Synopsis

Havana, spring 1971: The poet Heberto Padilla has just been released and appears before the Cuban writers’ guild, where he delivers a “heartfelt self-criticism.” He declares himself a counterrevolutionary agent and accuses many of his colleagues present—among them, his own wife—of complicity. A month earlier, his arrest on charges of threatening the security of the Cuban state had mobilized the intellectual vanguard of the entire world, who addressed a letter to Fidel Castro demanding the poet’s release, whose only crime had been to dissent through his poetry.

The writer’s mea culpa, whose recording is shown to the public for the first time, sets the narrative thread of a story that features testimonies from Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jorge Edwards, and Fidel Castro.