bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
A portrait of hell: Extract from the prize-winning novel El Color que el Infierno me Escondiera
Authors: Moreno Carlos Martinez 
Published: October 2007

Excerpt from Moreno's prize-winning novel, The Colour Hell Kept from Me, published in Mexico last year Born in Colonia, Uruguay, in 1917, Carlos Martinez Moreno was a prominent constitutional lawyer in his country before he was forced to leave following the military coup in 1973. He has also been a successful novelist, publishing ten novels since 1960, as well as being a regular contributor to what was Uruguay's foremost magazine of ideas. Marcha (see Index on Censorship 2/1979). After the military take-over, Martinez Moreno defended many people accused of political crimes, and acted on behalf of General Liber Seregni, who represented that sector of the armed forces still loyal to the constitution, and who had been a presidential candidate in 1971. Repeated threats and bomb attacks forced Martinez Moreno to leave Uruguay, and he has now taken up residence in Mexico, where in 1981 he published El Color que el Infierno me Escondiera (‘The Colour Hell Kept From Me’) from which the following chapter is taken. The novel was awarded first prize for books dealing with militarism in Latin America by a jury including Julio Cortázar, Ariel Dorfman, Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Carlos Quijano, and Julio Scherer Garcia; and has aroused a great deal of debate for the impression of utter hopelessness it conveys in its portrayal of a country and individual lives torn apart by violence, whether from the side of those in authority, who will destroy everything in their determination to remain in power, or from the guerrillas who had originally revolted against this state of affairs, but are now desperate and incoherent as they face defeat and death.
Passenger in transit
Authors: Valenzuela Tito 
Published: October 2007

This second piece by a Latin American about exile explores through that experience many aspects of his people's ‘personality’ and the events leading to exile. Tito Valenzuela is a 37-year-old Chilean poet and … now … novelist. After studying painting and graphic design at the School of Fine Arts of the University of Chile in Santiago, he worked during the years of Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government in film-making and television. A book of his poetry was published in 1971, and more appeared in an anthology of work by young Chilean poets in 1972. At the time of the military coup of 11 September 1973 he was working on a film on the nitrate mining area of northern Chile. During the coup the military raided his home, removing books and manuscripts. After living clandestinely for several months, Tito left the country for Peru. Unable to remain there he took up an offer by the United Nations to go to Rumania. Finding the atmsophere there restrictive and stifling, he left for Sweden, where he worked in a ham factory, then travelled on to Berlin and finally London in 1975. After a long battle with British immigration authorities he was given permission to stay. Pasajero en transito (‘Passenger in Transil’) is Tito Valenzuelas's first novel, as yet unpublished. It concerns a young Chilean photographer, Ignacio (García, who is exiled (like the author) first in Bucharest and then in Stockholm. The protagonist's profession is itself an image of his psychological state, where the past freezes in the present, tending to mystification and distortion. By tracing Ignacio's obsessions in exile and the deterioration in the past of his relationship with Soledad … who disappears during the first days of the coup … the novel explores the Chile of both Allende and the months following the coup, as well as exile itself. The extract we publish finds Ignacio in Bucharest, playing chess with another exile, Pedro ‘El Peluca’ Morales, whose situation is also producing crisis and domestic rupture. Certain references need explanation. Chileans make great use of nicknames, and most of the characters are referred to by these. El Peluca means ‘the wig’. Loco ‘crazy’ and El Caluga ‘the candy’ (as in sweet). Others have been translated - The Philologist, the Marquis. Coco is untranslatable. Huevón is the all-purpose Chilean interpolation, used incessantly, affectionately and in anger. Literally obscene, it means ‘big balls’. El Pedagogico is the Instituto Pedagogico, the Teacher Training Institute in Valparaiso. The Lebu was a ship used by the military as a prison during the military coup. Milico is slang for military. The tanquetazo was the attempted coup carried out by a tank regiment in June 1973.
USSR
Authors: Alexeyeva Lyudmila 
Published: October 2007

Conditions in Soviet penal institutions have in recent years become harsher than ever. In a report on the current status of political prisoners in the USSR, compiled by Lyudmila Alexeyeva and presented in New York on 1 August by its Executive Director, Jeri Laber, the New York based Helsinki Watch draws attention to a dangerous situation which leaves political prisoners ‘entirely helpless before the labour camp and prison authorities and the KGB’. We print a slightly edited version of the report.
Catch 28
Authors: Rama Angel 
Published: October 2007

Latin America's last three winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature are ‘Communist subversives’, according to the USA Professor Angel Rama is one of Latin America's foremost literary critics, who has taught at many major universities in Latin America, Europe and the United States. He has published prolifically, including fourteen books on Latin American literature as well as scores of anthologies, critical editions, prologues and essays. In exile from his native Uruguay, he is currently Guggenheim Fellow at the University of Maryland, USA. However, in March 1982, the US immigration authorities suddenly announced that his permit to stay in the country would not be renewed (see Index on Censorship 3/1983 p 15). So Professor Rama became the latest in a considerable line of Latin American intellectuals to be banned from the USA for political reasons under the notorious Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, known as the McCarran-Walter Act. He is currently in Paris to do research for a major book on Latin American cultural history, and awaiting the result of his appeal against the order. In the following article, which is edited from a longer original in Quimera (Barcelona) No 26, December 1982, Professor Rama considers the background to the action against him. Other articles dealing with this problem have appeared in Index 5/1980 p 6, 1/1981 p 38, and 3/1983 p 13. See also the Index Index entries under the USA in Index 2/1973, 3/1976, 4/1981 and 2/1983.
Cry for justice
Authors: Mazrui Al-Amin 
Published: October 2007

The author has been detained, uncharged and untried, since June 1982 Kilio cha Haki (‘Cry for Justice’) is a Kiswahili play set in Kenya during the colonial period. It is about the struggle between Kenyan workers on Mr Delamon's farm and the white settlers occupying their country. In this struggle, the workers are led by a brave woman, Lanina, who exposes the exploitation and injustice prevailing in the society. She succeeds in making the workers stand up and fight for their rights. In the ensuing struggle on the farm, three of Mr Delamon's assistants are killed. The entire workers' leadership is arrested and charged with murder. This was the beginning of the larger struggle for independence of the whole country. Al-Amin Mazrui is a highly-respected Kiswahili writer and scholar, an executive committee member of the Kenyan Writers Association, and was a lecturer in linguistics at Kenyatta University College until his arrest in June 1982 and subsequent detention without trial: (see Index on Censorship 2/1983, back cover). Two weeks before his arrest, Kilio cha Haki was performed at the University of Nairobi. This first English translation of an extract from Kilio cha Haki has been prepared by the Kiswahili scholar and poet, Abdilatif Abdalla.
The conversion
Authors: Bahereh  
Published: October 2007

A short story about a Baha'i family which first appeared in an underground paper in Iran There are about 300,000 members of the Baha'i religion living in Iran. It is the only religious minority not recognised by the Iranian Constitution. Since the revolution of February 1979, 141 Baha'is have been reported executed, and another 200 are in prison without having been charged. Between 5,000 and 10,000 Baha'is are thought to have left the country. Baha'is are usually charged with ‘Zionism’ and espionage on behalf of Israel, apparently simply because their world headquarters are in Israel. The ruling Mullahs are also infuriated by the Baha'i belief that the teachings of most of the world's great prophets - including Muhammad – are only relevant for a certain time and that their revelations ‘progress’ from one era to another. Baha'i property has been confiscated and the Baha'is themselves are subject to laws which effectively prevent them from holding employment. Recanting their faith and converting to Shia Islam is the only way they can escape persecution. According to a recent report (The Times, 29 July), 22 prominent Baha'is were arrested in Iran following the executions in June of 17 members of the faith, including several women. The following short story appeared in Spring 1982 in Nowbahar, an underground paper, where it was entitled ‘The day light came to our house’ and signed ‘Bahereh’, which means ‘The one who has seen the light’. The ‘Komiteh’ referred to in the first paragraph is the ‘Imam Committee’, i.e. the political police set up after the revolution in 1979.
Beyers Naudé and the Christian Institute
Authors: Shorten Richard 
Published: October 2007

Started in 1963, the Christian Institute was banned in 1977 and so was its director, Beyers Naudé. Both remain banned. The series of restrictions imposed on Dr Naudé by the South African government since his passport was withdrawn at Jan Smuts airport, Johannesburg, on 25 September 1974, has been’ chronicled in ‘Index/Index’. A five-year banning order was served in October 1977. In October 1982 it was renewed for a further three years; on 9 December 1982 it was partly lifted and Dr Naudé is no longer prevented from meeting more than one person at a time, and restrictions on his movements have been relaxed. But he remains banned. (For names of others whose banning orders were renewed on 1 July 1983, see Index/Index, p. 47). The following article first appeared in South African Outlook, Cape Town, November 1982.
Catastrophe: For Václav Havel
Authors: Beckett Samuel 
Published: October 2007

In a letter to Samuel Beckett written in April 1983, six weeks after his release, the Czech dramatist Václav Havel described ‘the shock I experienced during my time in prison when, on the occasion of one of her one-hour visits allowed four times a year, my wife told me in the presence of an obtuse warder that at Avignon there took place a night of solidarity with me, and that you took the opportunity to write, and to make public for the first time, your play Catastrophe. For a long time afterwards there accompanied me in prison a great joy and emotion and helped to live on amidst all the dirt and baseness'. When he came out, Václav Havel wrote a similarly short piece, Mistake, as a response to the play Samuel Beckett had dedicated to him. While Catastrophe had its first performance at the Avignon Theatre Festival in 1982, both plays were produced as a double bill at the Stockholm Stadsteater on 29 November 1983, as part of an ‘evening of solidarity’ with Havel and his fellow-members of the Charter 77 human rights movement in Czechoslovakia. The text of Catastrophe will appear in a collection of Beckett's shorter pieces, to be published by Faber in London in June this year. We are delighted to be the first to print both these plays, and we would like to thank Samuel Beckett, Faber & Faber, and Rowohlt Theater Verlag for giving us permission to do so.
Why Tiempo is under attack
Authors: Black George 
Published: October 2007

‘Those who are not with the government are considered enemies of Honduras, anti-patriots, Communists’ says Tiempo's editor, Manuel Gamero Honduras was until recently an area of calm in the stormy region of Central America. Now, however, its civilian government is hard-pressed by the armed forces who have involved the country in the struggle against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua and the guerrilla fighters in El Salvador. Both Honduras' press and university are coming increasingly under attack, as George Black, a British journalist who is on the staff of the North American Congress on Latin America in New York, here explains.
My brief for Ghana radio
Authors: Karikari Kwame 
Published: October 2007

The Acting Head of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation explains the role of radio and answers charges that the government of Jerry Rawlings has tried to ‘muzzle’ the press This interview was given on 4 July 1983, during a short visit to London. Later that month, journalists working on the Free Press newspaper were arrested and detained, and the paper has not been published since.
Books in Chile
Authors: Edwards Jorge 
Published: October 2007

How the censorship of books has evolved since 1973 Born in Santiago de Chile in 1931, Jorge Edwards is a distinguished novelist and short story writer, whose writing career began in 1952 with El Patio and has included such works as Los Convidados de Piedra (1978), and Las Máscaras (1980). He also served Chile as a diplomat, and represented Salvador Allende's government in Cuba for several months in 1971. His experiences there provided the material for a book, Persona Non Grata which at one time had the dubious distinction of being banned in both Chile and Cuba. Edwards resigned from his diplomatic career when General Pinochet took over in 1973, and lived in Spain for several years. Since his return to Chile in 1978, he has dedicated himself to writing and to the defence of writers' freedoms, being one of the founders of the Chilean Committee for the Freedom of Expression. Here he traces the various stages of the Pinochet regime's attempts to suppress and control the publication and distribution of books in Chile.
Discussion about poetry with an Inspector
Authors: Pomazov Vitaly 
Published: October 2007

A Moscow poet recalls his conversation with the KGB This is the transcript of a conversation between the Russian poet Vitaly Pomazov and KGB staff member Yu. N. Uvarov on 21 April, 1982, at the Serpukhov KGB Administration. Present during the conversation was another KGB staff member, who declined to introduce himself. Some of the remarks are his. The transcript was made by Vitaly Pomazov from memory following the conversation and is slightly abridged. The heading is a word-play on a famous, very ‘Soviet’ poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky, ‘Discussion about Poetry with a Finance Inspector’, It is an accurate and poignant reproduction of a situation very familiar to nearly every uncensored person of letters in the Soviet Union, and, indeed, in all countries of the Soviet bloc. The basic purpose of such ‘preventive conversations’ is ordinarily to ‘sound out’ the author of a ‘criminal’ work, but they are often also an attempt to warn him of ‘responsibility for acts perpetrated’. An appropriate ‘steps taken’ entry is made in the ‘offender's’ dossier as a result of such discussions. Vitaly Pomazov (born in 1946 or 1947) studied history at the University, but in 1968 was expelled from both the Komsomol (Communist Youth Organisation) and the University. The reason was his sociological research study ‘State and Democracy’. In 1971 Pomazov was arrested on a charge of ‘anti-Soviet activities’ and sentenced to one-and-a-half year's imprisonment. After completing the prison term, he was forbidden to live in Moscow and moved about 50 or 60 kilometres to Serpukhov, where the conversation took place. He is editor of the typewritten literary miscellany Protalina (untranslatable expression — it describes a patch of land in early spring, from which the snow has disappeared during a thaw, while the surrounding countryside is still covered with snow and ice).
The year of miracle and grief
Authors: Borodin Leonid 
Published: October 2007

Extract from a novel by a Russian author recently sentenced to a long term in a labour camp The author is a 46-year-old Russian historian who used to be the headmaster of a village school. In 1967 he was sentenced to six years' imprisonment for his membership of the All-Russian Social-Christian Union and after his release he worked as a labourer. In May 1983 he was sentenced to another ten years' term in a labour camp, to be followed by five years of internal exile. The charge was ‘anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda’ allegedly committed through his literary work. He was adopted as prisoner of conscience by Amnesty International. The following is an extract from Borodin's novel which is to be published in English by Quartet Books, to whom we are grateful for permission to print it.
Hunger for the truth
Authors: Orlos Kazimierz 
Published: October 2007

A Polish writer explains why unofficial writing flourishes Kazimierz Orlos was born on 26 December 1935 in Warsaw. In 1960 he graduated from the Law Department of Warsaw University and then worked for some years as a legal adviser to, among others, some of the biggest construction works. He has published three volumes of short stories: Miedzy Brzegami (‘Between River Banks’) in PIW 1961; Koniec Zabawy (‘End of Games’) in Czytelnik 1965; Ciemne Drzewa (‘Dark Trees’) in Czytelnik 1970; and two novels — Cudowna Melina (‘Magic Den’) 1973 and Trzecie Klamstwo (‘The Third Lie’) 1980 — published by the Institut Literacki in Paris. In 1983 a book of short stories Pustynia Gobi (‘The Gobi Desert’) was published in London by PULS Publications.
How I run Radio CX-30
Authors: Araujo Germán 
Published: October 2007

Radio CX-30 is a small, independent radio station in a country ruled by the military; its director explains how he and his station have managed to survive. Plaza Independencia is at the very heart of Montevideo, Uruguay's capital on the Rio de la Plata. Its buildings are symbolic of both the country's past and what has happened during the past decade of military rule. In the centre of the square is a statue to General Artigas, a hero of the fight for liberation from Spain in the nineteenth century, who put forward revolutionary land reform proposals. He died a pauper in exile. Opposite is the one-storey Presidential Palace, now in the shadow of a ten-storey military headquarters under construction for the past few years, but still unfinished. The other side of the square is dominated by Montevideo's traditional luxury hotel, the Victoria Plaza Hotel. This too has changed hands in recent times, and now belongs to the South-Korean inspired Unification Church (the ‘Moonies’) who bought it in 1982. To make their financial dealings simpler, they bought a majority shareholding in the Banco de Credito, Uruguay's third largest banking group. They also set up an evening newspaper Ultimas Noticias, run by the former secretary of the armed forces' information services. At one end of the Plaza Independencia is the arch leading to the spur of land which comprises the old city and the port. These were sealed off in June 1984 when a leading political exile, Wilson Ferreira Aldunate, returned from eleven years abroad after being elected as the Blanco party presidential candidate for controlled elections which the present military-backed government has called for November, after all their previous plans for continuing their own rule met with steadfast opposition from the Uruguayans. The radio station which has been prominent in giving a voice to that opposition is housed at the opposite end of the square, in the Palacio Salvo, a piece of grandiose Spanish architecture which somehow suffered a mid-century continental drift and found itself on the far side of the South Atlantic rather than in Barcelona. Radio CX-30 occupies the second floor of the rambling building. The defiant stance it has adopted towards the military government, particularly since 1980, has made it very popular, and its entrance is thronged constantly with people hoping to get their complaints heard, or to talk with its director, German Araujo. He is a small man with aquiline features and seemingly boundless energy. Appointed to head the radio in 1973, his personal prestige has grown with its popularity, and reached a high point last December when he embarked on a hunger strike in protest at the government's closure and occupation of the radio.
‘Is Togo television yours or mine?’
Authors: Placca Jean-Baptiste Dossè 
Published: October 2007

When the President, General Eyadema, put this question to the presenter of the 8 o'clock evening news, there was no doubt about the answer. The debate about a New International Information Order seems for the time being to have ground to a halt. Western critics of these proposals tend to fall back on one basic argument: the safeguarding of freedom of information, already in a poor state around the world. Their concerns are shared by many journalists in countries whose governments are calling for change, which only serves to show that their arguments are not entirely without foundation. But then, how do Third World governments make use of the means of information at their disposal? Why is it that the very idea of their countries' playing a more active part in the international exchange of news should spark off such distrust, not only in the West—particularly in the United States — but even among their own journalists? The ideal way of obtaining a complete response to this question would be to take each country in turn and analyse its system of information, taking each piece of the mechanism apart in order to demonstrate the various obstacles, deliberate or otherwise, to the free flow of information. Such a study is beyond the scope of the present article. Instead, we will limit ourselves to one example which may serve to shed light on the others: the tiny West African state of Togo — 35,000 square miles and 2 1/2 million inhabitants. Not that everything that happens there is valid everywhere else; but one can find solid examples of practices employed, to a varying degree, in a significant number of other Third World countries, particularly those of French-speaking Africa.
Black education
Authors: Kambule T. W. 
Published: October 2007

Protest by black school students at their inferior education system first erupted in Soweto in 1976. T. W. Kambule, for over 15 years Principal of Orlando High School, Soweto — a community-built school and for 25 years the only secondary school in Soweto — here explains why young Blacks have continued and increased their protests. A year ago he predicted further outbreaks, worse than 1976, if the signs of discontent continued to be brushed aside. In September 1984, Kambule told us: ‘Just now at the time of writing, schools have been closed in and around Soweto for a radius of 50 miles. Things are bad, and the government as usual is using strong-arm tactics, and the situation is deteriorating by the day. And there is no visible attempt to address the problems. The authorities are fanning the flames which border on a revolution. Even now there is a massive stay away from work by all and sundry. We are worried and the rulers indifferent.’ In 1977 Kambule resigned with 400 other Soweto teachers and is now Senior Lecturer at the Department of Mathematics at the University of Witwatersrand. The article first appeared in Indicator, Volume 1, No 3, published by the University of Natal.