Cuba’s chilling ‘Padilla Affair’ a warning to Florida, where leaders are quashing free speech | Opinion

Like a ghost called to a new battlefield, Cuba’s most notorious censorship scandal — known around the world as “The Padilla Affair” — is making an appearance in a Florida where the ruling Republican Party is diligently working to restrict free speech.

Welcome poet Heberto Padilla to the discussion, from the beyond.

The writer and his forced 1971 mea culpa rise from the grave of history via a documentary making its U.S. debut at the Miami Film Festival in Monday and Tuesday showings.

Cuban filmmaker Pavel Giroud, who lives in Spain, has unearthed — he won’t say how or from whom — never-released footage of the way Fidel Castro and his security apparatus used the writer to deal the final blow to criticism of the government in Cuba.

After holding Padilla and his writer wife, Belkis Cuza Malé, for two months in Havana’s notorious interrogation gulag, Villa Marista, Castro and his state security forced Padilla to stage a public false confession.

In a theatrical display that went on for hours, a sweating and almost hysterical Padilla claimed that the criticism of the government contained in his prize-winning poetry book, “Fuera del Juego” (“Out of the Game”), had been leveled out of “vanity” and to gain international attention.

It is chilling not only to see him self-censor but also to implicate friends and his wife. It is chilling to see all the other terrified writers around him who said nothing, and those who did, who shamed themselves, too.

State of democracy

What does this have to do with Florida?

Padilla’s case is chock-full of lessons — and packs a punch: Once a government succeeds, by whatever means, in arguing there’s no room for criticism, democracy dies.

This is precisely the battle being waged in Florida, where Padilla found for short periods both refuge in universities and rejection by hard-liner sectors of the exile community. Padilla, whom I met in 1990s Miami, a time teeming with hope after the fall of the Soviet Union, would easily recognize the methods being used today to govern the state.

Divide and conquer, shut down criticism, run government interference operations on once independent institutions like grade schools, colleges and universities, and chip away at constitutional rights in the name of establishing a sole prevailing ideology.

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Looks like censorship

The key to amassing the power strongmen usurp is silencing a society’s conscience — embodied in the work of writers, both literary creators and journalists, and the role of educators. And so, with education already set on a course of book banning and speech-quashing, the latest additions are the new attempts by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the Florida Legislature to shred media freedoms.

READ MORE: Backed by DeSantis, lawmakers look to gut press freedom. It might not stop in Florida

Bills filed in the Legislature seek to intimidate, regulate and muzzle the media covering the extraordinary rise of a young governor with his eye on the White House. One tries to overthrow the U.S. Supreme Court’s Sullivan decision to make it easier for Florida’s elected officials to sue journalists. Another seeks to force bloggers who write about DeSantis, his Cabinet and legislators to register their blogs, keep officials posted about what they write and how often they do it — or face stiff fines.

And again, I want to pull Padilla — who died in 2000 at 68 in Auburn, Alabama, where he was a writer in residence — into the conversation.

South Florida’s Cuban-American legislators — whose exiled ancestors spent decades defending press freedoms in Cuba and Latin America — will be asked to support DeSantis’ calibrated attacks on the media.

What will they do, step up or cower? And, how will their voters react? By looking the other way like Cuban citizens did during Castro’s erasure of press freedoms? Cuban Americans, a powerful voting bloc, have already played a role ushering in this era of censorship by backing the governor and his chosen legislators, no questions asked.

To outsiders, it all seems as preposterous as Padilla’s sham mea culpa once did. But it’s all too real.

Vengeful DeSantis has just successfully taken over the operating framework of a business, Disney World, to punish its corporate executives for voicing opposition to his homophobic “Don’t Say Gay” education law, being expanded during this session to higher grade levels.

Castro and his sidekick, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, also persecuted gays and sent them to a forced labor camp. One of them, another celebrated and later-exiled novelist, Reinaldo Arenas, can be seen among the crowd of writers summoned to witness Padilla’s shame. He looks scared and stunned.

I don’t know the motive behind resurrection of the Padilla episode , but I’m glad a new generation is being exposed to how dictatorships are shaped and solidified.

Castro’s plot backfired because many in the international intellectual community knew Padilla was acting to save his family and didn’t buy the ruse. They broke with a betrayed revolution Castro re-branded as Marxist-Leninist. Another lesson: Leaders don’t reveal their authoritarian intent until the repressive apparatus is a done deal.

The Padilla affair is as resonant today as it was in its time, both for jailed dissidents in Cuba and Floridians staring at the spectacle of censorship, drip by drip, too many among us not recognizing it.

Fascism is the mirror image of communism.

Ninety miles from Cuba, and decades after Padilla, the Florida Legislature’s Class of 2023 is well on its way to becoming the most shamefully censorious in state history.

This will be their legacy if they don’t course-correct.

The best of writers, they should know, end up rising above their censors.

Despite what reels of the embattled poet show, Padilla remains one of Cuba’s most relevant and accomplished poets. His poems told his truth.