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| Virgilio Piñera Poster by T.A. |
by Guillermo Cabrera Infante
It was then that Virgilio Pinera came back from Brussels via Prague and missed kissing Cuban soil by about three feet. Some hubris, Early one morning, on militia duty at the gates of Revolucion, I had a phone call from him. I was surprised at first, then I was astounded. Virgilio was calling me from the local gaol at the beach where he lived. He told me he had been arrested on charges of being a passive P. ‘But a capital P, you know.’ I understood: Virgilio meant P, not for Pinera or for poet, but for Pederast. The night before there had been some sort of carnal Kristalnacht in Havana. A special branch of the police, called the Social Scum Squad, arrested on sight everybody walking the streets at night in Old Havana who looked to the naked eye like a prostitute, a pimp or a pederast. This police operation was called the Night of the Three Ps. But at the time Virgilio was miles away, in bed (he believed it was healthy to go to bed early and to rise early), in the shack he christened his big bungalow on the beach. How in hell was Virgilio in gaol?
London Review of Books
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