Redeemers (48 page)

It likely was—and to such a degree that in thirty-five turbulent years García Márquez has never publicly detached himself from that vision. What did he see that anyone else could see? Tangible achievements in health care and education, though he did not ask himself whether the maintenance of a totalitarian regime was required in order to attain these social objectives. And what didn't he see? The presence of the Soviet Union, except as a generous purveyor of oil. And what did he say he hadn't seen? “Individual privileges” (although Castro and the top echelon of his government certainly enjoyed such privileges) and “police repression or discrimination of any kind,” although harshly administered detention camps had existed, at least since 1965, for homosexuals, religious believers, and dissidents—they were euphemistically called Military Units to Aid Production, or UMAP.

What he saw, in sum, was what he wanted to see: five million Cubans who belonged to the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, not as the spies and enforcers of the Revolution but as its spontaneous, multitudinous “true force,” or, more plainly—in the chilling words of Castro himself, admiringly quoted by García Márquez—“a system of collective revolutionary vigilance that ensures that everybody knows who the man next door is and what he does.” He saw many “alimentary and industrial items freely sold in stores” and he prophesied that “in 1980 Cuba will be the most developed country of Latin America.” He saw “schools for all,” and restaurants “as good as the best in Europe.” He saw the “establishment of popular power through universal suffrage by secret ballot from the age of sixteen.” He saw a ninety-four-year-old man immersed in his reading, “cursing capitalism for all the books he hadn't read.”

Most of all, he saw Fidel. He saw “the almost telepathic system of communication” that he had established with people. “His gaze revealed the hidden softness of his childlike heart . . . he has survived unscathed the harsh and insidious corrosion of daily power, his secret sorrows . . . He has set up a whole system of defense against the cult of personality.” Owing to all that, and to his “political intelligence, his instincts and his decency, his almost inhuman capacity for work, his deep identification with and absolute confidence in the wisdom of the masses,” Castro had managed to achieve the “coveted and elusive” dream of all rulers: “affection.”

These virtues were solidly supported, in García Márquez's view, by Fidel's “fundamental and most underappreciated skill”: his “genius as a reporter.” All the great achievements of the Revolution, its origins, its details, its significance, were “chronicled in the speeches of Fidel Castro. Thanks to those spoken reports, the Cuban people are some of the best informed in the world about their own reality.” García Márquez admitted that these discourses “have not solved the problems of freedom of expression and revolutionary democracy,” and the law that prohibited all creative works opposed to the principles of the Revolution struck him as “alarming”—but not because of its limitations on freedom. What troubled him about the repressive law was its futility: “any writer rash enough to write a book against the Revolution shouldn't need to stumble over a constitutional stone . . . the Revolution will be mature enough to digest it.” In his view, the Cuban press was still somewhat deficient in information and critical judgment, but one could “foresee” that it would become “democratic, lively, and original,” because it would be built on “a new real democracy . . . popular power conceived as a pyramidal structure that guarantees, to the base, constant and immediate control of its leaders.” (Years later, in an interview with the
New York Times
, he was asked by Alan Riding why he did not move to Havana, since he traveled there so often. “It would be too difficult to arrive now and adapt to the conditions. I'd miss too many things, I couldn't live with the lack of information.”)

Another paradigmatic piece of his political journalism is
Vietnam por dentro
(Vietnam from the Inside). A year before it was published, in December 1978, García Márquez had founded an organization called the Habeas Foundation for Human Rights in the Americas, with the aim of “advocating the freeing of prisoners. Rather than taking tyrants to task, it will strive as far as possible to uncover the fate of the disappeared and smooth the way home for exiles. In sum—and unlike other equally vital organizations—Habeas will take a greater immediate interest in helping the oppressed than in condemning the oppressors.” In this spirit, it was to be expected that the tragedy of the boat people who fled in desperation from Vietnam would attract his attention, as it attracted that of Sartre and other sympathizers with the Vietnamese regime.

But on his trip to Vietnam the founder of Habeas attended only to the official story. In García Márquez's dispatch we are given a magistrate of Ho Chi Minh's people's court, a “top official,” the Communist Party's minister of external relations, the mayor of Cholon, the minister of foreign affairs, and, of course, Prime Minister Pham Van Dong, who with “quiet lucidity . . . received me and my family at an hour when most heads of state are still in bed: at six in the morning.” During a stay of almost a month, García Márquez's group had occasion to attend “cultural festivities” at which “lovely damsels played the sixteen-string lute and sang doleful airs in memory of the battle dead,” but he said they had no time to consider the plight of the refugees. “Their story,” García Márquez wrote candidly, “took second place to the grim reality of the country.” This “grim reality,” of course, was the history of the war against Yankee imperialism and the danger of a new war with China.

What seemed truly momentous to García Márquez in Vietnam was that it “had lost the war of information.” For the founder of Habeas, the tragedy was not the hundreds of thousands of fugitives, starving and ill, huge numbers of them drowned or else stripped of their few possessions or raped or murdered by Thai pirates and other predators. The calamity was that the world knew about all this. García Márquez regretted that the Vietnamese (the ones he had interviewed, not the refugees in their distant internment camps) did not possess the “foresight to calculate the vast scale of the international effort on behalf of the refugees.”

All these dispatches adhered to the model of García Márquez's earlier pieces on Hungary, and revealed the pattern of all his political journalism, then and now: to listen only to the voices of the powerful, and to counteract—to withhold, downplay, distort, falsify, and omit—any information that could “play into the hands of imperialism.”

 

IV

Despite those dispatches of 1975, Fidel Castro remarked to the journalist Régis Debray that he was not yet convinced of the Colombian writer's “revolutionary firmness.” He knew that García Márquez had refused to support the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in the famous affair of his forced “confessions,” that tropical echo of the Moscow Trials that led many Latin American intellectuals to turn away from the Cuban regime. Castro noted this, but still was not convinced of his loyalty, and so Gabo was not granted an interview in 1975 with the maximum leader of Cuba. García Márquez had to content himself with interviewing the strongman of Panama, Omar Torrijos, a second-rank Caribbean dictator but a faithful reader of García Márquez. Torrijos had this to say about
The Autumn of the Patriarch
: “It's true, it's us, what we're like.” “His comment left me astonished and delighted,” said García Márquez. And “quite quickly,” writes Martin, “the two men would come to build a friendship based on a deep emotional attraction which evidently turned over time into a kind of love affair.”

In 1976 García Márquez returned to Cuba, and after waiting for a month (like the legendary colonel) at the Hotel Nacional for a call from the Comandante, the meeting that he had been anticipating for almost two decades finally took place. Once accepted by Castro, and under his personal supervision, he wrote
Operación Carlota: Cuba in Angola
, a chronicle that won him an award from the International Press Organization. Mario Vargas Llosa (who had written and published a doctoral thesis on
One Hundred Years of Solitude
) bluntly called him Castro's “lackey.” Two years later, García Márquez declared that his adherence to the Cuban way was in a sense similar to Catholicism: it was “a Communion with the Saints.”

“Ours is an intellectual friendship,” García Márquez said in 1982. “When we get together we talk about literature.” And it was not just literature that united them. “They began to have an annual vacation together at Castro's residence at Cayo Largo,” Martin records, “where sometimes alone, sometimes with guests, they would sail in his fast launch or his cruiser
Acuaramas
.”

García Márquez's wife “particularly enjoyed these occasions because Fidel had a special way with women, always attentive and with an old-style gallantry that was both pleasurable and flattering.” Martin also informs us of Castro's culinary skills, and of Gabo's taste for caviar and Castro's for cod. When Gabo was awarded the Nobel Prize, Castro sent his friend a boatload of rum, and upon the family's return he put them up at Protocol House Number Six, which, just a few years later, would become their Cuban home. There García Márquez “overwhelmed” guests such as Debray with bottles of Veuve Clicquot. “There is no contradiction between being rich and being revolutionary,” García Márquez declared, “as long as you are sincere about being a revolutionary and not sincere about being a rich man.”

To this vein—not of socialist realism but of socialite realism—the book
Fidel & Gabo
by Ángel Esteban and Stéphanie Panichelli contributes the testimony of the Cuban poet Miguel Barnet, a friend of García Márquez and president of the Fernando Ortiz Foundation. Barnet gives a detailed account of the parties at the “Siboney mansion,” describing even the attire of Gabo, who was the host. Fidel and Gabo, says Barnet, “are true specialists in culinary matters, and they know how to appreciate good food and good wines. Gabo is the ‘great sybarite,' because of his love for sweets, cod, seafood, and food in general.” And Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, a Spanish writer and friend of Castro, collected the following testimony from the “great Smith,” who was perhaps Cuba's best chef: “Gabo is a great admirer of my cooking and he's promised me a foreword for my cookbook, which is almost finished.” In that cookbook, each of the dishes is dedicated to the person for whom it was created. Gabo's is “Lobster à la Macondo,” and Fidel Castro's is “Turtle Consommé.” (In those days the Cuban ration book—which had been introduced in 1962—contained, per month and per person, the following delicacies: seven pounds of rice and thirty ounces of beans, five pounds of sugar, half a pound of oil, four hundred grams of pasta, ten eggs, one pound of frozen chicken, and half a pound of ground meat—chicken—to which fish, mortadella, or sausage could be added as an alternative in the category of “meat products.”)

 

IN
T
HE
Autumn of the Patriarch
, the Patriarch looks down on the man of letters: “they've got fever in their quills like thoroughbred roosters when they are molting so that they are no good for anything except when they are good for something.” García Márquez, now with a house of his own on the island, was good for a great deal. In December 1986, he established a film academy in San Antonio de los Baños: the New Latin American Cinema Foundation. The new institution—financed by Gabo—was important to the regime, because culture in Latin America has always been an essential source of legitimacy. Among its guests would be Robert Redford, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola. The academy, as Martin describes it, was a clever and exciting idea: “Cinema was convivial, collective, proactive, youthful; cinema was sexy and cinema was fun. And García Márquez lived every minute of it; he was surrounded by attractive young women and energetic and ambitious but deferential young men, and he was in his element.”

All of it resembled a reconstruction of Gabo's Macondian paradise from before the leaf storm, with the advantage that now it was Gabriel García Márquez who lived on the other side, the privileged side, the “American” side. For ordinary Cubans, his Siboney mansion, the lavish meals, the champagne, the seafood, the marvelous pastas prepared by Castro, the yacht outings were—as García Márquez wrote about the “forbidden city” of the Yankees in Aracataca—“fleeting visions of a remote and unlikely world that was veiled to us mortals.”

In 1988 García Márquez wrote a profile of the
caudillo
(as he calls him) that was published as the prologue to
Habla Fidel
(Fidel Speaks), a book by the Italian Gianni Mina. In this profile he furnished a sweeping literary homage to his hero (“He may be unaware of the force of his presence, which seems to take up all the space in the room, though he is not as tall or as solidly built as he seems at first glance”). That same year, living in Havana, García Márquez made progress on a book about Bolívar's final journey:
The General in His Labyrinth
. Martin suggests that his description of Bolívar was inspired by traits of Castro, and his descriptions of Castro by his image of Bolívar.

The following year began badly, with the reverberations of a public letter signed in December 1988 by several writers of international renown who demanded that Castro follow in the footsteps of the Chilean dictator Pinochet and dare to submit his regime to a plebiscite. For García Márquez—who in the 1970s had expressed his disdain for the institutions, the laws, and the freedoms of “bourgeois” democracy, and in December 1981 had mocked the “crocodile tears” of the “usual anti-Soviets and anti-Communists” after the repression of Solidarity in Poland—the letter was another chapter in the rise of the “right” fostered by John Paul II, Thatcher, Reagan, and Gorbachev himself. (In a visit to Moscow in the late 1980s, García Márquez had warned Gorbachev of the danger of surrendering to the Empire.)