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“... After the fall of Batista in 1959, the poet Heberto Padilla, then 27 and living in New York, returned elatedly to Havana, joining the staff of the paper Revolucion. Thus helping to create the god who would later fail him. In 1961 the First Congress of Cuban Writers and Artists was held, its motto being ‘To Defend the Revolution is to Defend Culture’; simultaneously, Padilla says, it became clear that membership of the new Writers’ Union was to depend on approval by the National Board of Culture, a body designed to prevent any repetition of the Pasternak affair ...”

“... with delusions of a grander guignol, and is apposite only because you cannot understand Heberto Padilla’s poems unless you know about Padilla’s hard times in Cuba. With him, as Sebastian Venable pretended, the life of the poet is really the work of the poet, and ...”

“... impertinence. So when Jorge Edwards fell foul of them for siding with the ‘dissident’ poet Heberto Padilla during his time as chargé d’affaires there, Neruda insisted on having him as his assistant at the Paris Embassy, a plum posting for someone who might otherwise have been in diplomatic disgrace. In his Memoirs Neruda merely writes: ‘My ...”

“... continuing (some thought self-interested) loyalty to Castro after the show-trial of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971. And Octavio Paz forced many readers to make an awkward distinction between his political views and his writing when, late in life and in the name of order, he became a member of the putrid Mexican Institutional Revolutionary ...”

“... at the hands of the Cuban Government. It describes the public ‘confession’ of the poet Heberto Padilla, who after thirty days in detention denounced friends, fellow writers and even his wife for holding ‘counter-revolutionary attitudes’. It was about this time, the early Seventies, that I and several of my friends had a high opinion of ...”

“... he’d heard that Fidel had endorsed the invasion of Czechoslovakia; and in Chile that the poet Heberto Padilla had been forced into a humiliating self-denunciation of the kind that’s nowadays inflicted on the staff of large corporations. By 1989, when the veteran revolutionary Tony de la Guardia went to the firing squad with General Arnaldo Ochoa ...”

“... who hated Sunday painters and minor poets, was pet poet and pet pest on the magazine. Heber to Padilla, born in the same town as Baragano (the funnily-named Puerta de Golpe in Cuban tobacco country: Puerta de Golpe literally means, as if Larry Grayson had named it, ‘Shut the Door’), came from exile in the Berlitz Academy in New York, and cultivated an ...”