first hand, that (with the exception of his first prize and his first book, ‘Tiempo en cueros’, (‘Time naked’), tales of his childhood in a rural town, published when he was 21) every one of his awards, books and literary and journalistic successes has been a struggle against various forms of censorship, ideological control and cultural repression. In a long interview I had with him in July 2005 when I was still in prison, I forced him to make public many of these struggles against censorship which he had never wanted to talk about. Anyone who reads this interview will reach a clear conclusion: life has rewarded Amir Valle with international prestige, the respect and gratitude of the vast majority of his colleagues, and the fear of his words on the part of the Cuban Revolution’s cultural commissars, simply because he has never stopped working, fighting, defending the freedom of his ideas. It has not been easy: in one of our exchanges of messages while I was in prison, he confessed that for every joy during his thirty-year literary career he had received more than a dozen bitter blows. “But I can sleep with a clear conscience, I can look anyone in the eye with my dignity intact and I can say that everything that I have I have won cleanly, far from all those shady secret meetings, literary cliques and ideological and cultural factions that, on all sides of the “Cuban question”, live off the suffering of our people,” he wrote to me at that time.

I will give this brief summary to give the reader an idea of ​​this difficult intellectual journey:

In 1983, aged 16, he joined the Literary Workshops Movement in Santiago de Cuba, which at that time were very important. By 1984 his problems were already beginning. He conceived and founded, with other young writers, a literary group, ‘Seis del Ochenta’ (‘Six of the Eighty’), which immediately received threats from the censors, as in their manifesto they announced that they intended to write about “taboo and problematic subjects relating to Cuban reality”. All its members were “warned” by the political police that their ideas could be exploited by the enemies of the revolution, and counterintelligence officials planted a spy in their ranks (another young writer). Due to the critical nature of their stories, it was José Mariano Torralbas and Amir who suffered the severest censorship. They were put on a blacklist that would force Torralbas to emigrate when all doors were closed to him in Cuba; it was a blacklist that Amir would never be taken off.

In 1987, there was another daring act: he submitted ‘Cambiar’ (‘Change’), a short story, for the national award of Muchacha, one of Cuba’s most important magazines. Thanks to a courageous jury, he won the competition and after a hard fight against the censors, writer Waldo González López, the organiser of the award, managed to get the story published. It tackled a highly sensitive issue: the double standards and ideological manipulation of young Cubans through the Communist Youth League (UJC), an appendage of the Communist Party. That put him back in the crosshairs of those who already considered him an “ideological deviant”. I witnessed how officers from State Security (political police) interrupted the class at the Faculty of Journalism and took him out of the classroom for questioning, asking him to account for comments he had made at cultural venues or in private, which made us realise that he was being kept under constant surveillance.

Thus would begin a shameful succession of acts of censorship of his work. In Cuba, these processes are usually secret and authors almost never manage to prove that they have been censored, but the affection and respect that Amir had gained allowed many of us to find out about the ploys being used to silence his criticism: in most cases, the censors themselves (writers or state officials) leaked us the information, admitting that they were forced to censor him.

A few examples:

• ‘Yo soy el malo’ (‘I am the villain’), the book with which Amir won

second place in 1986 in the important David Prize, awarded by the

National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC). It would be

published three years later, after a long battle with the censors;

• Due to his public condemnation of the censorship of ‘Yo soy el malo’,

there were threats that ‘En el nombre de Dios’ (‘In the name of God’)

would be stripped of the award that he had won for the book in 1988,

UNEAC’s Testimonial Narratives Prize, the most important of its kind

in the country. This was prevented by the strong opposition of a member

of UNEAC’s board, the writer Vasco Justo, supported by other writers.

The book was published in 1990, two years later;

• his book ‘Manuscritos del muerto’ (‘Manuscripts of the dead’), a novella

about the censorship of a journalist in a country dominated by a dictator

(one of five finalists for the Casa de las Américas Award in 1994), would

see the light of day in 2000, totally butchered, after the political police

sent the writer Eduardo Heras León (our teacher and mentor, almost a

father to us) to convince him of the ‘need’ to remove the critical parts

of the book. Amir accepted the butchery of his work out of respect for

the teacher;

• his short story ‘Mambrú no fue a la guerra’ (‘Mambrú did not go to

war’), a uncompromising account of the true story of a Cuban soldier

maimed in Cuba’s internationalist wars in Africa. There were moves to

exclude it from ‘Aire de Luz’ (‘Air of Light’), an anthology of the best

Cuban stories of the twentieth century, selected by the writer Alberto

Garrandés. Luckily, the anthologist refused, warned other selected

writers and we all made it known to the censors that we would not

allow our short stories to be published if Amir was excluded.

• from 1990 to 1999, no Cuban publishing house would accept his books,

despite his being recognised by literary critics as one of the country’s

most distinguished writers.

• from 2000 to 2005, except for the erotic fantasy novels ‘Muchacha azul

bajo la lluvia’ (‘Blue girl in the rain’), ‘Los desnudos de Dios’ (‘The naked of

God’) and the noir novel ‘Si Cristo te desnuda’ (‘If Christ undressed you’)

(which had to be published because they won national awards, and the

prize was publication), Cuban publishers censored ‘Las puertas de la

noche’ (‘The portals of night’), ‘Entre el miedo y las sombras’ (‘Between fear

and shadows’), and ‘Santuario de sombras’ (‘Sanctuary of shadows’), all

of them dealing with Cuban lives on the margins of society. It

was precisely with these novels that Amir Valle achieved international

recognition, when they were published in several languages by major

European publishing companies.

These acts of censorship dragged down Amir’s hopes; something changed radically in him. It was a cruel farewell to the naivety that many of us still retained and, with the precocity that he always had, he decided to distance himself from official spaces. I confess that I was one of those did not understand it then; mistakenly, I thought that it was enough to be producing critical, social and anti-government literature. That was what we were taught by our teachers who had allowed their generation to be crushed by fear, a fear that they then tried to transmit to us so that we would not suffer the repression they experienced in the 1960s and 1970s. I remember that when Amir clearly told me about his opposition to the totalitarian regime, his severe criticisms of the dictatorship and the human rights violations in Cuba, due to my political immaturity and the manipulation I had not yet escaped, I told him that “as an artist you shouldn’t get confused about our weapon – it’s literature. Our role is to write, not to play politics”.

_ Havana Babylon, Cuban censorship’s biggest blunder

Amir Valle is the author of what is believed to be the biggest underground bestseller in the history of Cuban literature: ‘Havana Babylon’, an in-depth investigation which ranges from the first historical evidence of prostitution on the island to its re-emergence with Cuba’s economic crisis following the fall of Communism in Russia and Europe. After graduating in journalism from the University of Havana in 1989, he spent several years inside the world of prostitution and poverty to write this book. Years later, following its publication by Editorial Planeta in 2006, it won the prestigious international Rodolfo Walsh Prize, awarded each year to the best non-fiction book published in the Spanish language. It is regarded by critics as a classic of the genre in Latin America and there are dozens of doctorates and theses on this work.

However, in Cuba it had to be distributed clandestinely in the years before it was finally published (no Cuban publishing house has as yet done so). In 1999, after five years of work, Amir decided to submit it for the Casa de las Américas Prize, in the Testimonial Narratives category. Around that time, writers of our generation were attending a workshop in Havana and witnessed something that made us proud – two of our own, Alberto Garrido and Amir Valle, won the prize in the short story and testimonial narrative categories, respectively. Years later we would learn something that Amir would not tell us at that time, out of concern for those who gave him the evidence: there was manipulation of the jury against his work. One of the jurors (who vetoed it saying the book was not appropriate given the problems facing the country) reported it to the political police and, even though Amir was informed unofficially that he had won, the prize was not awarded to him. I witnessed the news spreading throughout Havana that Amir had been stripped of the prize. At the awards ceremony, when the chair of the jury read out the results and declared the prize void, we booed in protest, which caught the attention of the audience and the foreign press. The next day, the foreign media wrote, “A Cuban is stripped of Casa de las Américas Prize for political reasons”.

How did that unpublished book become an underground bestseller? In 2004, after a lot of research, Amir’s German literary agent, Ray Güde Mertin, found out that someone had photocopied one of the copies sent for the prize, turned it into a Word document and put it on a CD which was circulated round the island in 2000 along with other banned works, including ‘Before Night Falls’ by Reinaldo Arenas, some books by Mario Vargas Llosa and ‘Castro’s Final Hour’ by Andrés Oppenheimer. It was also around that time that the email system controlled through the “intranet” began (a type of internet just for Cuba, without access to the real open internet), which meant that circulation of the text went viral.

The attempt to censor the book by withdrawing the prize became its biggest promoter: during that first stage, it reached thousands of Cuban readers. The cultural and political authorities began a silent campaign against it in workplaces all over in the country. “A counter-revolutionary document is being circulated” was the slogan of that campaign which would attract even more readers. Unfortunately, it also caused sackings and other “acts of repudiation” of workers who had been discovered printing or copying a text deemed “an enemy of the Revolution”. Finally, after the book was published in 2006, with Amir now living in exile in Germany, Fidel Castro himself attacked the work in response to the international publicity it was gaining, branding a Cuban journalist emigre who interviewed Amir and, days later, the author himself as “jineterólogos” (“hooker experts”). This was the boost needed for Cubans to embark en masse on a hunt for the book that, to this day, is still an underground bestseller desperately sought after by new generations of Cubans.

_ The Cuban Culture Collection: another blow from censorship

The cultural authorities and the political police monitoring culture would be attacked by a fresh wave of anger when, in 2002, Amir Valle decided to take over responsibility for the single most important opposition event at Cuba’s International Book Fair to this day: presentations of the Cuban Culture Collection of Plaza Mayor, the Puerto Rican publishing house.

The official cultural policy faced two challenges: first, the Collection would publish (and would present both within Cuba and outside Cuba) authors from both sides, trying to break down the wall with which the Revolution divided Cuban writers on the island and in exile; and second, the project was managed by Patricia Gutiérrez-Menoyo, daughter of one of the legendary guerrilla rebels, former comrades-in-arms of Fidel Castro: Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, who was one of the first leaders to actively oppose the Communist direction the Revolution had taken.

These were years when Cuban cultural policy strategists had convinced Fidel Castro of the need to present an image of openness to the world. Thus began a strategy to regain the international support of left-wing intellectuals who had distanced themselves from the Revolution for two decades because of the undeniable cultural repression on the island since the so-called “Padilla Affair” in 1971. The publication of books by less critical foreign writers began to be permitted, national publishing houses began publishing exiled Cuban writers (if they did not have a very critical stance against the Revolution), the work of some Cuban writers who had died in exile was published, and Cuban magazines could include references to the work of authors, artists, musicians and intellectuals which had been totally banned for decades. It was through that strategy that there was approval for the presence at the International Book Fair of Patricia, the publisher, in 2000 and, from 2002, official presentations of the titles that she would begin to publish.

It was in 2002 that Amir Valle became Plaza Mayor’s Coordinator in Cuba, which intensified attacks by the censors, who tried and failed to get it to comply with its demands: to moderate language critical of the government’s segregationist cultural policy in its promotional material and to not publish counter-revolutionary authors. As it was a means of being published outside Cuba (an opportunity the government only granted to a few authors in exchange for their services as mouthpieces for the Revolution), most Cuban writers gravitated towards Amir and the work he was doing for Plaza Mayor from his home in central Havana; work in many fields which resulted in the publication of 30 titles (24 of them personally managed by Amir) and in two prizes for novels which could be awarded to authors on the island and in exile.

In May 2002, Abel Prieto, the Minister of Culture, launched a campaign at a national meeting of the ministry to discredit the project and its Coordinator, in view of Amir’s refusal to apply the censorship to the Cuban Culture Collection demanded by the cultural authorities. In a subsequent meeting, the Minister would issue the order that Amir should not be employed in any cultural institution, should not be given any promotional opportunities, nor should his books be published or his works included in anthologies or national magazines. Despite this, that same year, Cuba was Guest of Honour at the Guadalajara International Book Fair and, after much negotiation, in an attempt to project an image of tolerance, the Cuban delegation agreed to include the Collection and several of its authors, both resident on the island and in exile.

This stifling atmosphere, which converted Amir into a social outcast, someone whom nobody should approach to “avoid being contaminated”, became even more suffocating when in 2003, the commander Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, who had been living in Miami since 1986, exercised his rights as a Spanish citizen who was a naturalised Cuban, and decided to return to Cuba to demand legal status for his political group, Cambio Cubano (Cuban Change). He made daily visits to Amir’s home; the political police declared Amir a “collaborator with the enemy” and, to closely monitor their movements, they used writer Raúl Antonio Capote (agent “Daniel”) as a spy, taking advantage of the friendship and close personal relationship the two authors had shared from very young.

By 2004 the regime had decided to stop such a corrupting project because, despite all the attacks and all the propaganda deployed against it, the Cuban Culture Collection continued to gain admirers and support among Cuban intellectuals, both on the island and in exile. The 2004 Havana International Book Fair would eventually provide the pretext: during the presentation of the latest titles, with the room full of people, Patricia Gutiérrez Menoyo launched into a speech that was too critical and provocative for the censors’ taste. In that speech, the publisher condemned the countless obstacles faced by the project: changes of site and programme without notice, disinformation to confuse readers, delays in customs procedures to prevent the books reaching the fair, threats to Cuba-based authors and the ban on the exiled writer, Luis Manuel García, from travelling to Cuba to present his book of short stories ‘El éxito del tigre’ (‘Success of the Tiger’). Patricia said that such a ban was due to the fact that this writer, who lives in Spain, was also editor of the magazine ‘Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana’ (‘Encounter with Cuban Culture’, banned in Cuba). She read to those present a message of condemnation sent by Luis Manuel from Madrid and another letter from Sweden, sent by the Cuban novelist Antonio Álvarez Gil, who clearly stated that he was refusing to come to Cuba to show solidarity with his colleague Luis Manuel and the 75 journalists imprisoned during the “Black Spring” of 2003 for the sole “crime” of informing the world of truths that the dictatorship tried to conceal.

Repressive measures were not long in coming: they needed to completely silence Amir Valle, as doing so would sever the influence of Patricia Gutiérrez Menoyo’s publishing project on Cuban intellectuals. On 3 February 2005, days before the start of a new season of the Fair, to which the Collection had not been invited, the Cubarte network (a server that provides email services to Cuban artists and writers) informed Amir, “We’ve been checking on the misuse of email to disseminate information which is not in line with the interests of the Cubarte network and therefore we have decided to suspend you from this service”. The “misuse” to which they referred was the magazine ‘Letras en Cuba’ (‘Literature in Cuba’), an independent publication that Amir drafted, designed and sent to thousands of readers outside the island via email, because he was never granted direct access to the internet. In the end, there were 30 editions of ‘Letras en Cuba’ and it was published at a time when there was no other Cuban literary magazine on the internet. After weeks of legal wrangling, he was once again connected to the email service, but only on condition that it would be used for personal matters and never to issue unauthorised publications. Amir then created a system of “information capsules” (small news items on important cultural developments not covered by the official press), calling them ‘A título personal’ (‘In a personal capacity’). He only managed to send out three capsules before the Ministry of Culture ordered that he should be totally denied access to email. As a result, until his departure from Cuba, he was forced to rent pirate accounts on the island’s internet black market.

_ Removing the rotten apple from the barrel

However, as I said at the beginning, Amir’s constant work helping young writers, giving workshops in various parts of the city and in his own home, the years when he was on the fiction panel of many of the most important events throughout the island, the three years (1995-1998) when he worked in the Literature Department of the Cuban Book Institute dealing with writers from all over the country, the two national courses that he taught as a professor of narrative technique at the Onelio Jorge Cardoso National Literary Training Centre, his work as General Coordinator of Plaza Mayor’s Cuban Culture Collection, the silent admiration that most of his colleagues from several generations felt for his ethical stance towards the government (saying what many of us wanted but did not dare to say about the situation in the country), and the bans on his work that only increased Cuban readers’ desire to know his books, his writings, his views, made him one of the most influential Cuban writers within the Cuban intelligentsia in those years. Furthermore, since the publication in 2001 in Spain of his novel ‘The portals of night’, on a real case of child prostitution in Cuba, the international press often interviewed him, his books began to win the most prestigious European critics’ and readers’ awards, and that gave his criticism of the government even more impact.

Arresting him, as they had done with other journalists and writers with a lower or non-existent international profile, would have been too damaging to the image of “tolerance” that the Revolution was trying to project. It was therefore decided to sever his influence over the Cuban intellectual and cultural world, especially on the younger generations of writers. As we later learned, at that time Abel Prieto, the Minister of Culture, commented to a colleague on the dirty trick he had devised, “Amir is a rotten apple and rotten apples are thrown out of the barrel so that they don’t rot the others”.

In October 2005, Amir went to Spain on a book tour to publicise his novel ‘Sanctuary of shadows’ on another taboo subject at that time in Cuba – human trafficking by sea to the United States with the collusion of members of the Cuban military. When he finished the tour, the authorities prevented him from re-entering the island. After staying illegally in Spain for several months, his German publisher got him a scholarship at the Heinrich Böll Foundation for six months. After that, when it was obvious that the Cuban government had not responded to the international campaign demanding the return of Amir to the island, the PEN Club of Germany awarded him a grant under the Writers in Exile international programme for three years. In 2009, as he was unable to return to Cuba, the German authorities granted him political asylum. Even today his name is on a blacklist of Cubans who, according to the dictatorship, have lost the right to return to Cuba. As if it were not enough to exile him for 10 years from his homeland and from the cultural scene where, fortunately, he is still admired and respected, in early 2015, the regime sent a cultural commissar (an old friend from his youth, whom Amir agreed to meet through pure nostalgia for the good times) to tell him that if he wanted to visit or return to the island, it would be advisable, at the very least, to tone down his criticism. “If you kept quiet for a while, they’d examine the possibility of letting you in at some point. It’d be wise for you to adapt to the new era brought in by the talks between Obama and Raúl,” said the commissar. Amir’s response has been clear: 2015 was the year when, through his work as a journalist for major German, Spanish and Latin American media outlets, he even more actively denounced the farce of “change” and dialogue with the enemy through which the Castroists are seeking to transfer all their power to their heirs, the Neo-Castroists.

This is the writer and journalist whose vision of censorship in Cuba you will read in this book. In both fields, literature and journalism, he has had many bitter experiences, confronting censors and repressors, and therefore his voice is important and his experience necessary to build that future free Cuba to which we all aspire. A Cuba where Culture will have to rebuild its historic, true pillars – ethical, libertarian and inclusive – destroyed by the ideology-driven cultural policy of this monster called the “Cuban Revolution”.

Ángel Santiesteban Prats