Productive Prison Time
When I finished the book, I sent it from prison to several publishers, but none of them took it on. It was thanks to Rafael Galvan, the former leader of the electricians’ union and a sympathizer of Trotsky’s, that it got published. Galvan, a Cardenista who later became a PRI senator, rang El Caballito publishers and urged them to do it. The book came out in 1971 and went through four editions in the space of a few months. I was released in 1972.
- From an interview with Adolfo Gilly, found in a New Left Review back issue. He wrote The Mexican Revolution while a political prisoner in Mexico.
Makes me think of Fernand Braudel writing The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II in a German POW camp—and somewhat less heroically, the fictional Mikael Blomqvist writing his expose during a self-scheduled prison term for libel.
