A Fleeting Impression of Vaclav Havel

He's small rather than tall, with very blond hair, a blond moustache and blue, gentle eyes which glance timidly around. He seems rather lost in that immense, very elegant palace, among the people guarding and escorting him, uncomfortable in the obligatory attire of collar and tie and blue suit.

We barely have time to exchange formal greetings before Patrick Poivre d' Arvor of French television, who has organized the meeting, places us under the lights and in front of the cameras and begins the conversation. He first questions Vaclav Havel. About the dramatic changes he has experienced in his life, those great strides he has taken from prison to President of the Republic, from banned playwright to a public figure revered everywhere. And about the challenges and obligations of the power that he now holds at this crucial moment in the history of his country.

He listen attentively, thinks for a moment and then answers very rapidly, in long, direct sentences, without the slightest hesitation. All his timidity and even his modesty evaporate when he speaks. And in the assurance and firmness of his replies there are flashes of the young Havel who, in 1956, made a shocking speech at Dobris to a group of official writers, which marked the beginning of his long career of opposition to the regime. Or the no less resolute intervention in 1965, at the Union of Czechoslovakian Writers, when he defended the magazine Tvar and accused the Union of intolerance and of obsequiousness towards power.

Poivre d' Arvor then asked me if it was true that the events in Czechoslovakia in the spring of 1968 had a great impact on my political ideas. Yes, they did. But they changed my behavior rather than my beliefs. Because at that time - when I got to know the USSR, when I had begun to take account of the truth that lay behind the mirages of Cuba - I did not have many illusions about socialism. But, like many others, I did not dare make my doubts and criticisms public.

Thanks to the armed intervention of the Warsaw Pact countries, I found the courage to do so.

This is the fourth or fifth time that I've been to Prague, but it is my first real visit. All the other times, in the mid 1960s, were stopovers, en route to or from Cuba, because, due to the blockade, the shortest route for a Latin American to Havana was via Prague. They stamped a loose piece of paper, not our passports, and we had to spend a night in a dreadful hotel on the outskirts of the city - the International, which has now been refurbished - and eat in a lugubrious dining room, where an old man, out of another era, dressed in tails, played the violin.

On one of these rapid visits, in the spring of 1968, my Czech translator took me to visit the many houses that the peripatetic Kafka family lived in - they moved continually, but always within the same block - and the Jewish cemetery, which seemed to be out of a Gothic nightmare. But what really impressed me were the streets, the spectacle of hopeful and enthusiastic people, united in a great fraternal and idealistic upheaval. A spectacle that was very similar to the one I had witnessed in Havana during the missile crisis of November 1962 ~ when, with the same naivety, I thought that I also had clasped that same fatuous beacon: socialism in freedom. For that reason, when the Soviet tanks entered Prague and Fidel made his shameful speech supporting the aggression, I wrote an article, 'Socialism and the Tanks' (see p. 79), which had two long-term effects on my life: I became the enemy of Latin American 'progressives' and I began to think and speak independently once again, a position that I have never since abandoned.

Václav Havel is not surprised that the communist utopia still has so many followers in Latin America. 'No one who has not lived and suffered it in the flesh can know what it is like.' Much less naive than I was, he was never remotely convinced by the beautiful spectacle in the streets of Prague in the days of Alexander Dubeek, because he had never been a Marxist and, from an early age, he had come to an uncomfortable conclusion: that the only socialism compatible with freedom is the one that is socialist in name alone (for example, that euphemism called social democracy). He was not therefore surprised by the arrival of the tanks or the return to obscurantism after the brutal suppression of this movement for democracy.

But this man who did not succumb to the political illusions of '68 and kept his feet firmly on the ground turned out, in the end, to be less prone to depression and better prepared to take on an apparently

invulnerable regime than those who had committed themselves wholly to the reform of socialism 'from within', and found their dreams brutally shattered.

Like Milan Kundera. The polemic between these two great writers, the novelist and the playwright, is one of the most instructive of our times. Kundera, one of the intellectual heroes of the reform movement of Czech socialism, came to certain conclusions after the failure of the experiment. The conclusions were gloomy, but they seemed the most lucid of all. Small countries do not count in that great whirlwind that is History, with a capital 'h'. Their fate is decided by the great powers and they are the instruments, and eventually the victims, of these powers. The intellectual must dare to face up to this horrible truth and not delude himself, or others, by indulging in useless actions - like signing manifestos or letters of protest - which often just serve as self-publicity or, at best, as a form of self-gratification at having a good political conscience. When Kundera went into exile in France in 1975, to dedicate himself completely to literature, he had lost all hope that his country would one day emerge from despotism and servitude. I understand him very well. My reaction would probably have been similar to his.

But the one who was right was Vaclav Havel. Because, in fact, one can always do something. However small, a manifesto, a letter signed with a handful of people, can be the drops of water that wear through the stone. And in any case, these gestures, ventures, symbolic threats allow one to go on living with a certain dignity and perhaps might spread to others the will and confidence that are necessary for collective action. There are no indestructible regimes or powers that cannot be changed. If history is absurd, then anything can happen - oppression and crime, of course, but also freedom.

This modest man, who finds the very mention of the word heroism repugnant, enjoys an immense moral authority in his country. In the market square of Prague I saw an old woman carrying his photo in a hand bag, as if it were the photo of a father or a son. He achieved this in those bleak years through his conviction, which was obstinate rather than strident, that even in the most difficult circumstances one can always act to improve the destiny of a country. Thus the Charter of January 1977 was born, signed initially by 240 residents of the 'interior', that would become a landmark in the democratic counter- offensive which twelve years Czechoslovakia.

I don't ask Havel about the six years or more, over three spells, that he spent in prison, because I have read his essays and I know his sober observations on this topic. Instead, I say to him that one of the most mortifying experiences that I had, in my time in politics, was to discover that almost inevitably politics degrades the language in which it is expressed, that its discourse sooner or later falls into stereotypes or cliches, that it is rarely authentic or personal since what is politic to say always takes primacy over what should be said. Had he not felt, on occasion, like a ventriloquist's dummy saying things that seemed to be the words of another person?

Yes, it has happened to him sometimes. And it is something that of course worries him and which he tries to watch out for. For this reason he writes his own speeches. Also, I should realize that literary language is one thing and political discourse another. The former can be everything a writer wants it to be. The latter is forced to be clear, simple, direct, capable of reaching the great variety of listeners that make up a society.

Another disturbing lesson of politics for me, I say to him, is the Machiavellian conflict, sometimes latent and sometimes explicit, but always inevitable, between efficacy and truth. Is effective politics possible without pulling the wool over people's eyes, without deceiving them? I tried this and I think that it was one of the reasons - though not the main reason - for my failure. Always to tell the truth in politics is to hand a devastating weapon to an opponent not constrained by morality. In his year of government had he not had to resign himself sometimes to the famous white lies of politicians?

'I have felt pressure to do so many times: he says, 'but until now I have resisted this pressure. Of course one must always make a great effort so that these unpopular truths become acceptable. One has to explain them thoroughly, go into detail. There can be exceptional circumstances in which certain things are not said, but I can guarantee that in the pursuit of government, I have never lied.'

I am sure that he is telling the truth now as well. I cannot judge if all his political acts have been correct since he was elected president. In the two days I've been in Prague, for example, I have heard criticism of his rash intervention a few weeks back in a demonstration of Slovak separatists, in Bratislava, where he was insulted and almost hit.

But I have read his speeches and what I have always admired in them (apart from their elegance), is how un-political they are in their permanent desire to subordinate action to morality.

When the interview is over, there is scarcely time to talk about serious things. We talk trivialities. The cigarettes that he smokes and that I gave up smoking twenty years ago. That we were born the same year and that we both, in our youth, did two years of military service. And that, like all our generation, we drank the waters of existentialism with mixed results. An old friend of his, Pavel Tigrid, is with him. He is one of his political advisers. 'I don't know why he called on an old man like me to work alongside him,' he says to me. I, on the other hand, do know why. When I was president of PEN International, Pavel Tigrid - an expatriate in Paris and director of a magazine of exiled Czechs, Svedectvi ('Witness') - was the president of the PEN Commmittee of Writers in Exile, and fought tirelessly for those colleagues who, in his country, or in Argentina, the USSR, Chile, Cuba, Poland, or in any other part of the world, were in jail. I know that the presence of Pavel Tigrid in that beautiful palace. through whose windows I could see the snow falling on the Mala Strana district - what incredible springs they have in this country - is to remind the president at all times of what he fought for when he was a nobody, of those goals that then seemed so difficult to achieve.

In one of his essays, Havel quotes the terrible observation of Eugene O'Neill: 'We have fought for so long against small things that we've become small ourselves.' I trust now that he no longer has to confront the formidable adversities of before, but rather the small and sordid adversities of the daily art of governing, the president of the Czechs will go on being the discreet and pure man that he is still today.

Prague, April 1991

Mario Vargas Llosa