I am sitting in a quiet room, having just said goodnight to my student after spending several hours today on the telephone with her researching and writing about two Cuban poets, Heberto Padilla and Nicolás Guillén. We share a Google Doc as we develop a term paper on these two men who became known not only for their powerful poetry but also for their sharply opposing views of the Castro regime.

Padilla was the outsider; Guillén, the insider. Their futures reflect that status: Padilla eventually went into exile in the United States, while Guillén remained in Cuba. Padilla’s counterrevolutionary stance placed him in direct opposition to the Castro government, making his life very difficult. Guillén’s willingness to support the regime earned him a prestigious position as head of the Union for Writers and Artists, a role he held for twenty-five years.

Outsiders, insiders. This concept and its consequences repeat themselves over and over in life. The iconoclasts; the conformers. The outspoken; the silent. The skeptics; the believers.

We live in a world filled with these two types of people—and many who fall somewhere in between. The outsiders often do not fare as well as the insiders. They may suffer consequences for their outspokenness, for their unwillingness to adhere to the “accepted” political regime, for defending the right to express their opinions freely and without fear. They are often regarded as the “other,” troublemakers who refuse to go with the flow.

And yet, consider what our world would look like without them.

Dictators and totalitarian regimes depend on silent conformity. Change can occur only when people are willing to rebel, to speak up, to question openly.

As Padilla wrote:

POETICS

Tell the truth.
Say, at least, your truth.
And then
let anything happen:
that you break the dear page,
that you knock on the door with stones,
that people
crowd in front of your body
as if you were
a prodigy or a dead person.

And perhaps this is the quiet work of poets—and of anyone with courage enough to speak honestly in difficult times.