A Longer Version of the Accusations Jacobo Timmerman Lays Before the Bar of History Regarding Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Fidel Castro

A footnote to: Deficiencies of Bureaucratic Planning: Reading Jacobo Timmerman on Gabriel Garcia Marquez on Fidel Castro…. Courtesy of Patrick Iber:

From Jacobo Timmerman (1990): Cuba: A Journey:

Gabriel García Márquez, of course, is uncensored [by Castro], except when he enthusiastically refers, as he often does, to perestroika. His famous dialogue with Mikhail Gorbachev at the Moscow Film Festival in 1987, transmitted by Soviet news agencies, was not published in the Cuban press. The Colombian writer is the man who can perhaps influence Fidel Castro most. He is El Comandante’s most important instrument of public relations on the international front.

His personal interventions with Castro have achieved certain freedoms, though his repeated appeals for an improvement of quality in the Cuban press have failed totally. Anecdotes frequently circulated in Latin America about García Márquez’s whispered criticism, in endless private conversations with Fidel Castro, of the Cuban state of affairs. But this confidential whispering, according to versions both men relay to intimates, seems more like complicity than an act of conscience when compared with the magnitude of García Márquez’s public eulogies with their byzantine hyperbole…

Reading the foreword written by Gabriel García Márquez for the book containing Gianni Minà’s interview with Fidel Castro for Italian television reminded me of Koestler’s books, and the attitudes of some of his contemporaries. Pablo Picasso drew a portrait of Joseph Stalin that genially captured the image of a revolutionary leader, although the French Communist Party of that time would have preferred something more classical, displaying Stalin’s presumed generous, brave, just personality, and also his wisdom as depicted in the poems of the Chilean Pablo Neruda, the Argentine Raúl González Tuñón, the Peruvian Alberto Hidalgo, the Turk Nazim Hikmet…

What’s fascinating about García Márquez’s prologue to that sixteen-hour interview is not its political content but its similarity to the driving mechanism that prompted those previous intellectuals to claim that one human being can actually possess the combined virtues ascribed to Stalin–the same virtues presently bestowed by the Colombian upon Fidel Castro.

In the light of glasnost–Minà’s book containing the Castro dialogue was published in 1988–this prologue is rash, indecent, infantile. García Márquez praises Fidel Castro for needing only six hours of sleep after an intense day of work. The same six hours were often presented as proof of Joseph Stalin’s vitality, extolled in writings that described his Kremlin window, lit until the wee hours. García Márquez praises Fidel Castro’s wisdom is stating that “learning to rest is as important as learning to work,” as a remark of the same force and originality as the recommendation appearing in the free almanacs in apothecary shops of old “Idleness is the mother of all vices.”

If the cumulative tasks in Fidel Castro’s workday, as described by García Márquez, are methodically enumerated, the figure emerging is a Rambo, someone who triumphs owing to his supernatural intelligence, someone without need to resort to the weapons Hollywood places in the hands of that quintessential American Fascist. García Márquez says of Fidel Castro that “his rarest virtue is the ability to foresee the evolution of an event to its farther-reaching consequences”; “he has breakfast with no less than two hundred pages of news from the entire world.” (Just try to read two hundred pages in the time it takes to have breakfast.) Moreover, “he has to read fifty documents” daily. “No one can explain how he has the time, or what method he employs to read so much and so fast”; “a physician friend of his, out of courtesy, sent him his newly published orthopedic treatise, without of course expecting him to read it, but one week later he received a letter from Castro with a long list of observations”; “there is a vast bureaucratic incompetence affecting almost every realm of daily life, especially domestic happiness, which has forced Fidel Castro himself, almost thirty years after victory, to involve himself personally in such extraordinary matters as how bread is made and beer distributed”; “he has created a foreign policy of world-power dimensions.”

Thus FIdel Castro has a secret method, unknown to mankind, for reading quickly; and he knows a lot about orthopedics; yet thirty years after the Revolution he hasn’t managed to organize a system for distributing bread and beer. But the mere fact that El Comandante is personally involved in the problem represents one more virtue added to the long list of his other virtues; he foresees the future; knows how to work and rest; his sleep is of the same duration as Stalin’s, and, as happened with Stalin, he is transformed into an all-knowing truth-seer and ever-triumphant conquistador by one of the greatest writers of his time.

Who is the victim? Not Fidel Castro. Nor Gabriel García Márquez. In Pablo Neruda’s complete works, poems on Stalinist glory don’t appear. Stalin’s portrait is an insignificant detail in Pablo Picasso’s work, and few recall it. In García Márquez’s complete works, at some future date, and not under Fidel Castro’s surveillance, to be sure, the perishable prologue to Gianni Minà’s book will not appear.

But there are victims, millions of victims: the young people who devour everything that García Márquez writes, without recourse to the slightest defense that experience and memories provide, or access to more open cultural spheres. They will readily accept, because the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude says so, that there dwells in Havana a magical being who will lead them to victory, for he is omnipotent and all-knowing. And they will allow themselves to die in some guerrilla or terrorist enterprise without having the opportunity to ask García Márquez what he thinks of Arthur Koestler. It is unfair…