FRIENDSHIP WITH FIDEL: THE FLIP SIDE
IN SPITE OF HIS PRIVILEGED POSITION WITHIN THE CUBAN universe, Gabo knows that not all that glitters is gold, and he understands very well that his friendship with Castro has its downside too. And it’s not just the resulting loss of some very valuable friends like Vargas Llosa, but also an onslaught of criticism fired at him from the right and the left, from Europe and the Americas, and even from some of his own friends. For example, his great life-long friend Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, who had been much more of a revolutionary and political activist in his youth than Gabo ever had, who put him in touch with contacts in Cuba in 1959 for Operation Truth and then with Prensa Latina, started to differ with his friend over the Padilla case, some details of which are still clouded in confusion. Then, when Apuleyo Mendoza wrote El olor de la guayaba about Gabo’s life and works, Mercedes, Gabo’s wife, remarked to her husband: “Apuleyo doesn’t like us,”1 a schism that became very well known upon the publication of another book about Gabo, El caso perdido: La llama y el hielo, which focuses at length on certain aspects of the Revolution.
In the late nineties, Plinio wrote another book that also alludes to his friend: Manual del perfecto idiota latinoamericano, a collaboration with Alvaro Vargas Llosa and Carlos Alberto Montaner. The book, which has been harshly criticized for its lack of objectivity, shoddy research, and an insufficient depth of understanding of Latin American cultural–political reality, says that anyone who has supported any of the Latin American revolutionary movements or has ascribed to what Plinio calls “your grandfather’s socialism” is “an idiot.”2 At one point, Apuleyo Mendoza said: “I think that when Fidel dies, the same thing is going to happen as when Stalin died. We’re going to hear about all the atrocities that went on under his rule. And I don’t think having been such a good friend of his is going to help Gabo very much.”3 For his part, Vázquez Montalbán asserts that the price Gabo pays for the friendship he cultivates with Fidel is not adequately compensated for by the comforts and privileges he enjoys in Havana.4
In any case, the special treatment and the level of mutual trust their friendship has achieved still don’t mean Gabo is entirely exempt from the same sort of control that all influential personalities are subject to. In Cuba, everybody minds everybody else’s business, everyone is spied on, controlled, and everyone is the subject of investigation. Anyone’s friend could potentially be a government agent who later reports on the activities of their “friend.” For Cubans, this role could be played by anyone, even family members or extremely close friends. In Gabo’s case, it’s well known that there are always three or four people following him around wherever he goes in Cuba. Ricardo Vega told us that García Márquez is very aware of this, and that he views it with a sense of humor. Every once in a while he’ll walk up to them and bring them a beer. If he is at a bar having a drink with friends, he’ll tell the waiter to tell the men at that table in the back—the “secret” surveillance team—that the next round is on him. That is a part of the price of being friends with a dictator. On one occasion, Antonio Valle Vallejo, a professor of Marxism and a good friend of Gabo’s, asked him: “Why do you put up with such contradictory treatment?” and García Márquez answered: “Because I want to write the book about Fidel.”5
When it comes to Fidel, it’s useful to note that he has very rarely been able to sustain a friendship over a long period of time. Generally, he gets bored and cuts off close relationships. That has never happened with Gabo. On the contrary, this particular friendship grows even stronger with the passage of time. In November 2002, a month after having published the heartfelt article about his friend’s memoirs, Fidel appeared together with his Colombian friend in the press half the world over, at a huge stadium for the opening ceremony of an international tournament. Gray-haired and looking their age, they still wore youthful smiles, conveying the customary complicity and mutual pride they tend to put on display for the cameras when they are together, showing off the friendship they both enjoy so much. Now, Gabo no longer remembers his critical spirit of about thirty years earlier, when—in the earliest days of their friendship—he told the Leftist magazine El Manifiesto: “In general, my most difficult problems of conscience don’t stem from the simple fact of being a writer, but from my somewhat illusory desire to maintain my position among a diaphanous group of Leftists of consequence. My political conscience boils with anger with the closing of the Soviet Union in the face of internal pressure from democratic forces, for example, from the ease with which Fidel Castro accuses a writer of being a CIA agent, a writer that Fidel Castro himself knows perfectly well is not, or with China’s stupidity, that breaks off relations with Beethoven while maintaining them with Pinochet. On the other hand, my writer’s spleen processes so much bile together, since literature has such a broad spectrum, inside of which these enormous contradictions become reduced to simple stumbling blocks of history.”6
Gringa coins, like any other, have heads and tails. The consequences of Gabo’s close relationship with Cuba and its Revolution, in relation to the natural enemy, also have a flip side. Not everything that comes from the North is bad. In an article from the early eighties, when Reagan was elected president, Gabo posits that his victory represented “a devastating cataclysm with very few precedents in the life of that awesome country, whose immense creative power has produced some of the greatest things of this century, and some of the most abject.”7 And in the Playboy interview, he flatly concluded that “No cultured man can exist today without traveling frequently to the U.S.”8 Finally, and as a still-positive note to a story with more downsides than not, when Gabo was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer in the summer of 1999, a condition complicated by his age and his previous bout with lung cancer, which had been operated on in 1992, the medical treatment that kept him alive came from California. There he underwent a therapy that contained the lymphoma and that, a year later, allowed him to appear before the cameras to announce that he was able to live a normal life, and that he was still writing his memoirs and working on various stories and novels, and that the letter that had been widely circulated on the Internet, in which he supposedly bids farewell to the world, was a hoax. Some skeptics may ask: Why didn’t Gabo go to a Cuban hospital, where he surely would have received a level of care appropriate for his high-ranking position within the Revolution? In fact, around that same time, none other than Diego Armando Maradona, the soccer superstar and friend of the Revolution, chose to go to Cuba, not the United States, to undergo detox treatment to get off of drugs, something that he hadn’t been able to accomplish in Italy or Argentina.
In spite of having been crowned the author of the “great American Novel” by New York Times critic John Leonard,9 and in spite of his great acceptance as a novelist in the United States, because of his work with Prensa Latina and his politics, from 1961 until 1971 García Márquez had been denied a visa to live in that country and to work in New York. That changed somewhat in 1971 when Columbia University awarded him an honorary degree. “Since then,” he explained in 1983, “I have had some sort of conditional visa that makes me feel insecure. It’s a game established by the State Department.”10 And he added that “It is unpleasant. It’s as if I had a mark on my forehead, and it shouldn’t be that way. I am one of the great propagandists for North American literature. I have said to audiences everywhere in the world that the North American novelists have been the giants of the century. Moreover, great cultural changes are taking place in the United States because of the influence of Latin America—and my work is part of that influence. I should be able to participate more freely.”11
In fact, the only Academy of Letters that he belonged to when he received the Nobel Prize is in the United States, and the critics in the U.S. are the ones who had given his works the warmest reception up to that point. Gabo wanted to make his position completely clear and coherent, underscoring the positive and negative aspects: “Sometimes I have the impression that in the United States, there is a tendency to separate my writing from my political activities—as if they were opposites. I don’t think they are. What happens is that, as an anti-colonial Latin American, I take a position that many people in the United States find annoying or uncomfortable. What I’d like to correct is the problems and errors in the Americas as a whole. I would think the same way if I were a North American. Indeed, if I were North American, I would be even more of a radical, because it would be a matter of correcting the faults in my own country.”12
His criticism of U.S. imperialism focuses on even the smallest details, such as the country’s name itself. He laments that the people of the U.S. appropriate the word America as if they were the only Americans, when in reality everyone from the North Pole on down to Patagonia is equally “American.” What’s more, they live in “a country without a name. They should find a name, because right now they have none. We have the United States of Mexico, the United States of Brazil. But the United States? The United States of what? Now, remember, that is said with affection. […] But as a Latin American, as a partisan for Latin America, I can’t help but feel resentful when North Americans appropriate the word America for themselves.”13 The imperialism is particularly noxious, he continues, when it involves small countries that are unfortunately too geographically close to them. For those cases, Gabo has a radical defense, like the one he adopts for the “Queen of the Caribbean”: “Cuba is very much a part of this American ship. Sometimes I think it would be safer for the Cuban Revolution if its people could get a tugboat and tow themselves elsewhere—somewhere other than ninety miles from Florida.”14
In recent years, in spite of the open hostility between the writer and the country still “without a name,” Gabo has acted as an intermediary between political forces of “his island” and of Colombia and the United States. He introduced Pastrana, the conservative president of Colombia from 1998 to 2002, to Fidel, who could facilitate a dialogue with the guerrillas. He also helped to restore relations between Bogotá and Washington. The U.S. Secretary of Energy, Bill Richardson, affirmed that, although Gabo hadn’t planned the meeting, he had at least been “a catalyst.”15
Gabo met with President Clinton several times, to act as mediator between Cuba and the U.S. on such important subjects as lifting the embargo, the crisis of Cuban rafters, and so on, and at the same time to tell the U.S. president about results of agreements between the guerrillas and the government of Colombia, a process in which Cuba played a leading role: “The United States needs Cuba’s participation in the Colombian peace process because the Cuban government has the strongest contacts with the guerrillas. In addition, Cuba is ideally located only two hours away by plane, so Pastrana could go there any time, conduct any necessary meetings, and go back without anyone finding out. The U.S. wants that to happen.”16 Gabo’s impression of Clinton was different, at least in the first years of his administration, than that of most other U.S. presidents, whom he had harshly criticized. He even sympathetically defended Clinton in one of his newspaper articles, referring to the “Lewinsky case,” recalling with amusement that he was present when Fidel found out about the story, and the dictator said furiously: “Those damn yanquis get on you about everything!”17 Gabo met with Clinton several times. Roberto Fernandez Retamar told us what precipitated their contact to try to resolve the rafter crisis. It was in the mid-nineties, when the Cuban economy was in a shambles. With massive numbers of Cubans leaving the island and heading for the Florida coast, it was feared that a crisis similar in scale to the Mariel boatlift was imminent, and Clinton spoke to Mexican president Salinas de Gortari to try to find a solution, knowing that Mexico had very good relations with Cuba. De Gortari got in touch with Fidel, who in turn contacted García Márquez, once more his minister, ambassador-at-large, diplomat, go-between, and negotiator-of-choice for Cuban crises.
One of those meetings also included Carlos Fuentes. Clinton seemed very open and interested, living up to a description of him as “a U.S. president who collected intellectuals.”18 Clinton was said to have listened attentively to the Latin Americans’ arguments on various topics, but he didn’t offer any responses to comments on subjects related to Cuba. On the trip back, Gabo said to Fidel something like: “He didn’t say anything about Cuba, but what he didn’t say was promising.”19 Vázquez Montalbán notes that, after that meeting, Gabo had another meeting, this time one-on-one, with the U.S. president, and he got the impression that Clinton was “very opportunistic, he’s only thinking about the elections, but he doesn’t have a clear philosophy completely against lifting the embargo, and if he doesn’t lift it, it’s so he won’t cause any problems politically.”20 That’s all we know about that second talk, since the first meeting has been described in detail by Carlos Fuentes to Vázquez Montalbán, and the conversation revolved around nothing more than good literature. The Catalan journalist and novelist described Clinton:
MVM: He was receptive, I think.
CF: He started by saying: “I’m going to listen to you very carefully, but I’m not going to give any opinions, just listen….” And basically, we talked. Gabo talked, he talked about Bernardo Sepúlveda, the former Foreign Minister of Mexico who was there, and I talked, and it seemed like Clinton went pale, he didn’t give away any emotion, he was perfectly controlled. That went on for forty or fifty minutes, an hour; then he said: “All right, I’m among writers here; why are we talking politics? Let’s talk about literature….” And then the fun part of the dinner began.
MVM: What writers did he talk about?
CF: Faulkner more than anything. He said he had read a lot of him, from the perspective of having come from a very dysfunctional family, very violent, the stepfather, the mother, and him, in the middle of the South, racked by racism, lynchings, intolerance. And he told us that when he was young, around fourteen or fifteen years old, he got on his bicycle and rode to Oxford (Mississippi), to see Faulkner’s house, to confirm that the South was more than all those problems—that the South was Faulkner too. He talked about Cervantes like people who have actually read Don Quixote will talk about him. He talked about his habit of reading two hours before going to sleep, every night, of his preference for certain writers, Marco Aurelio, for example. Police procedurals and the mystery writers, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, two, he insisted, Taibo two.
MVM: Paco Ignacio is in his glory.
CF: Just imagine. When he talked about books, he showed that he was a reader. He recited a passage from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and when the evening was winding down, Gabo and I went to the library to look up that passage: he had remembered it almost verbatim.
MVM: And what about Cuba? Had he read anything from Cuba?
CF: He didn’t say anything. He got up from the table twice to take phone calls; later he said it had something to do with the crisis in Ireland, Gerry Adams and Sinn Fein. But he had already said that he wasn’t going to say anything about Cuba, and he didn’t. He is a very controlled man, at least politically.21
In that first round, in spite of his silence on Cuba, it seemed that Gabo and Clinton had made a connection. Later, negotiations would continue. But they wouldn’t bring particularly positive results, and the possible agreements that might have been reached were still in a gray area: “I would love,” García Márquez said later, “to see Clinton again now, but it’s no longer possible. Everything’s changed since Kosovo. The situation in the world has completely changed. With Kosovo, Clinton has found the political legacy that he wants to leave behind him: the North American imperialist model.”22 At least, even though Gabo didn’t win the battle on the embargo and imperialism, the battles related to his health have been waged very successfully in the United States, and his photo appeared every now and then in a newspaper, in the middle of 2003, almost four years after he was first admitted to a clinic in California. Around that time, Roberto Fernández Retamar also had to be hospitalized for cancer treatment. He told us at his home in El Vedado that in mid-1999, when they both knew about each other’s diagnoses and the necessity of hospitalization, one day they were joking about the coincidence. By chance, Michael Jackson had also just been admitted to a hospital, and Gabo mentioned to Roberto, ironically: “Michael Jackson, you, and myself in the hospital: the culture is in trouble.”23
Cubans of the twenty-fifth century will say that when Fidel died, not that long ago, he went up to heaven, but Saint Peter, horrified, wouldn’t let him in, because he wasn’t on the list, and he sent him down to Hell. There, Satan welcomed him with all the honors befitting a head of state, rolling out the red carpet and serving a turtle soup worthy of the most discerning palate.
“Hello, Fidel! We’ve been waiting for you, come on in, make yourself at home.”
“Thank you, Satan, but I have to send out a messenger right away. I was just up in heaven and I left my bags there.”
“Don’t worry about it, I’ll send two demons from the third inferno on the left to collect your things.”
So two security agents from Hell went up to heaven, but the gates were closed, since Saint Peter was out to lunch and his fill-in had the day off.
“It doesn’t matter,” one demon said, “we’ll just climb over the gate and take the bags without anybody noticing.”
They started to climb the gates when two angels passed by and saw them. One angel said to the other, “Look, Fidel hasn’t even been in Hell for half an hour yet, and we have political refugees already.”
This anecdote, as real as Remedio the Beauty’s ascension to heaven while hanging the sheets out to dry, hoping to meet Fidel there, reveals the almost natural relationship between any dictatorial government and the large numbers of political exiles, many of whom have spent, just as “naturally,” a certain period of time hiding in the shadows. Gabo, who is a political figure who supports a dictatorship, while he is also an intellectual (and knows fully well what it means to be an intellectual), is aware of the level of independence that a writer can have with respect to a political regime, and what the limits are. And he understands that, sometimes, a poem can be more powerful than a bullet. Consequently, his political commitment has led him to try to secure the release of political prisoners on many occasions, and to try to help people in the literary world who find themselves in dire straits on the island. Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza cites a figure of 3,200 prisoners freed on his behalf. Gabo has often carried out this task with the utmost discretion, out of the media spotlight, and he doesn’t easily discuss the subject. This is, perhaps, the brightest side of a relationship with ample downsides. Jon Lee Anderson wrote:
When I pressed him to talk about it, García Márquez confirmed that he had helped people to leave the island, and he mentioned an effort that had resulted in the release and permitted exile of “more than two thousand people. I know how far I can go with Fidel. Sometimes he says ‘No.’ Sometimes he comes to me later and says that I was right.” He said that the power to help people made him happy, and he gave the impression that from Fidel’s point of view, he had no problem with seeing them go. “Sometimes I go to Miami,” he said, “although not that often, and I’ve stayed in the homes of people whom I had helped to leave. They are eminent gusanos [worms] who call up all their friends and throw huge parties. Their children ask me to autograph their books. Sometimes people that approach me are people who have denounced me before. But in private they show me another face.” Enrique Santos Calderón says that “Gabo knows perfectly well what the Cuban government is and he has no illusions about it, but Fidel is his friend and he has chosen to live with the contradictions.”24
As we see once again, the revolution is not perfect. Having come to know Cuba from one end to the other, it’s reasonable to admit that there have been certain victories, but it’s not quite so reasonable to suggest that it is the best system the world has ever seen. Between the time of that article in 1975 and the present, García Márquez has seen too many things, and simple common sense does not allow for irrational apologies. In an October 2002 article, Teodoro Petkoff describes a scene that is difficult to imagine having taken place five years earlier: “Around Christmas 1997, at his house in Havana, Gabo told me a stunning anecdote. A group of high-ranking officials had been talking with him and Fidel. Gabo made a few critical observations about the regime, and one of those present asked him what, exactly, he was trying to say. Fidel answered for him: ‘What Gabo is trying to say is that neither he nor I likes the revolution that we have made.’ You can imagine the shocked silence that followed that bitter confession.”25
November 1978 marked the opening of a new chapter in the relationship between the two friends that still exerts palpable political consequences. The radical Colombian newspaper Alternativa interviewed the writer:
ALT: Let’s look at Cuba. The national and international press is filled with various stories about the release of Cuban political prisoners, a process which you are well acquainted with. What’s behind the Cuban government’s decision on this?
GGM: The most important thing to make clear here is that we’re talking about a unilateral, spontaneous decision on the part of the Cuban Revolution, that upon marking in January the twentieth anniversary of its triumph, considered itself sufficiently mature and with sufficient defensive forces to not have to continue holding all of those people prisoner, who at a certain time were deemed to have been a real threat to the stability of the Revolution itself, but no longer are. The Cuban leadership also decided that the twentieth anniversary would be a great opportunity to work toward the reunification of the Cuban family, in the sense of establishing contacts and closer communication channels between the Cuban exiles in the United States, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela, mainly, and their relatives on the island.
This Cuban community in exile, as Fidel has called it, has begun to clearly distinguish itself from the small organized groups of “worms” that dedicate themselves to terrorism against Cuba. The government has thought that isolating the recalcitrant “worms” could do much for family reunification. Remember that in a long interview he gave in Havana, Fidel asked the exile community to form a group that could negotiate directly with the Cuban government, with no intermediaries, the release of approximately three thousand political prisoners, in the shortest time frame possible.26
From this commentary, Gabo seems to be a recognized, well-informed member of the Cuban government, although only three years had transpired since he first began exploring it and spending time on the island. He demonstrates an in-depth understanding of the situation; he knows how to explain and defend it. He has learned his lessons well; even the one about the collective interest coming before the interest of the individual. He never suggests here that he has been deeply involved (as the interview with Jon Lee revealed) and that perhaps it had been him, and not the mature judgment of a “unilateral, spontaneous decision on the part of the Revolution,” that had persuaded the Maximum Leader to open the jail cells. However, a little later on in the Alternativa interview, he reveals himself as the catalyst behind a prior prisoner release. He refers to “Reynol González, the Catholic leader who was imprisoned for fifteen years, and whose release I secured from Fidel in November of last year. Once he was free, Reynol immediately joined one of the negotiating committees of the exiles and returned to Cuba to coordinate the release of the remaining political prisoners. He recently called me from Miami to tell me that he had gone back there and that he was very happy. They gave him a car to use, put him up at an official government house, and he even talked to Fidel for three hours. After Reynol’s visit, forty-five prisoners were freed, among them an old friend of his, Fernando de Rojas,”27 but not as the author of La Celestina. In 1980 Heberto Padilla, the author of Fuera del juego, was released, after many long years in prison. When he was initially being persecuted, Gabo stayed out of it, and was the only intellectual who did not protest. However, after ten years had passed, Gabo helped Padilla obtain Castro’s permission to leave the island. That year also marked the exile of Reinaldo Arenas, persecuted for being a homosexual and a counterrevolutionary, and he got out thanks to the Mariel boatlift. But Gabo thought that this wasn’t a good way to leave the island, because of the potential repercussions in international public opinion. So when he found out that Arenas was planning on leaving by that route, Gabo tried to get hold of him to offer him a more dignified mode of transportation, but it was too late. Everything happened very quickly, and neither the Cuban government nor Gabo had time to react. Afredo Muñoz told us that one day, he crossed paths with Gabo in the hall of the Hotel Riviera as he was stepping off the elevator. Muñoz told him that Coco Salas, one of Arenas’s friends, had just confirmed that Reinaldo was leaving on the Mariel. Alarmed, García Márquez quickly placed a call to Alfredo Guevara, the director of the ICAIC and a powerful man in the Cuban government on matters relating to the world of the intellectuals. They immediately sprang into action to try to stop Arenas, but the boat had left port. Some hours later, Arenas set foot on French soil. A few years later, on April 9, 1983, Arenas sent a letter to García Márquez, with his customary irony and betraying a deep bitterness about his past on the island. He made reference to an earlier letter that Arenas had sent to Castro, which Gabo had alluded to in some of his writings. These are Arenas’s words:
Mr. Gabriel García Márquez, C.M.28
Presidential Palace
Bogota, Colombia
Respected fabulist:
Many writers who are close to you have told me something that, thanks to you, is already vox populi; that your close friend, Mr. Fidel Castro, told you that I had left Cuba for strictly personal reasons, and to illustrate this point, he extracted from his ample chest a love letter addressed to him and signed by me…. I do not in any way deny the existence of that letter, which you told the whole world about. Just the opposite: the letter exists, and was sent by me to officials of the Department of the Interior in Cuba, as a tactic to obtain permission to leave the country. Since, apparently, you have a very close relationship with the secret police, perhaps you could send me a photocopy of the aforementioned letter, for inclusion in a book that I am in the process of writing. Then, when the letter is published in various countries, it will save you the task as directed by your commander. If not, and because of you, I will be obliged to reconstruct the letter’s text from memory, a reconstruction that will, naturally, lack the impetus and passion of the original. So, as the excellent journalist that you have been, I urge you not to deprive the reading public of that particular document.
Sincerely,
Reinaldo Arenas29
When Arenas published this letter to García Márquez, he left the following page almost entirely blank, with just two lines: “Author’s note: Since García Márquez did not send the requested letter, we will leave this page blank in the hope of some day being able to publish the text.”30
One of Cuba’s most famous political prisoners, Armando Valladares, who spent almost twenty years in jail beginning in 1960 and has described being subject to tortures that almost left him crippled, was finally freed thanks to Gabo. García Márquez told the newspaper El País on December 8, 1982 (page 26) that he acted as an intermediary between Castro and Mitterrand to obtain Valladares’s release. And he elaborated: “I like to be involved without anyone knowing about my involvement. I always thought that it was an unnecessary problem for many people and it was better to solve it.” On a separate occasion, Gabo stated that Fidel had released Valladares to please him, a statement which reveals, according to Jorge Semprún, “the great writer’s outsized vanity.”31 In a personal interview, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza confirmed that Gabo helped the parents of Severo Sarduy, the great Cuban poet and novelist exiled in Paris, to secure permission to leave the island to visit their son. And Eliseo Alberto, the son of Eliseo Diego, left the island for professional reasons, thanks to Gabo. Lichi went to work on some film projects that Gabo had started in Mexico, and he never went back. Shortly thereafter, he wrote the heart-wrenching story Informe contra mí mismo, which his Colombian friend must not have liked very much at all.
But the most talked-about instance of assisting an exodus involves Norberto Fuentes. We have already seen how he was one of the insiders who introduced Gabo into Cuba’s “high society.” García Márquez, so loyal in friendship, suffered an unexpected reversal at the end of this relationship, perhaps all the sadder because of the element of surprise. At a time when he had certain connections to the shadowy world of arms traffickers, Fuentes met Colonel Tony De la Guardia. When Ochoa and De la Guardia were executed by firing squad in 1989, Fuentes, who had enjoyed a level of friendship with both of them, was never imprisoned or detained, not even for just a few hours, something that did occur with most of De la Guardia’s relatives and friends, according to Jorge Masetti and his wife, Ileana De la Guardia. This was surely because of Fuentes’s friendship with Raúl Castro, who protected him from those sorts of humiliations and promoted him as one of the most prominent, valuable young intellectual Revolutionaries. In any case, Norberto couldn’t help experiencing an uncontrollable fear, and he felt compelled to denounce his imprisoned friend on his own. He called up the State Security and informed them that Colonel De la Guardia had left a suitcase full of dollars in his house.
After the arrest and execution of the two military men, Fuentes started to feel persecuted. He obsessed about it and grew increasingly paranoid. He decided to leave the country, but the state would not allow it, so he launched a hunger strike in his apartment in Havana. Gabo had always been Norberto Fuentes’s great protector; so he intervened so that the Cuban government would allow Fuentes to leave. Finally, they both left on the president of Mexico’s private plane and flew off to the land of the Aztecs. For performing that intervention, Gabo received the support of the American writer William Styron. Some time later, Fuentes went to the United States, where he fell into the hands of the U.S. Secret Service. One day, Alfredo Muñoz, the reporter for France Presse who told us this story, spoke with Fuentes on the phone and asked him: “How are you doing?” and Norberto Fuentes answered: “I’m between Miami and Virginia,” that is, between the Cuban counterrevolutionary “worms” and the headquarters of yanqui intelligence. Barely out of Cuba, Norberto “committed the inanity of renouncing Gabo: he bit the hand that had fed him,” Alfredo explained to us. Fuentes’s articles and some of his books written in the nineties spew rancor at the man who had done nothing more than try to help him.
García Márquez’s glowing reputation as an intercessor on behalf of lost causes, in spite of the anonymity with which he preferred to carry out much of that work, resulted in many people approaching him as if he were some kind of saint. For example, a humble family, with no connections to the worlds of literature or politics, asked the world-famous writer to help their father, who was imprisoned in Cuba, to leave the island. Gabo made the necessary overtures, and that man was able to reunite with his family in exile. This family’s testimonial shall remain anonymous for posterity, and that family will be eternally grateful to the man who helped them, an act which was just a minor detail to him but meant the whole world to them.
So organizations and individuals from all walks of life began to ask Gabo for some really outlandish favors. García Márquez had a very interesting article published on August 11, 1982, titled “Even Humanitarianism Has Its Limits,” in which he told a story that sounded like something out of a Hollywood movie: in December 1980, a boat carrying twelve Colombians was intercepted in Cuban waters, and those aboard the vessel were sentenced for violating Cuba’s territory and for drug trafficking. In April 1981, another boat with nine Colombians aboard was intercepted for similar reasons: a large quantity of marijuana was found, and they were charged with violating territorial waters and illegal entry into the country. When Gabo arrived in Cuba in November 1981, a big pile of letters from the family members of those imprisoned awaited him, telling him that the Foreign Relations Department in Colombia refused to do anything on their behalf, since the people involved were common criminals, not politicians. Gabo pled their case to Fidel, and he presented it to the State Council, but when Gabo returned to Cuba in March to see how the process was progressing, the number of prisoners was no longer twenty-one, it had grown to thirty, since another boat had been intercepted in February, while the people aboard that vessel would be released a short time later. The problem was that later that year, when Gabo returned to Cuba in the summer to see what had transpired on the issue, he found out that in May, they had arrested sixteen more Colombians. So, at the end of the article, he had to make clear: “I am not prepared to intercede on behalf of the sixteen recently arrested prisoners or any of the others who will, no doubt, be captured in the future. The reason is very simple: at that stage, out of pure humanitarianism, I as well as the Cuban authorities would end up involuntarily, but very efficiently, serving the interests of the real drug traffickers. The families of those prisoners, in any case, now have the opportunity to make an appeal to the new government of Colombia, which perhaps has a bigger heart than the regime that has recently departed, for everyone’s good.”32
Vázquez Montalbán recognizes that Gabo’s mediation has been decisive in many cases, but it would be an exaggeration to talk about some three thousand political prisoners released because of his “powers of persuasion” or, simply, thanks to his power, which has steadily grown over the years. The figures cited by Jon Lee Anderson, Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, and others seem, when scrutinized, to be excessive. Vázquez Montalbán told us this in the interview we conducted the same day that some Spanish actors “took over” a session of Congress in Spain, in a bloodless coup without weapons, but with T-shirts that read: “NO to war in Irak.”
Once again, Fidel dies in the twenty-fifth century and goes to Hell. There, he notices that each country has its own inferno. He goes to the German one and asks,
“What do they do to you here?”
“Here, first, they put you in an electric chair for an hour, then they make you lie on a bed of nails for an hour, and for the rest of the day, the German devil comes and whips you.”
Apparently, Fidel didn’t like that idea, so he went around to see some infernos of other countries. He walked right by the one for the United States without even stopping. Then he went to the Russian, Spanish, and French infernos, and after asking about their various systems of punishment, he was surprised to find that they were all exactly alike. When he reached the Cuban inferno, he could see from far away that there was a huge line of people clamoring to get in. Intrigued, he asked Manolo García, the last one in line:
“Manolo, what do they do to you here?”
“Here, first they put you in an electric chair for an hour, then they make you lie on a bed of nails for an hour, and for the rest of the day the Cuban devil whips you.”
“But, if it’s exactly like the other infernos,” Fidel replied, “why are there so many people trying to get in?”
“You’ll see, Commander,” Manolo said, “the electric chair doesn’t work because there’s no electricity, there are no nails on the bed of nails because someone stole them last week, and the devil just shows up, signs something, and leaves.”
Unfortunately, for those who experienced a similar hell in real life, the scenario was different. The personal testimonies on tortures endured in Cuban prisons are numerous, and some of those giving these testimonies have a high public profile, making them difficult to dismiss. Padilla was tortured, at least psychologically, so that he would “be persuaded” to read the self-criticism. Valladares sustained life-long injuries. María Elena Cruz Varela told us one day from her office at the daily newspaper La Razón that she was subjected to a “hormonal treatment” that completely disfigured her. There are more. Some novelists have described the prisons’ regimes, with their “methods of seduction and correction.” The possibility exists, and in some cases it is more than a possibility, that certain testimonials have been exaggerated, or are completely false, but it is not likely that the hundreds of thousands of written documents on the subject all completely lack a certain objectivity and logic. Especially when we know that in all dictatorships, and also in many democracies, torture is a routine practice. Manuel Ulacia spoke plainly in a statement made in 1992: “Openly opposing him [Castro’s government] has greater implications. It’s common knowledge that dissidents are punished with psychiatric treatments—which include electroshock and forced ingestion of high doses of psychotropic drugs—imprisonment, torture, or death. For example, [here’s what happened to] the writer María Elena Cruz Varela, winner of the National Poetry Prize in 1989, just for having written a manifesto signed by a group of Cuban intellectuals which called for ‘an open dialogue between the government and the opposition to promote democracy in the country through peaceful means’: after breaking into her home, beating her in public, and forcing her to ‘eat’ the manuscripts of her poems, in front of her children, she was then sentenced to two years in prison.”33
For his part, Néstor Almendros made two documentaries on the subject, featuring chilling interviews with victims of some of these practices: Conducta impropia, about the repression of homosexuals, and Nadie escuchaba, about the physical and psychological tortures that Cuban political prisoners were subject to. One of the Cuban regime’s most “efficient” torturers, Heriberto Mederos, was detained not too long ago in Miami after one of his victims recognized him on the street. He is charged with having tortured hundreds of political prisoners with electric shock over forty years in the Havana Psychiatric Hospital, for which he could be sentenced to life in prison. Suspicions on certain other inappropriate acts mount when coupled with the knowledge that the United Nations has formally condemned the Cuban government thirteen times for human rights violations in its prison system over the past eleven years, and the UN has requested that international monitors be allowed inside the system for annual inspections; but no one has been permitted entry. In fact, the Cuban government repeatedly refuses assistance from the International Red Cross to supervise methods of control. Humanitarian organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch denounce the state of Cuban prisons and the treatment of certain classes of prisoners every year in their annual reports.
But the most amusing commentary on these subjects comes from Fidel Castro. Some think, ironically, that it is “almost a poem,”34 others are infuriated when they read it, and some may believe that Fidel is speaking with his heart in his hands…. We’re referring to the interview described in Tomás Borge’s book Un grano de maiz, published in 1992, where he affirms, in a shameless display of cynicism, that Cuba is the country “that has the most respect for human rights,”35 because there are no child beggars, no one is without sanitation, there are no illiterates, no homelessness, no child prostitution, no discrimination because of gender or race, no differences between the rich and the poor, no exploiters or exploited, where there is not “one woman that has ever prostituted herself to make a living” (his exact words), there are no drugs, and on and on.36 After this litany of lies and half-truths, he asserts: “Is there any country that has done more for human rights than Cuba has?”; and he answers himself, like Juan Palomo: “In over thirty years, Tomás Borge, force has never been used against the people, nor has anyone been tortured in spite of the crises, in the same way that we never beat or torture anyone in our revolutionary struggle, and that is partly why we are winning, because of the ethical dimension of our armed fight.”37
In his analysis, Vázquez Montalbán reaches the conclusion that instances of physical torture cannot be proven (nor can they be conclusively denied), despite the thousands of accounts that have been given by the alleged victims; but psychological torture is much more clearly evident. Books like Ariel Hidalgo’s Disidencia: segunda Revolucion cubana? and Juan Clark’s Cuba: mito y realidad have gathered from the repressive bodies of the Revolution an inventory of “recipes” meant to physically and psychologically control the inmates.
At this junction, García Márquez finds himself in the same position as the cuckolded, defeated husband in the song from the Spanish pop group Mecano: “On Mario, three wounds: one in the forehead, that hurt the most; one in the chest, that killed him; and another, the lie in the news….”38 For those unfamiliar with the best song to come out of Spanish pop in the eighties, Mario worked at night, and his wife worked during the day. They hardly ever saw each other, and their relationship was on shaky ground. One early morning, when Mario gets off work, he sees a couple kissing in the street. As he approaches them, he realizes that it is his wife with another man, who, when he sees Mario, takes out a knife and stabs him. The betrayed husband is wounded three times: once in the head, as he realizes his wife’s infidelity; once in the chest, from the actual stab wound that kills him; and the third time from the lie the newspaper prints the next day, as the story states that “two drug addicts robbed and killed Mario Postigo, while his wife witnessed the attack from a doorway.”39
Gabo has the same three crosses to bear: one in the head, that obliges him to defend his friend and the regime that supports him; another in the chest, or the accounts of the victims that show him their scars, marking their bodies and souls; and the third, the lie: the official position that flatly denies everything that takes place within the Cuban prison system, and a strong exile community that sometimes exaggerates the brutalities committed. In an interview in 1977, Gabo was asked if he has ever visited the Cuban jails, and he replied: “Not only the penitentiaries, but also the detention centers and the interrogation rooms. Of course, when you go to those places they’re not going to show you their instruments of torture, they wouldn’t show you where they dismember children, even if such a place did exist. And I’m not going to be so naïve as to claim that there is no torture simply because I haven’t seen it.”40 However, relying on Reynol González’s account, stating that he had not been tortured, García Márquez ventures to generalize, based on this one man’s word: “I’m sure that they haven’t tortured anyone in Cuba […]. I asked an officer responsible for determining what methods should be used to get detained suspects to confess, and he told me that the counterrevolutionaries’ morale was so low that violence wasn’t ever necessary as a means of coercion; and besides, the yanqui propaganda about torture in Cuba had made them so afraid that they came in ready to confess everything before anyone had even laid a hand on them.”41 No comment. The naïvete that he doesn’t want to fall into becomes something much worse and even much less effective: putting words into someone else’s mouth that he would like to say himself but doesn’t entirely believe or is unsure of. And his assertions are so childish that they cause the reader to almost cringe in embarrassment for him: the low morale of the counterrevolutionaries, and the fear inspired by the enemy’s propaganda machine. In the interview with Juan Luis Cebrián, his response is more grounded: “Now, in relation to Cuba, when the problem gets serious is when they start to talk about the disappeared, or political prisoners, torture and the like…. I’m in a position to be much better-informed about Cuba than the vast majority of the enemies of the Revolution. If I knew that they had tortured someone there, I wouldn’t just not be in that position, I wouldn’t have anything to do with Cuba. In Cuba, there is no torture.”42
In his extreme defense of Castro’s Revolution, he is willing to shut his eyes to some things. In 1994, the Argentine writer Ernesto Sabato recalled how he refused to sign a petition against torture in South America because García Márquez, its author, “would not include communist countries on the list.”43 When passion or ideology cloud or supersede reason altogether, a poor service is done to History. If the most basic principle of human dignity or even a person’s very life hangs in the balance, we must be belligerent. Capitulating because of a friendship or a false sense of obligation is succumbing to fear and terror, it is being an accomplice to infamy. The following phrase has been attributed to Mao Tse-tung: “When the wise man raises his hand to point out the beauty of the moon, the idiot looks at his finger.” Worse yet is acting the idiot without really being one.