Books
Barbarians at the gates
David Holden
Persona Non Grata Jorge Edwards (Bodley Head £6.95) . .. the barbarians will arrive today; and they are bored by eloquence and public speaking.
The shades of Cavafy's cultured pessimism are all around us these days, but not for some time have I read a book that illuminated them as clearly as this personal memoir by the Chilean writer and former diplomat, Jorge Edwards. Sub-titled An Envoy in Castro's Cuba, it appeared in Spanish in 1973 and was treated at first as a typical account of bourgeois disillusionment with the Cuban revolution. Now, with an essay on Pinochet's Chile added to the English edition, it has acquired a deeper resonance as one man's epitaph for decency and liberalism crushed between the millstones of revolution and reaction. As such it is both a summary of the specific Latin American condition and a warning that the barbarians could be waiting for us, too.
Sr Edwards is in many ways the archetypal Latin American reformer. He was born into one of Chile's most powerful, conservative families—his relatives owned the newspaper El Mercurio, now known to have been one of the recipients of CIA funds during Allende's Presidency—but he became a socialist and successfully combined his politics with writing and a career in his country's foreign service. For many years he was an admirer of Castro's achievements, and he had many friends among the leftwing writers and intellectuals in Havana. Thus, when President Allende named him as Chile's first charge d'affaires in Havana in 1970, with the symbolic task of breaking the American blockade of Cuba, he seemed just the man for the job and he arrived there expecting a warm welcome.
Instead, he was handed the frozen mitt. Characteristically, the family connection was his first problem since, to the official Cuban mind, the name of Edwards damned him as a potential class enemy whatever socialist enthusiasms he might profess.. More important, however, was his moral and intellectual honesty—although, to the Cubans, that seems to have been just another expression of his class hostility. Certainly, under pressure he proved to be more of a writer than a diplomat. When he found his Cuban writer friends being squeezed into silence by the revolution's creeping Stalinism, he refused to ignore or abandon them. He failed to suppress his dismay at the revolution's monumental inefficiency and growing party privileges and, when he faithfully recorded for his superiors in Santiago the appalling functional decay of Havana, he was equally dismayed to find that his dispatches were being monitored by the Cubans and discounted as worthless by the rising bureaucrats of the new left in Chile.
Above all, he could not stomach the omnipresent power of the police. In a revolutionary society, he discovered, everything acquired political significance; no friendship, action or belief was safe from surveillance and political judgment. In the end he was driven to ask : 'Is revolution conceivable without a security system, without a public safety committee set up in the shadow of the guillotine? If it were not conceivable in any other way, would this be a valid reason for wanting the revolution to be
But, along the way of his disillusionment there were some redeeming—even farcical —moments, mostly reflecting the volatile character of the Supreme Leader. There is Fidel with Sr Edwards on the golf course— contemptible, bourgeois institution !—so pleased with himself at sinking a massive putt at the first attempt that he promptly orders special supplies of compost for the moth-eaten greens, thus earning Sr Edwards the undying gratitude of his fellow diplomats who were virtually the only other people allowed to play the game.
There is Fidel on board a visiting Chilean naval training ship being firmly put in his place by the Captain who demands, with chilly politeness, the instant withdrawal from his private quarters of the Supreme Leader's squad of armed bodyguards. And, on the same occasion, there is President Allende's sister, Laura, being even more firmly squashed when she protests at the frivolity of the Captain's plans for shore leave for himself and his men, crying with that ludicrous solemnity that is so often the special hallmark of left-wing women, that she had spent her precious time in Cuba working: I've done nothing but work . . . I've visited factories, schools, agricultural projects, without a single moment's rest.' It does the male chauvinist heart a deal of good to find the Captain replying, unperturbed, that as the master of a training ship he does voluntary work day and night and Sundays, too, and after thirty days at sea he wants some relaxation. No wonder the Chilean Navy was a prime target for political infiltration by President Allende's colleagues—and that its resistance, in the end, was so devastatingly effective.
But nothing could redeem Sr Edwards in Cuban eyes. 'They've got you down as a liberal,' said his friend, the Cuban writer Hebert() Padilla, in ironic judgment : 'You've had it.' And he had. His friends, including Padilla, were arrested ; Edwards himself was more or less asked to leave and, when he tried to tell Fidel in one last, late country that has not passed through a stage night dialogue that socialism must be combined with freedom, the great man would have none of it. 'There is no socialist like this, with the replacement of the old
hEll ,n,g0 bourgeois culture . . by the new culture of socialism. The step is difficult but, as I've told you, bourgeois intellectuals no longer
• f interest us, they don't interest us at all!' The real poignancy of the book, however, comes from Sr Edwards's premonition that his friends in Chile might be making the
N,„„5,0. same mistakes. Repeatedly his diary entries
muse on that problem, and the risk that in muse on that problem, and the risk that in following Cuba too far or too fast Allende might provoke a fascist backlash. But the Cubans were not disturbed by that, either. On the contrary, they seemed to welcome the prospect of confrontation. 'Revolutionaries everywhere would pour into Chile. As the imperialists were also wide awake, Chile was doomed to become the setting for a latter-day Spanish Civil War. .. Most probably the country would go through a blood-bath, a prospect that some would-be guerrilleros seemed to find exhilarating. Had Che not said that it was necessary to create one, two, many Vietnams in Latin America?'
Poor Sr Edwards—and poor Chile—how right he was! And how he has paid for his honest doubts. His book and his person are now non grata in both countries, and he has become yet another of the contemporary world's growing band of refugees from political barbarism. But at least we can be grateful. As Fidel said to him, in a typically heated moment: 'I would have preferred it a thousand times if Allende, instead of sending us a writer, had sent us a mine worker . . .' Thank goodness he did not, since, with all respect to the miners, only a writer could have given us this revealing and moving book.
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