Fidel & Gabo

June 22, 2009
Gabriel García Márquez was Castro's propagandist and Che Guevara his conscience, say two new books.
Fidel and Gabo: A Portrait of the Legendary Friendship Between Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez
Ángel Esteban
, Stéphanie Panichelli
, trans. from the Spanish by Diane Stockwell. Pegasus
(Norton, dist.), $26 (304p) ISBN 978-1-60598-058-4

There's no romance in the relationship between the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and the Nobel-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, argues this stinging j'accuse.
On the surface their friendship is chummy and literary: Castro drops by García Márquez's Havana mansion—a gift from Castro himself—for endless conversation and critiques his manuscripts. But the authors view the men's bond as corrupt and neurotic: García Márquez, obsessed with power in both his fiction and real life, gets political influence; Castro, in turn, gets cultural prestige and a matchless propagandist. The authors condemn García-Márquez's public silence over Cuban censorship and human rights violations. Almost compulsive in their point scoring, the authors jeer at the novelist for going to American rather than Cuban hospitals. More polemic than biography, their study tellingly rebukes the Left's propensity for blinding itself to the failings of the Cuban revolution by glamorizing its leaders.