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.”

The Fidel I think I know

He's a man of ironclad discipline, inexhaustible patience, colossal ideas and insatiable illusions

Gabriel García Márquez

The Guardian,

Saturday 12 August 2006

His devotion is to the word. His power is of seduction. He goes to seek out problems where they are. The impetus of inspiration is very much part of his style. Books reflect the breadth of his tastes very well. He stopped smoking to have the moral authority to combat tobacco addiction. He likes to prepare food recipes with a kind of scientific fervour. He keeps himself in excellent physical condition with various hours of gymnastics daily and frequent swimming. Invincible patience. Ironclad discipline. The force of his imagination stretches him to the unforeseen.

José Martí is his foremost author and he has had the talent to incorporate Martí's thinking into the sanguine torrent of a Marxist revolution. The essence of his own thinking could lie in the certainty that in undertaking mass work it is fundamental to be concerned about individuals.

That could explain his absolute confidence in direct contact. He has a language for each occasion and a distinct means of persuasion according to his interlocutors. He knows how to put himself at the level of each one, and possesses a vast and varied knowledge that allows him to move with facility in any media. One thing is definite: he is where he is, how he is and with whom he is.

Fidel Castro is there to win. His attitude in the face of defeat, even in the most minimal actions of everyday life, would seem to obey a private logic: he does not even admit it, and does not have a minute's peace until he succeeds in inverting the terms and converting it into victory.

His supreme aide is his memory and he uses it, to the point of abuse, to sustain speeches or private conversations with overwhelming reasoning and arithmetical operations of an incredible rapidity. He requires incessant information, well masticated and digested. He breakfasts with no less than 200 pages of news. Responses have to be exact, given that he is capable of discovering the most minimal contradiction in a casual phrase. He is a voracious reader. He is prepared to read any paper that comes into his hands at any hour.

He does not lose any occasion to inform himself. During the Angola war he described a battle in such detail at an official reception that it was hard work to convince a European diplomat that Fidel Castro had not participated in it.

His vision of Latin America in the future is the same as that of Bolívar and Martí, an integrated and autonomous community, capable of moving the destiny of the world. The country about which he knows the most after Cuba is the United States: of the nature of its people, their power structures, the secondary intentions of its governments. And this has helped him to handle the incessant torment of the blockade.

He has never refused to answer any question, however provocative it might be, nor has he ever lost his patience. In terms of those who are economical with the truth, in order not to give him any more concerns than those that he already has: he knows it. He said to one official who did so: "You are hiding truths from me, in order not to worry me, but when I finally discover them I will die from the impact of having to confront so many truths I have not been told." But gravest are the truths concealed to cover up deficiencies, because alongside the enormous achievements that sustain the revolution - the political, scientific, sporting, cultural achievements - there is a colossal bureaucratic incompetence, affecting daily life, and particularly domestic happiness.

When he talks with people in the street, his conversation regains the expressiveness and crude frankness of genuine affection. They call him: Fidel. They address him informally, they argue with him, they claim him. It is then that one discovers the unusual human being that the reflection of his own image does not let us see. This is the Fidel Castro that I believe I know. A man of austere habits and insatiable illusions, with an old-fashioned formal education of cautious words and subdued tones, and incapable of conceiving any idea that is not colossal.

I have heard him evoking things that he could have done in another way to gain time in life. On seeing him very overburdened with the weight of so many distant destinies, I asked him what it was that he most wished to do in this world, and he immediately answered me: "Stand on a corner."

· Gabriel García Márquez is a Nobel prize-winning novelist. This is an edited extract of an article from the Cuban newspaper Granma. Fidel Castro is 80 tomorrow.