JAIME ABELLO BANFI: Director and cofounder of the Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism (FNPI), today the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation, created by Gabo in 1994 to contribute to the renovation of journalism in the countries of Latin America. A purebred Barranquillero and lover of Carnival.
ELISEO “LICHI” ALBERTO: The son of the Cuban poet Eliseo Diego, he was also a poet as well as a screenwriter and novelist. Diego always had a stormy relationship with Castro’s regime, and went into exile in Mexico in 1990. It is said that García Márquez helped him leave Cuba and settle in Mexico. In 1997 he published Report Against Myself, accusing the Cuban government of obliging him to spy on his father. He received the Alfaguara Novel Prize in 1998 for Caracol Beach. He died in Mexico City in 2012 at the age of sixty.
GUILLERMO ANGULO: Colombian photographer, writer, documentarian, and orchid grower. A close friend of García Márquez since their poverty-stricken Parisian days. He’s called Maestro Angulo. He lives in Bogotá and cultivates orchids outside the city.
RAMÓN ILLÁN BACCA: Recognized, prizewinning author and professor of literature living in Barranquilla, related to Samarian families of good name. Although his aunts knew Luisa Santiaga, García Márquez’s mother, it was difficult for him to get to know him.
CARMEN BALCELLS: The most powerful literary agent in the Spanish language, credited with having created the “boom.” In the days after Gabo died, she predicted that Gabismo would become a religion. The “Mamá Grande” as Gabo dubbed her, she died in Barcelona in 2015 at eighty-five.
CECILIA BUSTAMANTE: Colombian poet, a friend of García Márquez.
EMMANUEL CARBALLO: Mexican editor and writer with a long career. He was part of the group of intellectuals who embraced Gabriel García Márquez when he settled in Mexico City in 1963, with his wife Mercedes and son Rodrigo. He was the editor of ERA and founded a literary magazine with Carlos Fuentes. He died in 2014.
PATRICIA CASTAÑO: Documentary filmmaker and producer from Bogotá who served as guide and interpreter for Gerald Martin, the biographer of García Márquez, when he traveled to the Atlantic Coast to interview the writer’s maternal relatives.
IMPERIA DACONTE: The daughter of Antonio Daconte, an Italian immigrant who made a small fortune in Aracataca, where García Márquez lived with his paternal grandparents until he was eight years old. Colonel Nicolás Márquez was a good friend of Daconte’s and visited him frequently with his grandson. Imperia remembers García Márquez as a “cute little blondie” when they were children. She is ninety-seven.
MARGARITA DE LA VEGA: A Cartagenan academic, film producer, and critic who has lived in the United States since 1974. The daughter of Dr. Henrique de la Vega, who was a specialist in ailments of the head and a very good friend of García Márquez.
ALBINA DU BOISROUVRAY: French film producer, activist, and granddaughter of Bolivian tin king Simón Patiño. She met García Márquez during the golden days of the boom when together with Juan Goytisolo in Paris she created Libre, a magazine that published Latin American writers.
MARÍA LUISA ELÍO: She came to Mexico City as a refugee, the child of Spanish Republicans. She married Jomí García Ascot, a poet and filmmaker, the son of a Republican diplomat, and they were an integral part of the group of intellectuals, writers, and filmmakers in Mexico in the 1960s. The film On the Empty Balcony, which deals with the subject of exile and was directed by her husband, is based on one of her stories. One Hundred Years of Solitude is dedicated to her and her husband. She died in Mexico City in 2009.
MIGUEL FALQUEZ-CERTAIN: Poet, playwright, writer, and translator from Barranquilla, he has lived in New York since the 1980s.
HERIBERTO FIORILLO: Writer, filmmaker, and journalist, he has written eight books of essays and fiction, three films, and four newsreels. Creator and director of the La Cueva Foundation and the International Carnival of Arts.
ALBERTO FUGUET: Chilean filmmaker and writer. He was one of the leaders of the movement known as McOndo, which declared the end of magical realism. He was selected by Time magazine and CNN as one of fifty Latin American leaders in the new millennium.
ODERAY GAME: Ecuadorian filmmaker and producer who lived for many years in Paris and Madrid. She now lives in Quito.
AIDA GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Aida is the second of the García Márquez sisters and the fourth in order of birth. A teacher and a Salesian nun until 1979, she wrote a book about the childhood of the twelve García Márquez children.
ELIGIO “YIYO” GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: The youngest of the eleven siblings of García Márquez, and like him, a writer and journalist. Among his books is Behind the Keys of Melquíades, a journalistic investigation into One Hundred Years of Solitude published in 2001. In that same year he died of a brain tumor at the age of fifty-three.
GUSTAVO GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: A Colombian diplomat and brother of García Márquez. He died in March 2014 at the age of seventy-eight, waiting for a disability pension that never arrived, an echo of Nobody Writes to the Colonel.
JAIME GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: The eighth of the twelve García Márquez siblings, a great teller of stories about the life and culture of the Colombian Caribbean. He is one of the original members of the Foundation for a New Ibero-American Journalism, the foundation García Márquez founded in 1994.
MARGOT GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: The oldest of the García Márquez sisters who, like Gabriel, because of the closeness in their ages, was brought up in the house of their grandparents in Aracataca. García Márquez has said that she was the spine of the family, and that the character of Amaranta in One Hundred Years of Solitude was inspired by her.
KATYA GONZÁLEZ RIPOLL: A Colombian architect born in Barranquilla, “carnival queen” and García Márquez’s goddaughter.
CARLITOS GONZÁLEZ ROMERO: A multifaceted and creative Barranquillero, a designer of costumes and masks for the Barranquilla Carnival. He made Gabo and Mercedes their hooded cloaks when they considered the possibility of returning incognito to celebrate Carnival.
JUANCHO JINETE: More than anything else, he dedicated his life to being a great friend and organizer of whatever he was asked to do, above all by the four friends García Márquez immortalized as “the jokers of La Cueva” in Big Mama’s Funeral and then in One Hundred Years of Solitude. When French intellectuals and world journalists set out to find the origins of Macondo, Juancho acted as their guide. He died in 2010.
TANIA LIBERTAD: A Peruvian singer, a close friend of the García Márquez family.
NEREO LÓPEZ: He is one of the best-known photographers in Colombia. He has received all the possible prizes, for he has been documenting Colombia since the time of the Violence. He was part of the La Cueva group when he lived in Barranquilla as a graphic reporter for El Espectador. He was the official photographer for the committee that accompanied García Márquez to Stockholm to receive the Nobel. In 1997, at the age of eighty, he moved to New York to “open new horizons.” He died in New York in 2015 at ninety-four, leaving a bevy of unfinished photography projects.
EDUARDO MÁRCELES DACONTE: A writer and art critic born in Aracataca, the grandson of Antonio Daconte, the Italian friend of García Márquez’s grandfather. It was thanks to his grandfather, who brought the gramophone and movies to Aracataca, that García Márquez listened to music and saw his first film as a boy.
GERALD MARTIN: An English academic and writer, he spent seventeen years writing the biography of García Márquez, who called him “my English biographer.”
CARMELO MARTÍNEZ: He was a judge in Colombia. A native of Sincé, where the event occurred that García Márquez re-created in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. He has known García Márquez since they were both thirteen years old, when the writer came to live with his parents for the first time. Martínez was the best friend of Cayetano Gentile, the boy whom two brothers murdered over a question of honor. Carmelo was with him that day. García Márquez asked him to recount what happened. He died in Cartagena.
PLINIO APULEYO MENDOZA: A Colombian novelist, journalist, diplomat, and editor of Libre. Among the many books he has written are three about the time he spent with García Márquez. In them he recounts how poor García Márquez was in Bogotá and in Paris. They were intimate friends and companions. He was the one who arranged for him to work in Caracas and for Prensa Latina. In that period, they were both fervent believers in the revolution of Fidel Castro. Their political ideals separated them when García Márquez did not denounce the arrest of the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla in 1971, which is known as “the Padilla Case.” He is the author, along with Álvaro Vargas Llosa and Carlos Alberto Montaner, of the “Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot,” an essay that satirizes sympathizers from leftist groups in Latin America. He lives in Bogotá, where he writes a political column for the newspaper El Tiempo.
RODRIGO MOYA: A Colombian photographer residing in Mexico, and a close friend of García Márquez.
SANTIAGO MUTIS: A Colombian poet, the godson of García Márquez, and the son of Álvaro Mutis, who lives in Bogotá. A professor and editor of literary journals at the Universidad Nacional in Colombia. In 1997 he organized a traveling exhibit on García Márquez.
JOSÉ ANTONIO PATERNOSTRO: An economist from Barranquilla, a Barranquilloso, and father of the author.
EDMUNDO PAZ SOLDÁN: A Bolivian writer, one of the most representative of the Latin American generation of the nineties, known as McOndo. His work includes essays, stories, and novels.
KAREN PONIACHIK: A Chilean journalist and consultant who has worked in governmental posts in her country. She served as Minister of Mines and Energy during the first presidency of Michelle Bachelet.
GREGORY RABASSA: Translator of Spanish and Portuguese into English, who introduced the North American public to the works of the so-called Latin American boom. The translator into English of One Hundred Years of Solitude and four other books by García Márquez. With his translation of Hopscotch he won the National Book Award. It was Julio Cortázar who suggested to García Márquez that he use Rabassa as his translator. Among other authors he has translated are Jorge Amado, José Lezama Lima, Clarice Lispector, and Mario Vargas Llosa. His last years were dedicated to only translating dead poets. He died in New York in 2016.
FERNANDO RESTREPO: A pioneer of television in Colombia, who, with Fernando Gómez Agudelo, coordinated the operations that brought television to the entire country. Nine years later, in 1963, they founded RTI, the first programmer of the state television channels. In 1973 they transmitted the first television program in color. It is the first enterprise to produce its own soap operas and dramatic programs, among them Time to Die, in 1984, with a script written by García Márquez. He is the epitome of a Bogotá gentleman, a slicker.
HÉCTOR ROJAS HERAZO: A Colombian poet, novelist, journalist, and painter, he was García Márquez’s friend when they both worked for the newspaper El Universal in Cartagena, the city to which García Márquez returned after abandoning the study of law and a Bogotá inflamed by the assassination of Jorge Eliézer Gaitán on April 9, 1948. At that time Rojas Herazo was a reporter and columnist on the staff of the paper. He died in Bogotá in 2002.
ARISTIDES ROYO SÁNCHEZ: A Panamanian lawyer and former diplomat and minister of education who helped negotiate the Torrijos-Carter Treaties in 1977. He also served as president of Panama from October 11, 1978, to July 31, 1982, when he was pressured to resign by the military. From 1968 to 1989, Panama was ruled by a military dictatorship that started with General Omar Torrijos and ended with the overthrow of Manuel Noriega with the help of the United States. Torrijos had named Royo and the military deposed him exactly a year after the general died in a helicopter accident. He currently serves as the director of the Academy of Letters of Panama.
JOSÉ SALGAR: Editor, journalist, and director of newspapers in Colombia, he was the head of the editorial room at El Espectador when García Márquez arrived in Bogotá to work as a reporter. He died in 2013 after having worked in journalism for more than sixty-five years.
ENRIQUE “QUIQUE” SCOPELL: A Colombian photographer, the son of Cuban immigrants, he was the other Barranquillero still alive when I began this series of interviews in 1999. He was one of the group García Márquez joined when he came to work at El Heraldo in 1951. He called himself a professional drunkard. He died in 2014 in Los Angeles at age ninety-one and he made sure his body was laid to rest in Barranquilla.
ILAN STAVANS: Mexican writer and professor living in the United States. A student of Hispanic culture in the United States and Jewish culture in the Hispanic world. Among his books are a dictionary of Spanglish and one on the first forty years of Gabriel García Márquez’s life.
ROSE STYRON: A poet and human rights activist from the United States, she was the wife of the writer William Styron; García Márquez was a good friend of both of them. Since 1970, she has been part of the founding board of Amnesty International and many other nongovernmental organizations that fight for human rights. She worked with García Márquez in several Latin American causes, such as the case of Allende in Chile and the United States embargo on Cuba.
WILLIAM STYRON: An important author from the southern United States. He is famous for Sophie’s Choice, a novel about the life of a woman who survived Auschwitz, and for writing in the first person about his own alcoholism and depression. Because of his southern subject matter, in his earlier novels he was known as the heir to William Faulkner. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, among many other awards. He had a circle of very influential literary and political friends, among them two Latin Americans: Carlos Fuentes and Gabriel García Márquez. He died in 2006 at the age of eighty-one.
BRAM TOWBIN: A born and raised Upper East Side New Yorker turned flower grower in Vermont.
GLORIA TRIANA: Director of the Festivities and Folklore section of Colcultura, a key element in making the award of the Nobel Prize to García Márquez a fiesta.
RAFAEL ULLOA PATERNINA: A distant cousin of García Márquez on his father’s side, he is a chemical engineer whose vocation is writing short stories about the Colombian coast. He was born in Sincé, the river town where García Márquez’s father was also born. He cuts out and saves everything the press publishes about “his kinsman.” He died in Barranquilla.
ARMANDO ZABALETA: One of the most respected composers and singers of the vallenato, a very popular musical genre along the Caribbean coast. Among his best-loved songs is “I’m Not Returning to Patillal,” written as an homage to Freddy Molina, his spiritual brother, another troubadour like him, when he died suddenly. In 1973, Zabaleta composed a protest song against García Márquez when he learned that he had given some prize money to a group of guerrillas in Venezuela and not to Aracataca. He died in 2010 at age eighty-three, thankful for the love he received for his compositions.