Typing for Castro

IN Dulces guerreros cubanos, published last year in Spain, Cuban exile writer and former Castro confidant Norberto Fuentes tells the curious story of Gabriel García Márquez. The well-known Colombian novelist made several journeys to Cuba in the 1970s with but one goal in mind—to gain an audience with the Maximum Leader.

Apparently Castro was in no hurry to see him. After all, García Márquez was not known as a man of the Left; indeed, in his own country he had not (and still has not) supported any of the Marxist guerrilla movements seeking to overthrow the government. Nor, during the radical Sixties, was he a producer of “committed” Latin American literature. Far from it. His A Hundred Years of Solitude is a fable with no apparent political moral. The same is true of his Autumn of the Patriarch, despite its ostensible subject matter, the declining days of a Latin American dictator.

MF

About the Author

Mark Falcoff

Mark Falcoff is an Adjunct Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

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IN Dulces guerreros cubanos, published last year in Spain, Cuban exile writer and former Castro confidant Norberto Fuentes tells the curious story of Gabriel García Márquez. The well-known Colombian novelist made several journeys to Cuba in the 1970s with but one goal in mind—to gain an audience with the Maximum Leader.

Apparently Castro was in no hurry to see him. After all, García Márquez was not known as a man of the Left; indeed, in his own country he had not (and still has not) supported any of the Marxist guerrilla movements seeking to overthrow the government. Nor, during the radical Sixties, was he a producer of “committed” Latin American literature. Far from it. His A Hundred Years of Solitude is a fable with no apparent political moral. The same is true of his Autumn of the Patriarch, despite its ostensible subject matter, the declining days of a Latin American dictator.