Читать книгу Against All Hope - Armando Valladares - Страница 21

14

“SQUARES”: THE POLITICAL REHABILITATION PROGRAM

The morning the Major told us that the penal authorities were going to authorize books and newspapers to be brought in, a general murmur and exclamations of surprise stopped him. He called for silence and went on. Every inmate would be allowed three books per month, but they had to come from the National Press of Cuba. Foreign books would not be allowed, nor would Cuban books from other publishers. Magazines and books printed in socialist countries and their national newspapers would be allowed, but nothing from the free presses of the world.

Two weeks later, a truck full of books and magazines pulled up in front of the Circular. They had all been printed by the National Press. Among them there were some classics like Don Quixote, which had been published at the beginning of the Revolution when Castro and his henchmen kept denying they were Communists, but most of the texts either were explicitly Marxist or while not openly Marxist implicitly carried severe criticism of free societies and democratic countries. I recall, for example, Elementary Principles of Marxist Philosophy by George Pulitzer, translated into Spanish; Soviet economics textbooks; and Russian novels from the Communist period. There were also propaganda magazines published for foreigners by the Eastern Bloc countries of Poland, Hungary, Rumania, Bulgaria, and others.

The objective of the easing of the rules against reading matter was to flood us with propaganda and indoctrinate us. The authorities knew that the majority of the prisoners were campesinos, workers, and soldiers, and that well-educated and politically aware prisoners were in the minority. Reading the material the propagandists sent in to us would confuse more than one of the prisoners, and we would have a continuous struggle against the massive indoctrination which they were trying to pull off with those books.