René Depestre vs. Nicolás Guillén (2)

Later, Guillen condemned my behavior. He told me, "You sawed off the branch you were sitting on! Castro saw you, his brother too! They saw you defending an hijo de la gran puta!" Guillen didn't like Padilla either, because Guillen didn't appreciate criticism of the regime. Guillen said, "These people, they risked their hide in the Sierra Maestra. They took risks, they waged war. The rest of us intellectuals, we were in Paris, in Buenos Aires, we didn't do anything. We didn't have the cojones to take action like these young men, so we should just keep our mouths shut!" I didn't agree with this theory, that we had to keep our mouths shut because the men who took power were men of action, that we had nothing to say. But Guillen was Machiavellian: "You have to be clever, you lacked political talent! I thought you had more finesse." In other words, he defended the socialista realpolitik, like many people who had served Stalin and others. For me, if there's something about which I cannot be reproached, it's that I never walked the walk of Stalinist realpolitik. From the moment I knew about them I said no. I'm Haitian after all, so I had my own little tradition of rebellion, my cimarrón tradition.

(¿Un cubano más? An Interview with René Depestre about his Cuban Experience. Afro-Hispanic Review, Fall 2015)