Estudios de Teoría Literaria (Mar 2022)
La mala memoria: Heberto Padilla and the ruin of History
Abstract
In 1989, almost ten years after his departure from the island, and in tune with the crumbling of international communism, writer Heberto Padilla published La mala memoria, a text in which he recounts, among other things, his experience as a State Security detainee in Villa Marista prison and his subsequent self-criticism in the Union of Cuban Writers and Artists. Despite the fact that in 1971 those events questioned the entire intellectual community of the Latin American and European left and that, in the Cuban's publication, the "Case" is effectively the climax of the story, I would like to propose a reading of Padilla's memoirs that takes the focus off those events to foreground the ways in which the voice of the Revolution was constructed. This way of approaching the text is what I believe allows not only to establish relationships with other works by the author, such as the collection of poems Fuera del juego (1968), but also to reflect on his writing as a poetics of corrosion and emptying that allows him to dispute the senses of the State that censored him.
