Meanwhile Cuba was going through its own dramas. At the end of 1988 a so-called “Committee of One Hundred” had sent a letter to Castro condemning his country’s policies on human rights and demanding the release of all political prisoners: “On January 1, 1989 you will have been in power for thirty years without having, up to now, held elections to determine if the Cuban people wish you to continue as President of the Republic, President of the Council of Ministers, President of the Council of State and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces. Following the recent example of Chile, where after fifteen years of dictatorship, the people were able to express their view freely on the country’s political future, we request by this letter a plebiscite so that Cubans by free and secret ballot could assert simply with a yes or a no their agreement or disagreement with your staying in power.”44
This had appeared nine months after García Márquez had published his pen-portrait of Fidel Castro, lovable conversationalist and good friend to his friends. It was signed in Paris by a wide array of celebrities and intellectuals, though in essence the Libre group (Juan Goytisolo, Plinio Mendoza and Mario Vargas Llosa) were again at the centre of the action, and again with their mainly French allies. It was their first big push since the Padilla Affair, given added impetus now that communism was tottering in Europe. The American names are not especially impressive, apart from Susan Sontag, nor were the Latin American ones (no Carlos Fuentes, Augusto Roa Bastos, etc.), but this was nevertheless a powerful challenge.
It was in fact the single most serious verbal attack on Castro and Cuba since 1971 and was, indeed, the more telling because it was not based on a single event or a single problem but on Cuba’s entire political system. And it was signed by a very large number of influential intellectuals who could not by any stretch of the imagination be called “right-wing.” Reagan and Thatcher’s virulent anti-communism, backed by the Pope and immeasurably bolstered by Gorbachev’s effective surrender, was rapidly changing the international climate and would in due course change the world. Fidel’s Cuba would be one of the most serious casualties. And 1989 would be the year of the apocalypse. It was almost unbelievable that whilst all these clouds were gathering, García Márquez was sitting, much of the time in Havana, writing a novel about the last days of another Latin American hero—the only one who could rival Castro—also considered by some historians to have turned into a dictator late in his career.
Disillusioning events in Cuba must have strengthened García Márquez’s desire to return to Colombia. At a time when Mario Vargas Llosa was beginning his quixotic campaign for the presidency of Peru, the Cuban government was arresting (on 9 June) and trying General Arnaldo Ochoa, its greatest military hero of the African campaign, that adventure whose coverage had allowed García Márquez to get so close to Fidel, Raúl and the revolution. Also on trial were two good friends of García Márquez, Colonel Tony la Guardia, a kind of Cuban James Bond, and his twin brother Patricio. García Márquez was in Cuba at the time teaching at the film school. The defendants were found guilty of smuggling narcotics and thereby betraying the Cuban Revolution and Ochoa, Tony la Guardia and two others were sentenced to be executed on 13 July 1989. Patricio la Guardia was sentenced to thirty years in prison.
Quite near the end of The General in His Labyrinth Bolívar, lost in the rain and sick of waiting and not knowing why, touches rock bottom and cries in his sleep. The next day he flees one of his worst memories, the execution of General Manuel Piar in Angostura thirteen years before. Piar, a mulatto from Curaçao, had consistently resisted the authority of whites, including Bolívar himself, on behalf of blacks and mestizos. Bolívar condemned him to death for insubordination, ignoring the advice of even his closest friends. Then, struggling with tears, he was unable to watch the execution. The narrator comments: “It was the most savage use of power in his life, but the most opportune as well, for with it he consolidated his authority, unified his command, and cleared the road to his glory.”45 All those years later, Bolívar looks at his valet José Palacios and says, “I would do it again.” (Which is what Colonel Márquez was reputed to have said after he killed Medardo Pacheco in Barrancas.) There was no need whatever for García Márquez to place this example of an act of utter ruthlessness carried out for reasons of state at the end of his penultimate chapter, where it becomes, irremediably, the last major drama, the last narrative action of the novel (albeit thirteen years before the end of Bolívar’s life and therefore shown in flashback). But he did. And so again, García Márquez’s extraordinary ability to anticipate major events is quite blood-chilling. Fidel Castro must have read this episode a matter of weeks before participating in the judgement on Ochoa’s fate. Did he remember it as he made his decision?46
One of García Márquez’s close friends had now executed another of his close friends. (Naturally Castro declared that the decision was not in his hands.) The executions caused García Márquez much heartache and severe political embarrassment. Tony la Guardia’s family appealed to him personally on more than one occasion. He gave his word that he would intercede with Fidel; if he did, it was without success.
He left Cuba before the executions and on the day they were carried out he was to be found with his friend Alvaro Castaño in Paris, where he met Jessye Norman and French Culture Minister Jack Lang, who was making final preparations for the bicentenary of another revolution which had ended up devouring its children. The following day García Márquez attended the celebration banquet for the 200th anniversary of the storming of the Bastille. He had feared he might have to sit next to Margaret Thatcher (“eyes of Caligula, lips of Marilyn Monroe,” according to their host François Mitterrand) but was fortunate enough to sit next to the glamorous Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan, while Thatcher herself, who had declared that the French Revolution “foreshadowed the language of communism,” appeared, as one British newspaper put it, like a “ghost at the feast.”47 The following day García Márquez arrived in Madrid and said he had seen Fidel Castro “last week,” adding, lamely, that he had told Fidel he was “not only against the death penalty but against death itself.” He said that the execution of four soldiers of the revolution was “a very painful thing, a drama we have all suffered.” He said he had “very good information” that the dead men had been tried by a military tribunal and executed for treason, not drug-trafficking. And “treason is punishable by death all over the world.”48
A return to Colombia was part of his ambitious new strategy—was he resigned or, as the French say, retreating the better to leap forward?—but Colombia was now entering a new nightmare period perhaps unparalleled in all its previous experience. On 18 August 1989, Luis Carlos Galán, now the official Liberal candidate and perhaps the most charismatic Colombian politician since Gaitán, met the same fate as his predecessor when he was assassinated at a political rally on the outskirts of Bogotá by hit men acting for Pablo Escobar. Even Colombia, so used to horror, reacted with stupefaction and widespread despair.49 Once again, García Márquez sent no message to the widow Gloria Pachón, who had been the first journalist to interview him on his return to Colombia in 1966, but he declared the following day that the country “should support President Barco.” He then appealed publicly to the drug-traffickers “not to turn Colombia into an abominable country where not even they, their children or their grandchildren will be able to live.”50
Politically, this had been an extraordinary year. And yet the biggest event of all was about to take place: the fall, on 9 November, of the Berlin Wall. It was possible, as Margaret Thatcher had intimated, and as García Márquez himself had also divined, that two hundred years of Western history had come to an end. Now the demise of the USSR and of communism itself could not be far behind. In December García Márquez, who, for sure, was not passing on the real content of his conversations with Castro, confided to the world that “Fidel fears that the USSR will become infected by capitalism; and that the Third World will be abandoned.”51 He said that the USSR was still desperately needed as a c
ounterweight to the USA and that if it withdrew its financial support from Cuba—for this was the great spectre confronting the revolution—it would be “like a second blockade.” He acknowledged that Cuba needed profound changes, some of which had been well under way long before perestroika. But Cuba’s enemies were continuing to oppose its reinsertion into “its natural world”—Latin America—because people would see it as a triumph for Fidel Castro. It was fortunate, García Márquez must have thought, that Felipe González and his PSOE government had been re-elected in Spain on 29 October, one of the few pieces of good news in an otherwise dismaying panorama.
From García Márquez’s perspective, one entire plank of progressive thinking and political action in the world was on the way to disappearance. What would follow was an unprecedented period of economic and social change; but whereas in the past great moments of change, however disorienting, were accompanied by explanatory political and social ideologies, now everything was driven by economic change itself and the associated ideology of globalization. And simultaneously it might seem as if all meaning was being sucked out of existence by technological and biological advances. Hence the desperate return to fundamentalist religion, born out of anxiety, fear or even despair. Some of this he thought but very little would he say. Whatever happened out in the material world, García Márquez would set about finding another way to be optimistic. It was how he had responded to all but the darkest moments; now he saw it as his duty to the planet.
23
Back to Macondo?
News of a Historic Catastrophe
1990–1996
NINETEEN EIGHTY-NINE had been the most terrible year in Colombia’s recent history. In March Ernesto Samper, a future president, had received multiple bullet wounds in an assassination attempt at the El Dorado Airport and barely survived. In May paramilitaries attempted to blow up Miguel Maza Márquez, head of the DAS or secret police, who also miraculously survived. In August a leading presidential candidate, Luis Carlos Galán of the Liberal Party, was assassinated in full public view. In September the offices of El Espectador were devastated by another attack and the Hilton Hotel in Cartagena was bombed. The life of Galán’s replacement, César Gaviria, a party technocrat, had been threatened by the drug-traffickers as soon as he was nominated.1 In one attempt to kill him, in November, a civilian plane belonging to the national airline Avianca was bombed, with 107 dead, though Gaviria was not on board. In December another huge bomb was detonated in front of the DAS building in Bogotá, killing dozens of passers-by. And there were many other such episodes. All of this was new. Certainly there were no more people dying now than at the height of the Violencia in the 1950s but the vast majority of those had been anonymous deaths in the rural areas; indeed, the complaint that many had previously made about the Colombian political system was that almost anyone could be murdered except the candidates of the two traditional parties—unless (as was the case with both Gaitán and Galán) those candidates were rocking the consensual boat in which each party sailed alternately to comfortable prearranged victories in smooth political waters.
The difference, of course, was drugs. The traditional political parties were no longer entirely in control because a significant proportion of the national resources was no longer theirs to distribute in whatever ways would maintain the “stability” of their status quo. Other interests were now at stake. So now there were new targets. On 3 November Excelsior reported García Márquez as saying that the so-called “war against drugs” (the increasingly popular U.S. phrase) was “doomed to failure” as currently conceived.2 He began to urge the need for renewed talks between government, guerrillas and drug-traffickers. Otherwise, he said, Colombia would end up as a victim of the United States’s own imperialist designs for the rest of the continent by fighting a proxy war on its behalf.
Just six weeks later everyone could see, who wished to do so, that once again García Márquez had shown that he knew his American hemisphere. In late December the United States under President George H. W. Bush, emboldened rather than relieved by the fall of the Berlin Wall, invaded Panama, killing hundreds of innocent civilians, and kidnapped a sitting Latin American president—their own creation, Antonio Noriega—for the first time in history. Sure he was a dictator, and a gangster, and a drug-runner, a real son-of-a-bitch (all of these were pretexts for the invasion); but he had been their son-of-a-bitch until just a few months before. Thus the USA returned to the policy of foreign invasions in precisely the year in which the Soviets acknowledged that their own great invasion, of Afghanistan, had been a mistake. García Márquez condemned the Panamanian intervention in Cuba’s Granma (21 December), despite his detestation of Noriega, but Granma was not a publication the U.S. authorities were known to take much notice of. Much new writing was on the wall, for sure; much old writing also.
In 1990 Colombia went on as it had in 1989. A group of “Notables,” leading public figures, apparently with support from President Barco, published an open letter proposing “less rigorous” punishment of drug-traffickers if they would bring the campaign of violence to an end. Leading elements of the Medellín cartel offered to halt the carnage and surrender cocaine-refining facilities in exchange for government guarantees. Not all the drug-traffickers went along with this proposal, however, and it soon broke down. A second presidential candidate, Bernardo Jaramillo, of the Unión Patriótica (ex-Colombian Revolutionary Armed Forces, or FARC), was assassinated by the Medellín cartel in late March. (The FARC is the oldest guerrilla organization, whose founders originated from the left of the Liberal Party during the later phases of the Violencia and then founded the FARC as the armed wing of the Communist Party in the 1960s; it is also the guerrilla organisation with the deepest roots in the peasantry, in a country reputed to have, at the start of the twenty-first century, the largest number of displaced peasants in the world. When it attempted to take the electoral road in the 1980s, the FARC lost some 2,500 candidates and officials murdered by paramilitary death squads, often in league with government forces. Not surprisingly it returned to full-scale guerrilla war.) The Interior Minister, Carlos Lemos Simmonds, was accused by opponents of provoking Jaramillo’s murder and resigned. Then in late April a third presidential candidate, Carlos Pizarro, of another former guerrilla movement, M-19, was assassinated on an internal flight by a hit man who had been paid—so Pizarro’s brother alleged—by police or army-backed death squads. Meanwhile Pablo Escobar, the leading drug-trafficker, offered a bounty of 4,000 dollars for each policeman killed. Bombs exploded all over the country, killing hundreds of people. When the presidential elections were held, César Gaviria, Galán’s former chief of staff, won with 47.4 per cent of the vote. Only 45 per cent of the 14 million electorate went to the polls. A further offer by the drug-traffickers to suspend the violence was rejected by the new government. Gaviria’s programme included continuing a policy of firm repression of the drug cartels, and constitutional reform.
It was at this moment that García Márquez decided to make another effort to instal himself in Colombia. It has to be wondered whether he would have considered doing so at such a sombre time nationally if Cuba had not been so politically embarrassing to him. When he found his feet again and began to consolidate his new political strategy the objective would no longer be to advance the Cuban Revolution as such but to help save Fidel—if necessary, from himself.3 Now, on several occasions, García Márquez conceded—though he advanced it as an avant—garde intuition-that “we are in the first stages of a new and unpredictable era,” but then specified, perhaps less convincingly, that this new era “seems destined to liberate our thinking.”4 What he did not acknowledge was that this new era represented the defeat of everything he had always believed in. He decided to make not a clean breast of it but the best fist of it, and to act as if all that was happening was exactly what he had been hoping for: it was the reactionaries, first among them the U.S. government, who did not grasp the enormity of what was happening in the world and the scale of
the opportunities that now awaited mankind. This, he argued, required everyone to reconsider their political convictions.5 It was, truly, a defining moment in his thinking.
Surely things could only get better? No, they immediately got worse. In late February, a few weeks after the example of Panama, the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, which had won power and held on to it in the teeth of American opposition, was voted out of office by a people weary of war and pessimistic about the future in a continent still dominated by the Colossus of the North. García Márquez was stupefied but managed to bluster that the Sandinistas would win the next election.6 Fidel Castro would not have been surprised by the Nicaraguan reverse but he must have been bitterly disappointed and fearful for his own country’s future. The truth was that Latin America as a whole was poorer at the end of the 1980s than it had been in the 1960s and most of its countries were heavily in debt. Economic backwardness and injustice were everywhere to be seen. One Hundred Years of Solitude was thought to have been a memorial to underdevelopment at the very moment when underdevelopment, thanks to the 1960s revolutions, was on its way out for ever. Far from it; in the 1980s Latin America seemed to be on its way back to Macondo.
Gabriel GarcÃa Márquez Page 63