On the death of Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian patriot, Nobel laureate, scholar and democracy advocate. Mario Vargas Llosa and the Padilla Affair
Mario Vargas Llosa, March 28, 1936 – April 13, 2025
The Center for a Free Cuba released earlier today a statement on the passing of Mario Vargas Llosa Below is an excerpt.
The death of Mario Vargas Llosa in Lima, Peru is a great loss for Cubans in the island and around the world who benefited from his tireless efforts to denounce the crimes of Cuban communism. It is also a loss for millions of people worldwide whose struggle for human rights he defended in his many books, columns, and thousands of articles that appeared in major newspapers on three continents. Mario Vargas Llosa was a champion for the victims of oppression, and he urged the international community to assist them.
He was a Peruvian writer, professor and politician. Vargas Llosa was the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature and is considered one of the leading writers of his generation. He garnered a large international audience and had worldwide impact. Vargas Llosa has long been vocally opposed to the Castro dictatorship in Cuba. In 1971 following the imprisonment of Cuban poet, Heberto Padilla, Vargas Llosa, along with other intellectuals of the time, wrote to Fidel Castro protesting the Cuban political system and the unjust imprisonment of the poet.
The Center for a Free Cuba has included Mario Vargas Llosa in its Legion of Honor since 2016.
The Legion of Honor represents men and women from all parts of the world who came to the assistance of the Cuban people oppressed by the communist regime when many others chose to ignore their tragic plight. Cuban mothers, like mothers everywhere , teach their children to say, “thank you.” José Martí Cuba’s revered patriot and poet wrote that “Honrar, honra.” In Martí’s words, when we honor someone, we honor ourselves. It is our hope that when freedom arrives in Cuba, the name of Mario Vargas Llosa will be listed at an appropriate place in the Parliament of a Free Cuba.
He had been a man of the Left, but the systematic human rights abuses in Cuba shook his worldview, and changed the course of his life. In 2013, he spoke of this journey from Marxism to Liberalism in an address to the Montreal Economic Institute.
Background on The Padilla Affair
Heberto Juan Padilla, a Cuban poet, who like many had been an enthusiastic supporter of Fidel Castro ousting Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, became disillusioned when the Castro regime’s dictatorial nature became clear, and reflected it in his writings. In 1968, however, Cuban judges in the national poetry contest awarded their “Julian del Casal” poetry prize to Padilla’s collection, Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game), which contained critical lines such as:
“The poet! Kick him out!
He has no business here.
He doesn’t play the game.
He never gets excited
Or speaks out clearly.
He never even sees the miracles …”
The book was published but an addendum was added that criticized the work as counterrevolutionary, and Heberto Padilla was placed under house arrest. On March 20, 1971 Heberto Padilla and Belkis Cuza Malé’s home was raided by armed state security agents at seven in the morning and they were arbitrarily detained.
Belkis was held incommunicado for three days and released. Heberto was interrogated for over a month and psychologically tortured by the secret police and on April 27, 1971 taken to confess before the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, UNEAC) his counter-revolutionary tendencies. Cuban literary critic José Antonio Portuondo served as the moderator and introduced Heberto Padilla to the gathered group, and the numerous cameras of the official press. Below is an excerpt of a video from the event.
Artists and intellectuals wrote two open and public letters to Fidel Castro about Heberto Padilla, the first on April 9, 1971, was signed by Carlos Barral, Simone de Beauvoir, Italo Calvino, Josep Maria Castellet, Fernando Claudín, Julio Cortázar, Jean Daniel, Marguerite Duras, Hans Magnus Enzensbeger, Jean-Pierre Faye, Carlos Franqui, Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Juan Goytisolo, Luis Goytisolo, Alain Jouffroy, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Joyce Mansour, Dionys Mascolo, Alberto Moravia, Maurice Nadeau, Hélène Parmelin, Octavio Paz, Anne Philipe, Pignon, Jean Pronteau, Rebeyrolle, Rossana Rossanda, Francisco Rossi, Claude Roy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Semprún, and Mario Vargas Llosa. The second letter on May 20, 1971 was signed by an even greater number of artists and intellectuals, and was in reaction to Heberto Padilla’s “confession.”
They expressed their belief that it was their “duty to communicate our shame and anger to you” regarding it and expressed concern for “the contempt for human dignity that involves forcing a man to ridiculously accuse himself of the worst betrayals and vileness does not alarm us because he is a writer, but because any Cuban colleague – peasant, worker, technician or intellectual – may also be the victim of a similar violence and humiliation.”
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