The Tower of Alexandria
In 1971, Padilla broke before the Committee. In 2018, Díaz broke before public opinion. What changes when repression doesn’t come from the state but from algorithms, curators, and sensitivity tribunals? This essay asks an uncomfortable question: nothing essential has changed.
By Israel Centeno
There was a time when public confession was part of the repressive ritual of totalitarian regimes. Dissidents were not only required to renounce their ideas, but to do so spectacularly, performatively, under the bright lights of propaganda, so that the people would witness not just the retraction, but the humiliation. That was the case of Heberto Padilla, the Cuban poet who, in 1971, after publishing Fuera del juego, was arrested by State Security and forced to read a public self-criticism—an anatomy of how the state breaks the writer’s spirit.
Decades later, in a democratic, liberal, and supposedly open society, another writer—Junot Díaz—endured a moral inquisition of a different kind, yet with a disturbingly similar structure. He wasn’t arrested. He wasn’t tortured. He wasn’t forced to confess in a cell. And yet, he was pressured into writing a public confession, published in The New Yorker, in which he detailed personal traumas, past mistakes, emotional guilt, and a desperate need for reconciliation with the moral codes of the cultural ecosystem around him.
Padilla and Díaz share a common experience: imposed silence. One through the explicit violence of authoritarianism. The other through the far subtler, though no less effective, mechanism of social judgment under the institutional progressive left.
When Padilla read his confession in 1971, he did so before his colleagues in UNEAC. Figures like Nicolás Guillén and Lisandro Otero listened in discomfort and complicity. The poet not only confessed to “betraying the revolution,” but implicated his wife and friends. It was pedagogical theater. A performance of repentance as political spectacle. The defeat of language as a triumph of the regime.
Junot Díaz was not forced by decree. He is a citizen of a pluralistic democracy. But his case illustrates how power now operates under different formats. In 2018, during the height of #MeToo, public allegations of inappropriate behavior surfaced. None of them led to legal consequences. All of them carried immense symbolic weight.
Díaz responded with a confessional essay—an open wound published in one of the world’s most prestigious magazines. He wrote of childhood sexual abuse, unresolved trauma, broken relationships. It was not a defense. It was a gesture of emotional surrender. A narrative of repentance. A moral act of contrition.
And still, it wasn’t enough. Because the progressive literary machine doesn’t seek truth—it seeks emotional compliance. It doesn’t demand justice—it demands alignment. The essay was not read as sincerity, but as strategy. As an attempt to avoid exile. There was no forgiveness. Only the weight of judgment multiplied across social media, universities, panels, reading clubs. Junot Díaz wasn’t censored. He was omitted. Not by law. By saturation.
In Cuba, Padilla was silenced by chains. In the United States, Díaz was silenced by curatorial omission. By institutional sensitivity protocols. By publishers who no longer call. By prizes that evaporate. By invitations that disappear. In both cases, the result was the same: the writer reduced to his flaw.
And yet, Díaz—at his best—was not gratuitously transgressive. He was fiercely honest. His literature captured the Dominican soul with brutality and tenderness. His voice—hybrid, rhythmic, imperfect, deeply human—refused to be sweetened. He did not aestheticize trauma. He did not turn violence into a fetish. He did not translate his wounds into a digestible product for academic festivals. That was his mistake.
Because in the new progressive orthodoxy, the Latin American writer must speak from a script. Must embody guilty masculinity, performative feminism, moderate anti-capitalism, just resentment, romanticized marginality. Contradiction is not allowed. Discomfort is not permitted. He must be useful. He must have a cause. And if he lacks a cause, he must at least have guilt.
And if, on top of that, he doesn’t speak out—loudly and performatively—against the enemies of the canon, he’s out. If he doesn’t curse Uribe, if he doesn’t transform Chávez into a martyr or a monster according to taste, if he doesn’t chant the mantras of redemptive identity politics, then he’s not invited. Because what’s rewarded is not literature, but the correct script.
No longer is a party card required—what’s required is an emotional credential. The access code of affect. The badge of shared sensitivity. The hashtag on the lapel.
And if you refuse, as Padilla refused, as Díaz stepped aside, then the punishment is not physical exile, but symbolic erasure. Not prison, but invisibility. The quiet directive to stay low. Don’t make waves. Don’t think strange. Don’t speak loudly. Don’t be yourself.
That is not freedom. That is not literature. That is a new Stalinism with an inclusive smile and pastel logo.
And it doesn’t end there. It seeps into the classroom. The classroom, which should be a space for difficult thinking, has become in many places a space where professors are judged not by what they teach, but how they say it. Where they must calibrate their tone to match the emotional temperature of the group. Where emotional pedagogy is demanded instead of intellectual rigor.
But no. A professor should respect their students, yes. But they should not modulate their voice or their thinking to match every personal preference in the room. Their job is not to please sensitivities, but to awaken intelligence. Not to mirror the emotional state of the class, but to provoke thought, even when it’s uncomfortable. The authority of the teacher is not in their tone, but in their capacity to lead others into knowledge without asking permission to think.
That is what’s truly at stake: the right to write without permission. To teach without reading the approved emotional script. To say what’s not expected. To be a writer without a cause, without a net, without a slogan. A writer who refuses to become a brand or a marketable victim.
Padilla was silenced by decree. Díaz by the emotional matrix of the present. Both represent, each in their time, the most ancient and dangerous figure of all: the writer who will not obey.
I write from that same place.
In English with an accent.
In Spanish with vertigo.
And I still don’t know if that’s a defeat… or the only place from which it’s worth writing.
Israel Centeno
From the Tower of Alexandria, Year of the Curated Index
Centeno's Lighthouse 