19
Chile and Cuba: García Márquez
Opts for the Revolution
1973–1979
ON 11 SEPTEMBER 1973, like millions of other political progressives across the world, García Márquez, sitting in front of a television in Colombia, watched in horror as Chilean air force bombers attacked the government palace in Santiago. Within a few hours it was confirmed that the democratically elected President Salvador Allende was dead, whether murdered or having committed suicide no one knew. A military junta took power and began to round up what would become more than thirty thousand alleged left-wing activists over the coming weeks, many of whom would never emerge from custody alive. Pablo Neruda lay dying of cancer in his house at Isla Negra on Chile’s Pacific coast. Allende’s death and the destruction of his political dreams as Chile fell into the hands of a fascist regime made up the content of Neruda’s last days on earth before he succumbed to the illness which had beset him for several years.1
Allende’s Popular Unity government had been watched by political commentators and activists around the world as an experiment to see whether a socialist society could be achieved through democratic means. Allende had nationalized copper, steel, coal, most private banks and other key sectors of the economy, yet, despite constant propaganda and subversion from the right, his government had increased its share of the vote to 44 per cent in the mid-term elections in March 1973. This only prompted the right into redoubling its efforts to undermine the regime. The CIA had been working against Allende even before his election: the United States, beleaguered in its Vietnamese quagmire and already obsessed with Cuba, was desperate that there should be no further anti-capitalist regimes in the Western hemisphere. The savage destruction of the Chilean experiment, before the eyes of the entire world, would have something of the effect on leftists that the defeat of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War had exerted almost forty years before.
At eight o’clock that evening García Márquez wrote a telegram to the members of the new Chilean junta: “Bogotá, September 11, 1973. Generals Augusto Pinochet, Gustavo Leigh, César Méndez Danyau and Admiral José Toribio Merino, Members of the Military Junta: You are the material authors of the death of President Allende and the Chilean people will never allow themselves to be governed by a gang of criminals in the pay of North American imperialism. Gabriel García Márquez.”2 At the time he wrote this message Allende’s fate was still unknown but García Márquez later said that he knew Allende well enough to be sure he would never leave the palace alive; and the military must have known it too. Although some said that sending this telegram was a gesture more appropriate to a university student than a great writer, it turned out to be the first political action carried out by a new García Márquez, one who was already looking for a new role but whose politics had now been brutally focused and radically hardened by the violent end to Allende’s historic experiment. He later told an interviewer, “The Chilean coup was a catastrophe for me.”
The Padilla Affair had turned out, predictably, to be the great dividing of the waters in Latin American Cold War history, and not just for intellectuals, artists and writers. García Márquez, despite the criticisms of his friends—ranging from “opportunism” to “naivety”—had remained the most politically consistent of the major Latin American authors. The Soviet Union was not the socialism he wanted but from the Latin American standpoint he considered it essential as a bulwark against U.S. hegemony and imperialism. This was not, in his eyes, “fellow travelling” but a rational appraisal of reality. Cuba, though also problematical, was more progressive than the USSR and had to be supported by all serious anti-imperialist Latin Americans, who should nonetheless do what they could to moderate any repressive, undemocratic or dictatorial aspects of the regime.3 He chose what seemed to him to be the path of peace and justice for the peoples of the world: international socialism, broadly defined.4
He had undoubtedly wanted the Chilean experiment to succeed but had never believed that it would be allowed to do so. In answer to a question from a New York journalist in 1971, he had said:
My ambition is for all Latin America to become socialist, but nowadays people are seduced by the idea of peaceful and constitutional socialism. This seems all very well for electoral purposes, but I believe it to be completely utopian. Chile is heading toward violent and dramatic events. If the Popular Front goes ahead—with intelligence and great tact, with reasonably firm and swift steps—a moment will come when they will encounter a wall of serious opposition. The United States is not interfering at present, but it won’t always stand by with folded arms. It won’t really accept that Chile is a socialist country. It won’t allow that, and don’t let’s be under any illusions on that point. It’s not that I see [violence] as a solution, but I think that a moment will come when that wall of opposition can only be surmounted by violence. Unfortunately, I believe that to be inevitable. I think what is happening in Chile is very good as reform, but not as revolution.5
Few observers had seen the future as clearly as this. García Márquez realized that he was now living at a critical juncture in world history. Over the next few years, despite his deep-rooted political pessimism, he would make a series of statements about political commitment which were perhaps best summed up in a 1978 interview: “The sense of solidarity, which is the same as what Catholics call the Communion of Saints, has a very straightforward meaning for me. It means that in every one of our acts each one of us is responsible for the whole of humanity. When a person discovers this it’s because his political consciousness has reached its highest level. Modesty apart, that is my case. For me there is no act in my life which is not a political act.”6
He looked for a way to take action. He was more convinced than ever that the Cuban road was the only feasible route to Latin America’s political and economic independence—that is, its dignity. But he was distanced, yet again, from Cuba. In the circumstances he decided that the route back lay, in the first instance, through Colombia. He had been involved in discussions for some time with young Colombian intellectuals, particularly Enrique Santos Calderón of the El Tiempo dynasty,7 whom he had recently got to know, Daniel Samper whom he had known for a decade, and later Antonio Caballero, the son of the liberal upper-class novelist Eduardo Caballero Calderón, with a view to creating a new form of journalism in Colombia—specifically by founding a left-wing magazine.8 García Márquez had come to the conclusion that the only way for his deeply conservative country to reform itself was by what he would jokingly call the “seduction” and “perversion” of the younger generation from the old ruling families.9 Other key participants were the nation’s best-known chronicler of the Violencia, the internationally respected sociologist Orlando Fals Borda, and a left-wing entrepreneur called José Vicente Kataraín, who would later become García Márquez’s publisher in Colombia. The new magazine would be called Alternativa, its point of departure was “the increasing monopoly of information suffered by Colombian society at the hands of the same interests which control the national economy and national politics,” and its purpose was to show “the other Colombia that never appears in the pages of the big press nor on the screens of a television service more closely subordinated each day to official control.”10 The first number would appear in February 1974. The magazine would last six turbulent years and García Márquez, who would spend relatively little time in Colombia despite his best intentions, would nevertheless be a regular contributor and would make himself permanently avail-able for consultations and advice. He and the other leading participants invested large amounts of their own money in this inherently risky business. In the meantime he announced that he would be moving back to Latin America and, more sensationally, that he would be writing no more novels: from now on, and until the military junta led by General Pinochet in Chile fell from power, he was “on strike” as far as literature was concerned and would be devoting himself full time to politics.
In December, as if to underline his n
ew resolutions, García Márquez accepted an invitation to become a member of the prestigious Second Russell Tribunal investigating and judging international war crimes. More significant perhaps than it might seem at first sight, this invitation was the first clear sign that he was going to achieve international acceptance in places and at levels unknown to most other Latin American writers and that despite his controversial commitment to Cuba he was going to have a relatively free hand to participate in political activity wherever and whenever he chose.
The first number of Alternativa in February 1974 sold 10,000 copies in twenty-four hours. The police in Bogotá confiscated several hundred copies but this would be the only case of direct censorship in the magazine’s history (though there would be “indirect censorship” through bomb attacks, court interventions, economic blockades and a sabotage of distribution, all of which would eventually bring about its demise). Later it would have persistent financial problems but the response in the early months was extraordinary. Before long it was selling 40,000 copies, an unheard-of figure for a left-wing publication in Colombia. The first number had a slogan about consciousness raising—“To Dare to Think Is to Begin to Fight”—and an editorial, “A Letter to the Reader,” which stated that the new magazine’s aim was to “fight the distortion of national reality in the bourgeois press” and to “counter disinformation” (a theme which had been famously exemplified by the aftermath of the banana massacre in One Hundred Years of Solitude).
The magazine, which appeared twice a month, included the first of two articles by García Márquez under the headline “Chile, the Coup and the Gringos.”11 It was his first incursion into openly political journalism since he had become famous and it achieved worldwide distribution (published in the USA and UK in March) and immediate classic status. García Márquez lamented what he construed as Salvador Allende’s misguided end:
He would have been sixty-four years old next July. His greatest virtue was following through, but fate could only grant him that rare and tragic greatness of dying in armed defence of the anachronistic booby of bourgeois law, defending a Supreme Court of Justice which had repudiated him but would legitimize his murderers, defending a miserable Congress which had declared him illegitimate but which was to bend complacently before the will of the usurpers, defending the freedom of opposition parties which had sold their souls to fascism, defending the whole moth-eaten paraphernalia of a shitty system which he had proposed abolishing, but without a shot being fired. The drama took place in Chile, to the greater woe of the Chileans, but it will pass into history as something that has happened to us all, children of this age, and it will remain in our lives for ever.12
It was the same tone of contempt with which García Márquez had been speaking about the Colombian parliamentary system since the mid-1950s, best exemplified in “Big Mama’s Funeral.” As for Salvador Allende, he had become a García Márquez character, one more martyr in the ghastly pantheon of Latin America’s failed heroes; many others were to follow and many optimistic but fearful politicians would become friends of García Márquez in the coming years in a perhaps desperate or superstitious effort to avoid such a destiny.
Just as García Márquez almost fled from Mexico once One Hundred Years of Solitude had been published and he had managed to pay off his debts, he now prepared to leave Barcelona after the completion of The Autumn of the Patriarch and the preparation of his Collected Stories.13 He had always had a half-hearted, somewhat distracted and occasionally patronizing attitude to Spain and now his mind was on other matters and other places. The next year would involve a gradual adjustment of both his place of residence and his attention from Europe to Latin America and from literature to politics. Meanwhile Mario Vargas Llosa, who had arrived in Barcelona after him, was leaving before him. On 12 June 1974 Carmen Balcells hosted a farewell party for Vargas Llosa, who was going back to Peru.14 Most of the Latin American writers in residence during that period were there, including José Donoso and Jorge Edwards, as well as the Catalans José María Castellet, Carlos Barral, Juan Marsé, Juan and Luis Goytisolo, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, and many others. This, surely, with Vargas Llosa leaving and García Márquez preparing his own departure, was the ceremony which marked the end of the Boom in all its European splendour.15 Vargas Llosa set sail for Lima with his wife and family, leaving their many friends in Barcelona bereft, though Carmen Balcells would continued to provide a point of focus.
At the end of the summer García Márquez and Mercedes themselves took an extraordinary decision. They left the boys in Barcelona, in the tender care of their friends the Feduchis, Carmen Balcells, and the woman who cooked and cleaned the house, to travel, somewhat surprisingly, to London. García Márquez had decided it was time at last to attend to what he considered the only great failure of his life—his inability to learn English. He and Mercedes had suggested to Rodrigo and Gonzalo that they might consider two years in London. The boys flatly refused but were astonished, and resentful, when their parents announced that they at least would be going and left the two teenagers behind.16 The couple stayed for a time in the Kensington Hilton, a hotel they knew well, and enrolled in an intensive course in the Callan School of English on Oxford Street, which guaranteed excellent results in a quarter of the normal time with its “infallible” methods.
Learning English—which did not go well—was not García Márquez’s only preoccupation. It was in London, curiously, that the first steps were taken to reintegrate him into the Cuban Revolution. Since the 1971 Padilla Affair he had been even more ostracized than before but in London he contacted Lisandro Otero, a writer whose confrontation with Heberto Padilla had led indirectly to the first phase of the affair in 1968. Otero knew Régis Debray and Debray agreed to act as an intermediary between García Márquez and Cuban Foreign Minister Carlos Rafael Rodríguez. He told Rodríguez that the revolution was making a big mistake in leaving a figure of García Márquez’s significance in “political limbo.” Rodríguez agreed and the Cuban ambassador to London invited García Márquez to lunch and informed him: “Carlos Rafael wants me to tell you that it’s time for you to go back to Cuba.”17
Early in his stay in London García Márquez had been discovered in his hotel by several Latin American journalists from the pro-U.S. weekly Visión. He sidestepped most of their questions but gave an interesting insight into his impression of London:
London is the most interesting city in the world: the vast and melancholy metropolis of the last colonial empire in liquidation. Twenty years ago, when I came here for the first time, it was still possible to find, amidst the fog, those Englishmen with bowler hats and striped trousers who looked so much like Bogotanos of the time. Now they’ve taken refuge in their mansions in the suburbs, alone in their sad gardens, with their last dogs, their last dahlias, defeated by the irresistible pressure of the human tide coming in from the lost empire. Oxford Street looks like a street in Panama, Curaçao, or Vera Cruz, with intrepid Hindus sitting at the doors of their shops full of silks and ivory, with splendid black women dressed in bright colours selling avocadoes and conjurors who make the ball disappear from beneath the cup before the eyes of the public. Instead of fog there’s a hot sun which smells of guavas and sleeping crocodiles. You go in for a beer in a bar, like a cantina in La Guaira, and a bomb goes off under your seat. You hear Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, and Greek being spoken all around you. Of all the people I’ve met in London, the only one who spoke impeccable English in an Oxford accent was the Swedish finance minister. So don’t be surprised at finding me here: at Piccadilly Circus I feel as if I’m in the Portal of the Sweets in Cartagena.18
Few observers had foreseen London’s future identity as “world city” quite so early and with such clarity. Asked if any regime in Latin America would ever have unarmed police like the British ones, García Márquez retorted that there already was one: Cuba. And the big news in Latin America, he went on, was the consolidation of the Cuban Revolution—hostile observers at the time believed suc
h “consolidation” was in fact “Stalinization”—without which none of the current progressive developments in the continent would have been possible—nor, he added, the literary Boom itself. Finally, he reiterated that he would not be writing any more fiction until the Chilean resistance had overthrown the Chilean dictatorship, whose members were paid by the Pentagon. There was a clear sense in this hostile interview that García Márquez was burning boats and raising the flag of his socialist commitment. Why? Because he was sure that he was on his way back to Cuba.
When he was not attending his English lessons in London, he tinkered with the definitive version of The Autumn of the Patriarch and played with different ideas for radical film scripts. He and Mercedes were visited by his youngest brother Eligio and his wife Myriam, who had moved to Paris in September, and Eligio and his famous brother Gabito became closer despite the twenty-year gap between them. Eligio and Myriam would spend Christmas 1974 in Barcelona with Gabito, Mercedes and their two sons.
In September 1974 political problems had arisen within the Alternativa editorial board and Orlando Fals Borda’s faction left the magazine. Enrique Santos Calderón later told me, “We intended to be pluralist but people divided very quickly into different groups. Gabo suffered acutely with all the troubles, he finds internal tensions between his friends very difficult to deal with. Each furtive return he made caused him anguish but they also politicized him, woke him up to the reality of armed struggle and made him an idol of the left.”19 In December García Márquez interviewed CIA renegade Philip Agee, whose revelations about the organization’s activities in Latin America would shortly be causing a sensation worldwide.20 By now no one was refusing a meeting with García Márquez. In the 1974 elections in Colombia, after the formal ending of the National Front pact, Liberal Alfonso López Michelsen had come to power with 63.8 per cent of votes cast, though over 50 per cent of the electorate failed to vote. Despite his doubts about López Michelsen’s politics, García Márquez was happy to have him as president, given their distant kinship through the Cotes family link in Padilla, his own prior relationship when he took López Michelsen’s law course at the university in Bogotá and the possibilities of working with a man who was certainly not a reactionary.21
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 49