Fidel Castro 'dismayed' by death of Gabriel García Márquez

Cuban first vice-president says former leader 'feels the loss of his friends', after Castro's silence fuels rumours about his own health

Associated Press in Havana

theguardian.com, Friday 25 April 2014 19.04 BST

Fidel Castro was hit hard by last week's death of long-time friend and Nobel prize-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, Cuba's first vice-president said on Friday.

Speaking in Havana as he signed a book of condolence at the Colombian embassy, Miguel Diaz-Canel said Castro was dismayed.

"Fidel is a man of great human sensibility, so he feels the loss of his friends," Diaz-Canel told reporters. "But he is also a man who is very seasoned by all the battles he has had to fight … he also has a resilience for such problems."

The former Cuban president, now 87, has not commented publicly on the author's death, though he sent flowers to a memorial ceremony in Mexico City, where the author lived for the final three decades of his life.

The two were close for years after García Márquez travelled to Cuba to work for Prensa Latina, the state news agency which was founded by Che Guevara.

Castro's silence fuelled yet another round of rumours on social media about the health of the 87-year-old former leader, who was forced from office in 2006 by a near-fatal intestinal illness.

He also kept mum for days after the deaths last year of two others he considered close friends: Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela.

Castro, 87, retired from the Cuban presidency for good in 2008 and rarely appears in public now. Last year he all but stopped writing once-regular opinion pieces that were carried across Cuban state media.

"His health is very good. He is working intensely," Diaz-Canel said.

The vice-president saluted García Márquez for his "literary greatness", his support for the Cuban revolution and his friendship with Castro.

Diaz-Canel is the first high-level Cuban official to speak publicly about García Márquez since the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude and other renowned novels died on 17 April in Mexico City, aged 87.

GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ AND FIDEL CASTRO: A COMPLEX AND NUANCED COMRADERIE

The Nobel laureate’s friendship with the Cuban revolutionary, to some, was the famed novelist’s one glaring flaw

April 19, 2014 7:00AM ET

by Joel Whitney @joel_whitney

Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” is hailed as a masterpiece and harbinger of the literary genre, magical realism, a style of writing that influenced everyone from Isabel Allende to Salman Rushdie to Toni Morrison. With more than 30 million copies sold, the book is second only to Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” among Spanish-language novels. And Cervantes had, as one writer noted, a “four-century head start.”

But hours after the Nobel laureate died Thursday, the Cold War debate over his friendship with Cuba’s iconic revolutionary and former President Fidel Castro was rehashed as the singular stain on his otherwise glorious literary legacy.

While Castro’s revolution in its early days inspired admiration from the global left, his movement quickly became characterized by acts of repression and censorship. For the past four decades, García Márquez had been criticized for maintaining his support even after Castro blessed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, with obituaries this week calling that support “scandalous” and a defense of “the indefensible.”

But the nuance of García Márquez’s position was such that while he refused to break definitively with Castro, he never stopped criticizing Castro’s revolution, and even softened some of Castro’s roughest edges at a time when the Cuban leader was constantly under attack from the north.

The first time Castro and García Márquez met was on Jan. 19, 1959, during “Operation Truth,” Castro’s attempt to open Cuba’s trials of the Fulgencio Batista regime to journalists. When García Márquez landed in Havana to observe the trials with his friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, he recalled how Castro asked hospitably, “Have you eaten?” The trial García Márquez witnessed was of a colonel accused of civilian murders in a small town called El Oro de Guisa. García Márquez first signed a request for leniency, and when it was denied, deemed the sentence fair.

Apuleyo Mendoza and García Márquez were hired in the early 1960s to launch a Bogota bureau of Prensa Latina, a news service founded by Cuba to counter the power of U.S. media. When García Márquez transferred to the Havana bureau to undergo training in 1960, he met Castro again, briefly. There he spent so much time working that all he remembered of the Cuban capital was the elevator and his office. “If anything is going to sink this revolution,” he told his boss, Jorge Masetti, regarding the long hours, “it’s going to be the light bill.”

In a 1981 article, “Memories of a Journalist,” García Márquez recalled witnessing Masetti intercepting a coded CIA message in early 1961 revealing details of the Bay of Pigs invasion. When they took it to the government with a plan to surprise the invaders, they were told the government already had its own plan.

García Márquez wrote that during the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, he was in New York being menaced by “gusanos,” or counterrevolutionary American “worms.” He called the U.S. the worst place to be at that time. After the Americans threatened his family, he left.

When Communists took control of Prensa Latina, García Márquez and Masetti resigned.

But the Bay of Pigs and the New York episodes left a strong impression of Cuba as an underdog going against a powerful enemy. After the 1967 publication of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” made García Márquez an international sensation, two events the following year formed the basis for his relationship with Castro. It would last until the onset of García Márquez’s dementia in 2011.

The first of those events was the Padilla affair. While García Márquez was reluctant to publicly support Heberto Padilla — a Cuban writer who had been persecuted and jailed in 1971 for his opposition to the Castro regime — he nevertheless believed he helped Padilla get permission to eventually leave Cuba. When Castro that same year supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, García Márquez expressed dismay, but described the world as caught between “two imperialist states equally cruel and insatiable.”

In the decade and a half between the publication of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, García Márquez, in his public statements about Castro, vacillated between unqualified support and mild criticism.

He described Soviet communism in 1971 as “only symptoms of a system that resembles socialism less and less.” But in 1973 he was so disturbed by the U.S.-backed coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende that he vowed not to write another word while Gen. Augusto Pinochet was in power. (He later recanted, saying this was tantamount to self-censorship.) In an exhaustive 1975 article about Cuba, he cited the lack of free speech but predicted free speech would come; Cubans had enshrined it in the constitution. He also praised Cubans’ innovative adaptation to U.S. sanctions, which he depicted as cruel.

García Márquez’s support for Castro likely prevented him from getting a visa to come to the U.S. until President Bill Clinton lifted the ban in the late 1990s. When García Márquez did travel to the U.S., he met with Clinton and during their talks defended Castro.

“In 1996,he dined with President Clinton and told him that ‘if you and Fidel could sit face to face, there wouldn’t be any problem left,” Mexican author Enrique Krauze wrote.

“After Sept. 11, [Marquez] published a long letter to Bush: ‘How does it feel now that the horror is erupting in your own yard and not in your neighbor’s living room?"’

None of this clumsy diplomacy would protect him from attacks over his politics. Exiled Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante accused García Márquez of “delirium totalitarium,” while Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, a former friend of García Márquez’s and also a Nobel laureate, called him “Castro’s courtesan.” Others called him “Castro’s gopher, messenger and go-between.”

Whatever one’s politics, the consensus is clear: Castro and other powerful men fascinated García Márquez and will remain entwined in his legacy. When writing his 1975 novel, “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” García Márquez is said to have turned to a friend who mentioned Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and asked, “What is power? It’s as if it’s a little ball that some people hold in their hands and they’re constantly caressing it.”

Latin America scholar and University of California at Berkeley lecturer Patrick Iber writes in an email that García Márquez overestimated Castro. But he adds, “It is clear that García Márquez was one of the few people who could speak freely with Castro, to criticize the revolution privately and constructively. If he had broken with Castro publicly, he would have lost that power.”

Stephanie Panichelli, a co-author of the 2009 book “Fidel and Gabo,” thinks it’s important to separate the author from the friend and political ambassador: “His support of the Cuban revolution, even after the Padilla affair ... should not influence readers’ … appreciation for his literary work.

But García Márquez’s translator Edith Grossman doesn’t think the friendship would affect the Nobel laureate’s legacy in the least. “His political loyalties and support of Fidel Castro,” she wrote in an email, “aren't crucial to his books and, in a sense, aren’t anyone's business but his.”

Fidel Castro Visits with Chavez’s Daughter

April 29, 2014 |  

HAVANA TIMES — Maria Gabriela Chavez, the eldest daughter of the late Venezuelan 

President Hugo Chávez  met  in Havana with former President Fidel Castro, to 

remember  her father, she said through the Venezuelan social network  Instagram.

“On my return to Cuba, I had the honor of sharing for three  hours with my dear Fidel, 

commander of all time,” said Maria  Gabriela, adding that “Fidel does not forget his 

friends.”

The appearance of a photo of Chavez’s daughter appears  accompanied by Castro, 

has sparked reactions of all kinds,  especially after a new wave of rumors circulating 

about the  health of the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution.

When Barbara Walters Was Charmed By Fidel Castro

Posted By Humberto Fontova On 4:29 PM 05/14/2014 In | 

Katie Couric hailed Barbara Walters this week in Vanity Fair, calling her “an early ballbuster, and I mean that in the nicest possible way. She rattled a lot of cages before women were even allowed into the zoo.” The occasion was her retirement this week from the popular television show ”The View.”

Some women living in the U.S. today (and with long experience in literal cages) strongly differ with Couric.  They know — and from first-hand experience — that  far from “busting” any gentleman parts, the figurative description for Ms Walters’ services to a powerful man matches a famous performance by another woman in Vanity Fair this month. (Her name starts with an M and ends with ‘onica Lewinsky.’)

Barbara Walters “interviewed” Fidel Castro in 1977 and again in 2002. But the famous ABC Wicked Witch who interrogated Nixon, Reagan and Bush – when confronted by Fidel Castro — morphed in Ann Margaret in front of Conrad Birdie. No hint of the famous ABC News dominatrix in Washington was evident in the smiley and goo-goo-eyed groupie in Havana.

Instead this famous feminist shamelessly stroked one of the most brutal and insatiable male egos in modern history — and within walking distance of where hundreds of his female victims languished in filthy, rat-infested and sweltering torture chambers.

When feminist icon Barbara Walters sat quivering alongside Fidel Castro in 1977 cooing: “Fidel Castro has brought very high literacy and great health-care to his country. His personal magnetism is powerful!” dozens of Cuban (genuine) feminists suffered in nearby torture chambers. From exile today many of them recall the horrors:

“They started by beating us with twisted coils of wire recalls former political prisoner Ezperanza Pena from exile today. “I remember Teresita on the ground with all her lower ribs broken. Gladys had both her arms broken. Doris had her face cut up so badly from the beatings that when she tried to drink, water would pour out of her lacerated cheeks.”

“On Mother’s Day they allowed family visits,” recalls, Manuela Calvo from exile today.” But as our mothers and sons and daughters were watching, we were beaten with rubber hoses and high-pressure hoses were turned on us, knocking all of us the ground floor and rolling us around as the guards laughed and our loved-ones screamed helplessly.”

“When female guards couldn’t handle us male guards were called in for more brutal beatings. I saw teen-aged girls beaten savagely their bones broken their mouths bleeding,” recalled prisoner Polita Grau.

Fidel Castro’s regime jailed and tortured 35,150 Cuban women for political crimes, a totalitarian horror utterly unknown in Cuba until the regime Barbara Walters found “magnetic.” Some of these Cuban ladies suffered twice as long in Castro’s Gulag as Alexander Solzhenitsyn suffered in Stalin’s.

Their prison conditions were described by former political prisoner Maritza Lugo. “The punishment cells measure 3 feet wide by 6 feet long. The toilet consists of an 8 inch hole in the ground through which cockroaches and rats enter, especially in cool temperatures the rat come inside to seek the warmth of our bodies and we were often bitten. The suicide rate among women prisoners was very high.”

“Only minutes after my arrival at the Hotel Riviera in Havana, I was told to be in his (Fidel Castro’s) office within 15 minutes,” wrote Barbara Walters about her first interview with Fidel Castro in May 1977. “There I found a very courtly, somewhat portly Fidel Castro. He apologized for making me wait for two years and said that now he wanted to cooperate…On Wednesday, Castro himself came to our hotel to pick us up … Then, driving a Russian-made jeep, he took us to the Bay of Pigs, where we boarded an armed patrol boat. We thus became, according to Castro, the first Americans to cross the Bay of Pigs since the U.S.-supported invasion there in 1961.”

Barbara Walters’ crossing of the Bay of Pigs was probably more than a historical sight-seeing junket. On the other side and near the mouth of the bay sits Castro’s personal island-resort Cayo Piedra, that houses his luxurious get-away chateau. According to defectors, when younger, Fidel Castro often repaired to this remote but luxurious villa for spearfishing, among other recreational pursuits.

Juan Reynaldo Sanchez, a Lieutenant Colonel in Cuba’s Armed Forces who spent 17 years as Fidel Castro’s bodyguard/valet had just been promoted to the position when Barbara Walters visited Cuba for her first interview with the Stalinist dictator in May 1977. Sanchez defected to the U.S. in 2008 and explained to this writer how he was part of the Castroite entourage that accompanied Ms. Walters and Fidel to the latter’s island chateau. Ms Walters does mention that:

“We stopped at a little island for a picnic lunch of grilled fish and pineapple. During which Castro swapped fish stories with the ABC crew. It was here that we taped our first but brief and candid interview with him.”

Argentinian journalist Juan Gasparini writes in his Spanish language book Mujeres de Dictadores (Women of Dictators) that, “It is widely supposed that Fidel Castro had several amorous adventures with the North American reporter Barbara Walters who twice visited Cuba to interview him. It is said that she later visited Cuba more discretely for private visits.”

When Castro’s torturers were transferring his female prisoners from cell to cell — while Barbara Walters visited Castro’s Bay of Pigs’ love shack — the guards were forced to drag many of these Cuban women around like dead animals. They were simply incapable of walking. The constant beatings had incapacitated many of them. The excrement and menstrual fluid caked to their legs and bare feet made it more difficult still. Some of the cells called “Tapiadas,” were barely big enough to stand and walk in and were completely sealed except for a few tiny air holes. The women were confined completely underground in total darkness and suffocating heat for weeks at a time. These were tombs by any other name, except that their occupants were still alive, if barely and if only by ultra-human perseverance.

So you’ll please excuse these Cuban ladies (most of them U.S. citizens today) if they regard the “struggles” of Betty Freidan, Gloria Steinem – and yes, the “ballbusting” by Barbara Walters — as a trifle overblown.

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