Persona Non Grata
Subtitle: A Memoir of Disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution (Nation Books)
Contributors: Octavio Paz (Preface)
Publisher: Nation Books
Published: March 31, 2004
Language: eng
Format: Paperback
Number of pages: 304
ISBN-13: 9781560256076
Subjects: Latin America - South America; Diplomacy; Cuba - History; Biography & Autobiography; Biography / Autobiography; Political; Biography/Autobiography; Personal Memoirs; Historical - General; Biography & Autobiography / Political; Caribbean & West Indies - Cuba
First sentence: Someone had already hinted to me in Santiago that I might be getting a new posting, so the telephone call I received in Lima did not take me entirely by surprise.
Description: "In 1970 Jorge Edwards was sent by socialist Chilean President Salvador Allende as his country's first envoy to break the diplomatic blockade that had sealed Cuba for over a decade. His arrival coincided with the turning point of the Revolution, when Castro began to repress the very intellectuals he once courted." "In Kafkaesque detail, Edwards records the four months he spent in Havana trying to open a Chilean embassy and his disenchantment with the revolution. His stay culminated in the arrest of his friend Heberto Padilla - the first imprisonment of a well-known writer by the regime - for giving Edwards a "negative view of the revolution." In a menacing midnight political debate with Edwards immediately after Padilla's arrest, Castro argued that in this phase of the revolution, bourgeois writers would no longer have "anything to do in Cuba." Castro accused Edwards of "conduct hostile to the revolution" and declared him "persona non grata.""--BOOK JACKET.