Almost 30 years ago, Armas Marcelo, a novelist forever gifted with an open spirit, summoned to the Canary Islands a pluralistic group of intellectuals from the Ibero-American world to discuss the hottest issues then affecting our societies. Naturally, I attended and wrote a paper about the repression against writers, believers, and homosexuals in Cuba, and I asked for signatures for an open letter in which we demanded that poet Heberto Padilla be allowed to leave that country.

The reaction was lamentable. Shouts, insults, boos, and ridiculous threats against my life were uttered. ...

...In his opinion, it was abominable for the intellectuals in our scene, who should be defending freedom and supporting the victims, to become accomplices of the tyrannies.

...While the communists talked about the bright future awaiting post-capitalist society, the societies they controlled were repugnant dungeons, as Solzhenitsyn warned in The Gulag Archipelago...

...

What led these people (along with Octavio Paz, Vargas Llosa, Ernesto Sábato, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, and so many other valuable intellectuals) to abandon communism and begin to defend the values of liberty? In the first place, the painful realization that the communist governments, without exception, built societies that were very poor and brutal, from which people invariably tried to flee in desperation. All the communist experiments failed, regardless of the substrata on which they tried to erect their systems. The Germans, the Slavs, the Latin Americans (Cuba and Nicaragua), the Asians, the black Africans failed—all, without exception. Why? This was the second discovery: because communism was a theoretical blunder. It wasn’t that the doctrine was beautiful but its execution faulty. The doctrine was based on a major intellectual mistake and on a lamentable lack of morality that inevitably led to disaster and terror. That is why the more intelligent people, and those who were genuinely interested in their neighbors, abandoned it. The book Why I Quit Being a Leftist explains that with irrefutable clarity."

Very interesting read, and an interesting site.

http://www.independent.org/printer.asp?p...cle.asp?id=2372

http://www.independent.org/research/cogp/