In the Shadow of the Patriarch

IV.

Despite those "memorable dispatches" of 1975, Fidel Castro remarked to Régis Debray that he was not yet convinced of the Colombian writer’s "revolutionary firmness." True, 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 to the break of many Latin American intellectuals with the regime. Castro noted this, but still he wasn’t sure, and so no interview was granted. García Márquez had to content himself at the time 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."

Martin devotes a few passages to describing the growing bond between the Comandante and the writer after 1980. "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." He also informs us of Castro’s culinary skills, and of Gabo’s taste for caviar and Castro’s for cod. For the Nobel ceremony, 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."

In this vein--not of socialist realism but of socialite realism--Martin could have gotten some juice out of Gabo and Fidel, by Ángel Esteban and Stéphanie Panichelli (which he mentions in his bibliography but does not quote in the book). This volume presents 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 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." It is important to note that 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 The 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 plenty. 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 García Márquez--was important for 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."

Martin is right: García Márquez was "in his element." What Martin does not see is the biographical significance of what he is recounting. The whole thing was like a reconstruction of the 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."

Best of all was once more being able to walk hand in hand with the patriarch. In 1988 García Márquez wrote a profile of the "caudillo" (as he calls him) that was published as the prologue to Habla Fidel, or Fidel Speaks, a book by the Italian Gianni Minà. 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 isn’t as tall or as big 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 vice versa.

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 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.)

Of the signatories to this letter of protest against political unfreedom in Cuba, Martin writes that "the American names are not especially impressive, apart from Susan Sontag, nor were the Latin American ones (no Carlos Fuentes, Augusto Roa Bastos, etc.)." Among the American authors who did not impress Martin were Saul Bellow and Elie Wiesel; among the Latin Americans, Reinaldo Arenas (who composed the document), Ernesto Sábato, Mario Vargas Llosa, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Octavio Paz; among the Europeans, Juan Goytisolo, Federico Fellini, Eugene Ionesco, Czesław Miłosz, and Camilo José Cela.