AFTERWORD

SWAN SONG

WHILE THIS BOOK WAS BEING PREPARED FOR PUBLICATION, some events transpired that would further threaten Cuba’s fragile stability. Between March 18 and 21, 2003, seventy-nine peaceful protesters were arrested on the island, almost all of them intellectuals committed to Cuba’s future development—but as a democracy. Some were even accused of “possessing a Sony recorder.”¹ They were sentenced to up to twenty-eight years in prison for crimes of conscience. The swan’s song was becoming a shriek, taking advantage of the international chaos caused by the Iraq war. A few days after that event, some three hundred people from the worlds of literature, film, politics, and the arts in general signed an open letter demanding “the Cuban government immediately release all of the dissidents” and also calling for “an end of repression against the peaceful opposition.”² Among them were such luminaries as Mario Vargas Llosa, Günter Grass (who, ever since his days as a militant communist, had always supported revolutionary “gestures”), Pedro Almodóvar, Ana Belén, Alfredo Bryce Echenique, Elisabeth Burgos, Jorge Edwards, Juan Goytisolo, Enrique Krauze, Claudio Magris, Javier Marías, Antonio Muñoz Molina, Teodoro Petkoff, and Joaquín Sabina.

The initial phase of the war in Iraq was drawing to a close, and the triumphant spirit of the allies led some to suggest that there were still people living under oppressive regimes around the world, and they should not reject the possibility of intervention in some of those countries, such as North Korea. Cuba was one of the countries tossed around as possible targets in the press, but these conjectures were always couched in ambiguity. At this juncture, another uncomfortable situation arose for the Castro regime: within a few days of each other, Cubans who wanted to escape the country and emigrate to a freer one attempted to hijack a few planes and a boat. The boat was intercepted by security forces when it ran out of fuel, and those responsible for the attempted hijacking were arrested, immediately brought to trial, sentenced to death, and executed; all of this took place within the record time of less than one week. On April 11, the executions by firing squad were announced; the sentences had been carried out ipso facto. The three condemned men were black men under thirty. The youngest was only twenty years old, and the attempted hijacking of the boat had been non-violent. A few days after the executions were announced, the mother of one of the executed men gave a television interview to a Spanish station, and explained how they had called her a few days before, at ten o’clock in the morning, to inform her that her son had already been buried. She went to the cemetery, and they would not let her confirm her son’s identity. “I didn’t know if what they had inside that coffin was my son or a dog,” she told the cameras from Television Española.

As might be expected, there was an immediate outcry. The International Foundation for Freedom, headed by Mario Vargas Llosa, and which counts Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Carlos Alberto Montaner among its members, released a “Manifesto on Cuba,” which asked: “Why has the Cuban dictatorship decided to act in such a brutal, challenging manner on the international stage? Essentially, because it is a totalitarian regime that does not allow the Cuban people any vestige of liberty or autonomy; and its dictator, owner, and master over the will of all of his subjects had nervously observed the growing revitalization of a civil society that was trying to escape his control. Castro simply wanted to punish them. He wanted to punish the opposition and intimidate the people. It’s what he has always done.”³ It also challenged supporters of democracy around the world to not limit their responses to mere words and to take action, reducing Cuba’s diplomatic presence within democratic countries, expelling Cuba from all international organizations, and pressuring the regime in the same way that the racist South African government had been pressured to reform.

Some writers of the left who had always taken Castro’s side now said that solidarity has its limits, and that fundamental human rights must be respected. The most notorious example was the Portuguese writer José Saramago, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998; he published a short article in El País on April 14, 2003 titled “As Far as I’ll Go.” His words reverberated around the world: “From now on, Cuba can continue on its way; I’m staying here. The right to dissent is something that is found and will be found written in invisible ink on all declarations of human rights, past, present, and future. Dissenting is an irrepressible act of conscience.” He talked about sentences that were out of proportion to the offenses, and the absence of any conspiracy on the part of the Cubans with the U.S. Interest Section in Havana; and added: “Now here come the firing squads. Hijacking a boat or a plane is a seriously punishable offense in any country on earth, but you don’t sentence the offenders to death, especially when you keep in mind that there were no victims. Cuba has not won any heroic battle by executing these three men, but it has lost my confidence, it has squandered my hopes, it has betrayed my illusions. I will go no further.”⁴

Another of the disillusioned was Eduardo Galeano. His article “Cuba duele” (Cuba hurts) was harshly criticized, as was Saramago’s piece, by the Cuban press. In it, the author of Las venas abiertas de America Latina describes a model of power that is in decline, and that “has made obeying orders issued from on high a revolutionary virtue.”⁵ He affirms that he never believed in “single-party democracy,” nor in the omnipotence of the state as “a response to the omnipotence of the market”; that the Revolution has been losing the “winds of spontaneity and freshness that propelled it from the beginning”; that there was a “disaster of communist states converted into police states,” which represents a “betrayal of socialism”; and that the spread of democracy in Cuba is absolutely essential, but it has to come from the Cubans themselves, “without anyone from outside putting their fingerprints on it; they need to open up new avenues for democracy, and fight for the liberties that they lack.”⁶

The pressure on those intellectuals was such that, in Galeano’s case, he issued a correction a few days later. However, Saramago had already made an inalterable decision. Articles against him appeared in Granma, La Jiribilla, Tiempo21, etc., as well as the previously cited piece by Steffan. On April 23, 2003, we attended a Day of the Book event in Granada (Spain) with the Portuguese Nobel laureate. After the dedication ceremony of a new cultural center, he told us privately that he felt a tremendous sense of frustration about everything that was going on, since he had always been loyal to the Revolution, and had continued to be; but it was the Revolution that was betraying itself, it wasn’t what it had been before, and, that being the case, he could no longer continue to support it as he had in the past.

The reactions in Cuba were not just from private individuals. On April 20, El País collected statements from high-ranking political officials defending themselves from the international outcry that they were abusing their power. The Minister of Cuban Foreign Relations, Felipe Pérez Roque, pointed out that the executions and the mass imprisonments had been painful but completely unavoidable measures. He justified the death penalty “with exceptional character” for the “simple rise in the number of plane and boat hijackings—seven in as many months—that could provoke an immigration crisis with the United States,”⁷ and could provide them with the perfect excuse for armed intervention. Similarly, twenty-seven Cuban intellectuals, including Miguel Barnet, Leo Brouwer, Roberto Fernández Retamar, Julio García Espinosa, Eusebio Leal, Senel Paz, Silvio Rodriguez, and Cintio Vitier, signed a letter on April 19 titled “A message from La Havana to our friends who are far away,” which revealed the pain they felt from the devastating declarations that had been made against Cuba in recent days, especially because they had been made by “steadfast friends” of the Revolution who had been misinformed and who, because of their attitude, could unwittingly provoke a U.S. invasion into Cuba. The letter stated, “Our little country is more threatened today than ever before by the superpower that wants to impose a fascist dictatorship on a worldwide scale. Out of self-defense, Cuba has been forced to take rigorous measures that of course they would rather not have to take. Those measures should not be judged by taking them out of context.”⁸ And they shouted back at the exile community in Miami “Today Iraq, tomorrow Cuba,” to try to reawaken solidarity with their disillusioned communist compatriots.

Those of us who are well aware of Castro’s close relationship with García Márquez asked ourselves during the course of that long month: where is García Márquez? Why doesn’t he come out in defense of his friend? And more importantly, why doesn’t he publicly condemn the executions, since he has always opposed the death penalty? And why didn’t he sign the letter with signatures from twenty-seven intellectuals who called on their old friends to support Cuba again? Susan Sontag helped us out, just as we had given up hope of getting any clear answers, a few days before García Márquez would finally sign the pro-Castrist Cuban letter. At the end of April, the American writer was invited to speak at the Bogotá Book Fair, and her presentation, titled “The intellectual in times of crisis,” was given before an audience of thousands who responded to the provocative speech with thunderous applause. She stated that, if intellectuals could not be considered as “a cohesive group,”⁹ in instances when freedom of expression is repressed, they cannot remain silent. Since she was in Gabo’s country, and his silence with regard to recent events had surprised her, she added: “I know that Gabriel García Márquez is highly appreciated here, and his books are very popular; he is the great writer from this country and I admire him very much, but it’s inexcusable that he has not made any statement regarding recent actions of Cuba’s regime.” She compares his stance with Saramago’s: “I supported Cuba against the United States, but I quickly realized what Castro meant. Now I have seen that a man like José Saramago, who still calls himself a communist, condemns the barbarity that has taken place in Cuba. But I ask myself: what will Gabriel García Márquez say? I’m afraid the answer is: he’s not going to say anything. I cannot excuse him for not talking.”¹⁰

In the wake of this publicly issued challenge, Gabo could not remain silent. In fact, the next day, he made some statements to El Tiempo in Bogotá, in which he defends himself by cataloging some of his virtues with regard to the situation in Cuba in general, but without getting specifically into the matter at hand: “I could not even tell you myself exactly how many prisoners and dissidents I have helped, completely anonymously, to leave Cuba over the last twenty years. Many of them don’t even know it, and the ones who do know are enough to keep my conscience at peace.” When he addresses the recent execution of the three Cubans, he limits himself to abstract generalizations, to avoid clashing with Cuba’s particular interests at that time: “In regard to the death penalty, I don’t have anything to add to what I have said in public and in private for as long as I can remember: I am against it in any place, in any circumstance, for any reason. That’s all, since I have a personal policy of not responding to unnecessary or provocative questions, even if they come from—as they do in this case—such a worthy, respectable person.”¹¹

As might have been expected, Gabo’s answers were unsatisfying to many of those who had already openly expressed their opinions on the latest Cuban affaire. In an opinion column published in El País on May 9, Enrique Krauze wrote a piece called “Gabo in his Labyrinth.” After a brief summary of Gabo and Fidel’s friendship, he asked how this “fidelity to Fidel” could be explained. He wrote:

At a conference for journalists held in 1996 in Colombia, García Márquez said: “Fidel is one of the people that I love most in the world.” “A dictator,” someone said, and the writer replied that elections were not the only way to be democratic. Then a Venezuelan journalist asked why he served as an honorary aide to Castro. “Because he is my friend,” García Márquez answered, adding that one should do everything for one’s friends.¹²

Later in the article, he repeated something Gabo had often said, about how a journalistic piece had to be accurate down to the last comma, and he asked again: “How does García Márquez reconcile this statement on journalistic ethics with his own concealing of the truth in Cuba, in spite of the fact that he has privileged access to Cuban reality?” and he concludes that “it would be an act of poetic justice if, in the autumn of his life and at the zenith of his glory, he disentangled himself from Fidel Castro and put his prestige in the service of freedom, democracy, and human rights in Cuba.”¹³

Mario Vargas Llosa was much harsher in his criticism of Gabo’s statements and his position in relation to Fidel and the Revolution. At the same book fair in Bogotá, having read Gabo’s response to Sontag, Vargas Llosa affirmed that García Márquez is “a writer who is a courtesan of Fidel Castro, whom the dictatorship holds up as an intellectual alibi, and he so far has come to accept very well all the abuses, the trampling of human rights that the Cuban dictatorship has committed, saying that secretly he helps some political prisoners get released. It is no secret to anyone that Fidel Castro hands over some political prisoners to his courtesans once in a while. That is how he keeps his conscience clean. To me it seems more like repugnant cynicism. Writers are how they are, and each assumes a responsibility with that kind of conduct. I have never read an article or essay by García Márquez that explains in moral and civic terms this systematic alignment that seems religiously devout, because intellectually he should explain it and he hasn’t so far, and I doubt very much that he ever will.”¹⁴ Finally, as an exclamation point to his strong words, he has this to say about Gabo: “I don’t know what going to Cuba to be seen with Fidel Castro accomplishes; maybe to show that the regime has an important writer they can claim.”¹⁵

Bad times for the lone swan, which sings no more. Mortally wounded, it just thrashes about, like a fish. Until when?