Enemies of the State

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

IMPROPER CONDUCT Directed by Nestor Almendros and Orlando Jimenez Leal

For the individual citizen of the totalitarian state, the story is dismally familiar: the knock on the door in the midnight hours; the squalid jail where you are held for days without charges; the brutal and degrading interrogations; the phony trial; the years in the forced-labor camp or maximum-security cell. If you are very lucky the nightmare ends with release, exile and the solemn duty to bear witness against your oppressors.

Yet unhappy countries are like Tolstoy's unhappy families; each is miserable in its own way. Even by that standard, the portrait of Fidel Castro's Cuba offered by the exiles whose testimony forms the bulk of this softspoken, yet emotionally gripping documentary is singularly poignant.

The analytic intelligence, the wryness and ironic wit with which 28 of them recount their experiences there make their story all the more persuasive.

Almost from the moment Castro consolidated power, his revolutionary government was determined to deny the existence of political "impurities" in Cuban society--by charging many dissidents with "moral impurity." Given the country's licentious reputation in the bad old days of the Batista regime, a program of sexual austerity had a plausible, even uplifting, ring. It would satisfy the puritanical strain that attends much leftist thought even as it appealed to traditional Cuban ideas of machismo, nourished in Castroites by their years of guerrilla warfare. As Writer Rene Ariza says, there is "some Castro in all of us."

The hand of the state fell with particular heaviness on homosexuals. There came a time when a man could be arrested for wearing tight pants on the streets of Havana. Or long hair. One female guardian of the faith would pick a piece of scrap paper off the pavement, swipe it across the face of a suspected homosexual and, if it came away bearing traces of makeup, solemnly file it in his dossier. Taking a page from A Clockwork Orange, officials would show gay men nude photos, administering drugs to make them ill when the subjects were male. The prisoners, naturally, learned to register false enthusiasm for female nudes, according to Poet Heberto Padilla, who insists that "manly" homosexuality was rampant in the regime. One brave and touching transvestite, named

Caracol, tells of a prison guard's falling hopelessly in love with him. The half-mad policy would have been dankly comic had not the results so often been tragic. Poet Armando Valladares, 22 years a political prisoner, tells of a twelve-year-old boy who was arrested for a prank, tortured and raped by guards--then marked down as a homosexual.

"The state can send you to college or to prison," says another writer, Reinaldo Arenas, summarizing the unbalancing capriciousness of totalitarianism in a simple, well-balanced phrase. Improper Conduct achieves a similar effect by crosscutting its most vivid reminiscences of sexual harassment with a pious Castro interview in which he asserts no one has died or been tortured for dissidence in his Cuba. It is a sequence his many apologists ought to see and bear in mind. Just as Improper Conduct ought to be seen and borne in mind by the more violently repressive enemies of sexual deviance, whatever their political views. --By Richard Schickel