Gabriel García Márquez

by Gerald Martin

  The ingredients of politics, sex and personal rivalry make up a potent cocktail, in whatever proportions they are shaken together. Behind Vargas Llosa’s evident sense of betrayal may have lurked an anxiety that the small unprepossessing Colombian was proving too much for him. Mario’s own extraordinary and well-deserved literary success and matinée-idol good looks were not in themselves enough; so perhaps his only remaining weapon was the big punch. And he probably only managed that with the benefit of surprise: one imagines a forewarned García Márquez running around him, like Charlie Chaplin, and kicking him repeatedly up the rear. No matter how well Mario himself wrote, no matter how much publicity he received, it was García Márquez whom the newspapers and the public most wanted to hear about; and however justified Mario felt in his rejection of Castro and Cuba, García Márquez seemed to have emerged scot-free from the fallout after the Padilla Affair and had become the unchallenged literary champion of the Latin American left. It must have been intensely frustrating.36 The two men would never meet again.

  In March and April García Márquez was back in Cuba. He had already had worldwide acclaim with his articles on the Chilean coup and he must have felt that his was a talent that Fidel Castro would be foolish to ignore. So he set out to make the Cuban leader an offer he could not refuse. He proposed to Carlos Rafael Rodríguez that he should write the epic story of the Cuban expedition to Africa, the first time a Third World country had ever interposed itself in a conflict involving the two superpowers from the First and Second worlds. Given Cuba’s history of slavery and colonialism, the African liberation movements of the era were of particular interest to Cuba and no less a figure than Nelson Mandela would later judge that Cuba had made a significant and perhaps decisive contribution to the overthrow of apartheid in South Africa.

  Cuba’s Foreign Secretary passed García Márquez’s idea on to Fidel Castro and the Colombian spent a month waiting in Havana’s Hotel Nacional for the Comandante’s call.37 One afternoon at three o’clock Castro turned up in a jeep and took over the driving so that García Márquez, who was with Gonzalo, could sit next to him. They set off into the country and Fidel talked for two hours about food. “I asked him,” García Márquez would recall, “‘So how come you know so much about food?’ ‘Chico, when you have the responsibility to feed an entire people, you’ll find out about food!’” Like so many others before and since, García Márquez was stunned by Castro’s astonishing love of facts and phenomenal mastery of detail. He might have anticipated this from listening to the great leader’s unscripted eight-hour speeches but he was not prepared for Castro’s personal charm and courtesy, which could light up not only a tête-à-tête like this one but a room of twenty or thirty people.

  At the end of the expedition Fidel said, “Invite Mercedes across and then talk to Raúl.” Mercedes arrived the next day but then they waited another entire month for Raúl Castro’s call. Raúl was the head of the armed forces and it was he who personally briefed García Márquez: “In a room where all the advisors were, with the maps, he began to uncover the military and state secrets, in a way that surprised even me. The specialists brought in coded cables, deciphered them and explained everything to me, the secret maps, the operations, the instructions, everything, minute by minute. We were at it from ten in the morning to ten at night. They gave me a list of key people with instructions to talk freely to me. I took all that material off to Mexico and wrote a complete description of ‘Operation Carlota,’ as it was called.”38

  When García Márquez had completed the article he sent it to Fidel “so he’d be the first to read it.” Three months later nothing had happened and García Márquez returned to Cuba for discussions. After consultation with Carlos Rafael Rodríguez he revised what he had written and “clarified important questions and added details that were missing.” The article was syndicated all over the world and the Castro brothers were delighted. García Márquez had won his revolutionary spurs; or, as Mario Vargas Llosa would later put it, had become Fidel Castro’s “lackey.”

  Not only had he pleased Fidel but later García Márquez received the International Press Organization’s world journalism prize for his chronicles on Cuba and Angola. It may be assumed they were unaware that he had had three distinguished collaborators. For a while to come García Márquez, understandably intoxicated by his personal friend-ship with the most important figure in recent Latin American history, would tell journalists that he was unwilling to talk about Fidel because he was afraid of seeming to be a sycophant—and then he would rave on anyway. These statements enraged Cuban exiles in Miami and elsewhere.

  García Márquez continued his research and self-education as an informed defender of the Cuban Revolution. He had probably already abandoned his book on daily life under the blockade, though he continued to use it as cover for a time. He had realized from the beginning that the question of human rights and political prisoners would be a crucial issue that his enemies would fling at him. But once the Americans under Nixon and Kissinger had taken the gloves off in their treatment of Latin American progressive movements and were training military regimes in “security methods,” including assassination, torture and disinformation, and now that he had thrown in his lot with Castro’s Cuba, he needed to document himself on the prisons issue—even if documenting himself meant doing whatever he had to do to persuade himself that the situation was acceptable and supportable in all the circumstances. (He was learning a lot about prison regimes in his work for the Russell Tribunal.) At the same time, ironically, the USA itself now had a new leader and the puritan President Jimmy Carter was preaching human rights and seemed sincere about the matter. So Nixon had taught García Márquez that U.S. governments would never really change but Carter taught him that public relations, diplomacy and propaganda were also now a vital part of the ideological struggle on the international stage. García Márquez was convinced that the external opposition actually wanted Cuba to have political prisoners so that they could continue their attacks and he thus believed, perhaps naively, that the country should reduce the number of such prisoners to as close to zero as possible. This would be a large part of his endeavour in the coming years. And it would shift his focus from militancy with Alternativa and a defence of Cuba’s African intervention to international diplomacy and, over time, as things got more difficult, a rearguard defence of Cuba’s sovereign integrity tout court.

  Late in 1976 he arranged to talk to long-term counter-revolutionary prisoners at the prison of Batanabó. From that list, at random, he chose the case of Reinol González. González was an opposition leader who had worked through the Christian trades union movement, a committed Catholic, and, effectively, a Christian Democrat.39 He had been arrested in 1961, accused of plotting to kill Fidel Castro with a bazooka near Rancho Boyeros Airport and of setting fire to the El Encanto shopping centre in Havana and killing an administrator called Fe del Valle. González himself would later admit that these charges were true. After García Márquez’s conversation with González at Batanabó, his wife Teresita Alvarez contacted the writer in Mexico City and asked for his help in securing her husband’s release. García Márquez was moved by her entreaties and saw the possibility of a win-win manoeuvre. He resolved to talk to Castro but saw him four or five times without daring to broach the matter.

  Eventually Castro took him and Mercedes out for a ride in his jeep. On the way back, García Márquez recalled, “We were in a bit of a hurry and I had six points noted down on a card that I wanted to bring up with him. Fidel laughed at my precision with each point and said, ‘This yes, this no, we’ll do that, we’ll do the other.’ When he’d answered the sixth point we were going through the tunnel to Havana and he asked me, ‘And what’s number seven?’ There was no number seven on the card and I don’t know if the devil whispered in my ear but, put like that, I thought, ‘This could be the right moment.’ I said, ‘Point number seven is here but it’s really awkward!’ ‘OK, but tell me what it is.’ Like someone throwing himself
overboard in a parachute, I said, ‘You know, it would give great satisfaction to a family if I could take Reinol González, liberated, to Mexico to spend Christmas with his wife and kids.’ I hadn’t looked behind me but Fidel, without looking at me, looked at Mercedes and said, ‘And why is Mercedes looking like that?’ And I, without looking back, without seeing what expression Mercedes had on her face, answered: ‘Because she’s probably thinking that if I take Reinol González and he ends up playing some dirty trick on the Revolution, you’re going to think I messed up.’ Then Fidel answered not to me but to Mercedes: ‘Look, Mercedes, Gabriel and I will do what we think is right and if after that the other guy turns out to be a louse, that’s another problem!’” Back in their hotel room the always judicious Mercedes rebuked her husband for his impertinence but García Márquez was exultant. Months went by, however, and Castro said that he had not yet been able to persuade his colleagues on the Council of State. Complex issues were involved and García Márquez and González would have to be patient.40

  Meanwhile, August 1977 saw García Márquez’s first significant connection with a European socialist who would be a crucial contact, and friend, over the coming years: Felipe González, the leader of the Spanish Socialist Party, PSOE. González had been elected Deputy for Madrid in Spain’s first elections for forty-one years on 15 June, an election in which Adolfo Suárez became Prime Minister for the ruling right-of-centre UDC party. The legendary Communist militant La Pasionaria had returned to Spain for those elections, for the first time since the Civil War. At the end of August, González, a lawyer, was in Bogotá and gave an interview to Antonio Caballero (editor), Enrique Santos Calderón (director), and García Márquez (“editorial adviser”) of the Alternativa staff. The article was entitled “Felipe González: a Serious Socialist.”41 PSOE’s policy in Latin America was to support all popularly based regimes in more or less democratic countries and to support liberation movements in non-democratic countries: “We are united by the objective of liquidating regimes which slow the democratic rhythm.” The article did not include González’s views on Cuba, a question which would eventually cause trouble between him and García Márquez years later.42

  It is possible that this interview started a lot of bells ringing in García Márquez’s head. Before long he would be closely engaged, despite his own scepticism about their beliefs and activities, with numbers of members of the moderate and democratic Socialist International, from his good friend Carlos Andrés Pérez, the President of Venezuela, whose parents had Colombian connections, through France’s François Mitterrand, to Felipe González himself. Both Mitterrand and González had closely followed Allende’s progress and demise—but surely Europe was different? In December García Márquez would have an intense conversation in Paris with Régis Debray, another onetime revolutionary contemplating the democratic road (which he would eventually take, inside François Mitterrand’s government). By this time Debray himself was already a member of the French Socialist Party and García Márquez quizzed him as to whether he was still a “real socialist” and what he thought of the progress of revolution in Latin America.43 It is more than likely that from this moment García Márquez was on his way out of Alternativa and looking for another role. And it would be a dual role: one approach in Latin America and another in Europe. Once again García Márquez was searching for room to manoeuvre.

  In early June he had published another article about his friend Omar Torrijos, unashamedly referencing one of his own works in the title: “General Torrijos Does Have Someone to Write to Him.”44 This could stand of course for a question about García Márquez then and in the future. Was he writing about men of power, to men of power, or for them? As in Cuba, he began by addressing the Panamanian human rights question, presenting himself as an honest broker between reality and the reader (just as eventually he would attempt to mediate between Castro and Torrijos, on the one hand, and González and Mitterrand on the other). Thus he made a show of finding out the situation of alleged political prisoners in Panama—Torrijos has been accused over time of being involved in torture—and offered to mediate between the Torrijos regime and Panamanian exiles in Mexico. Then in August another major article by García Márquez appeared about the Panamanian caudillo, his negotiations with the USA, and the threats upon his life.45 García Márquez characterized Torrijos as “a cross between a mule and a tiger,” a formidable adversary and a brilliant negotiator, intensely human and popular with the ordinary people.46

  The new Panama Canal Treaty was signed at last on 7 September 1977 in Panama City. The Panamanian delegation included two additional members, Graham Greene and Gabriel García Márquez, both travelling on Panamanian passports—as many of the world’s criminals were accustomed to doing—and thoroughly enjoying the experience, like two overgrown schoolboys.47 They particularly enjoyed their close physical proximity to the dastardly Pinochet. In October Panamanians approved the new treaty by plebiscite, though the USA continued to make amendments and then finally ratified the revised version on 18 April 1978.

  In 1977 the García Barcha family finally began to make its adjustment to the inevitabilities of separation as the boys grew up and began to go their own way in life. Of course in a sense Gabo and Mercedes had left their sons in 1974–5 before the two boys could leave them, but at that time there was still a family home—though a temporary one—in Barcelona to which everyone would naturally return. Now the boys were on their way to leaving home. In particular Rodrigo was on his way to cookery school in Paris and Gonzalo was thinking of following him there to study music.

  García Márquez had been waiting all this time for news of his initiative over Reinol González. At last, in December 1977, matters began to move.48 At a reception in Havana for Jamaica’s Prime Minister Michael Manley, Fidel Castro approached García Márquez and said, “Well, you can take Reinol.” Three days later García Márquez and a stunned Reinol González arrived in Madrid, to be joined almost immediately by his wife Teresita. In early January 1978, García Márquez, Mercedes and Rodrigo would meet up with González and his family in Barcelona, where they would hear in detail about his harrowing experiences in Cuban prisons. After that, on 15 January, the González family would fly to Miami. Later, González would vindicate García Márquez’s strategy and Castro’s agreement to it by playing a key role in negotiations when the revolution started the dialogue with the exile community abroad after Castro decided that it was time to reduce tensions with the families of the three thousand imprisoned counter-revolutionaries.

  For years García Márquez would play down his part in helping to persuade the Cuban leadership to make this crucial gesture of releasing the great majority of these prisoners. He had shown the Castro brothers that he was not only full of good intentions but also a sincere supporter of the revolution, less liberal and more socialist than he appeared and, above all, as they had intuited, a safe pair of hands. Gradually the relationship with Fidel moved beyond the purely instrumental and political, both men flattered by the other’s attention, to something like a friendship. (García Márquez would always insist to the press that he and Castro mainly talked about literature.) Castro, a confirmed workaholic, had a circumscribed and utterly secret private life and a limited social life. For many years it was believed that his only long-term relationship with a woman was that with his revolutionary comrade Celia Sánchez, who would die in 1980, and that following her death he had occasional dalliances with other women which sometimes produced illegitimate children. Only recently has it become clear that by the end of the 1960s he had begun a long-term relationship, effectively a marriage, with Dalia Soto del Valle, with whom he had five sons, a relationship that continues to this day. But Dalia was never given any official role and the image of Castro’s apparent solitude has been constantly underlined by the fact that she has not been a part of that limited social life.

  Equally Castro has not been known, since the death of Che Guevara, to have many significant male friends, beyond his eternal
ly loyal brother Raúl and men like Antonio Núñez Jiménez, Manuel Piñeiro and Armando Hart. So that the friendship with García Márquez was highly unusual and totally unexpected. How surprising, on reflection, is perhaps another matter. García Márquez was the most famous writer the Spanish-speaking world had produced since Cervantes and, by an extraordinary piece of luck, was a socialist and a supporter of Cuba. Moreover he was almost the same age as Fidel, both men were from the Caribbean, and both had become anti-imperialists partly as a reaction to the proximity of the U.S. monopoly producer of bananas, the United Fruit Company. Anecdotally, both men had been in Bogotá in April 1948 during the Bogotazo and some conspiracy theorists even believe that they began to subvert Latin America together from that time. Although a great writer, García Márquez was in no sense an aesthete or an intellectual snob and his lifestyle allowed him to keep Castro in contact with the wider world despite his virtual confinement within the borders of his tiny island in the sun. Castro himself told me that their shared Caribbean heritage and a shared Latin Americanist vocation were crucial foundations on which to build a friendship. “Besides,” he added, “we are both country people and we are both seasiders … We both believe in social justice, in the dignity of man. What characterizes Gabriel is his love of others, his solidarity with others, which is a characteristic of every revolutionary. You cannot be a revolutionary without admiring and believing in other people.”49

  Generally things were going well for Cuba now, with a new revolutionary enthusiasm injected by the African adventure. But a quite new era was dawning. On 6 August Pope Paul VI died; John Paul I was appointed and died a month later, leading to the appointment of Karol Wojtyla, John Paul II, who, allied tacitly with Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, both elected within eighteen months of his appointment, would turn the terms of political trade against Cuba for the next twenty-five years (not to mention hastening the demise of the Soviet Union). Worse, from the Cuban standpoint, only two days after the death of Pope Paul VI in August 1978 the Shah of Iran imposed martial law in his country, an act which would accelerate his overthrow and in turn bring about the fall of President Jimmy Carter and the election of right-winger Ronald Reagan.