"Trapped in history in such a small place." Such was the poet Allen Ginsberg's characterization of the lives of Cuban intellectuals in the mid 60s, when he visited the island, from where he was deported after a couple of months. Ginsberg's presence in Cuba unchained a wave of political repression in which Fidel Castro himself ordered a publishing house closed and all its books banned. A Cuban writer reflects on those days and the role his first book, written when he was in his teens, played in that scenario.