How a Poet's Arrest Ended a Golden Age

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Boom's euphoric early period is generally read as closing in 1971, and the year has a specific cause: the Padilla affair. Heberto Padilla, a Cuban poet, was imprisoned by the Cuban government and pressured into a public recantation of his own work, an act that split the ranks of Latin American and European intellectuals who had, until then, largely stood behind the Cuban Revolution as a hopeful political project. Writers of the Boom generation had built much of their public identity around solidarity with Cuba, so Padilla's treatment forced many of them to choose between continued support for the revolution and their own standards for how a state could treat a writer. The rupture did not end the individual careers the Boom had launched, Garcia Marquez, Fuentes, Vargas Llosa and Cortazar all continued writing and publishing for decades afterward, but it closed the movement's own sense of shared political and literary purpose, and scholarship on the period after 1971 generally treats what follows as a distinct phase, sometimes called the Post-Boom, rather than a continuation of the original group's unified moment.