Interlude
Reflections
by Comrade Fidel Read Spanish Version
Interlude
Yesterday,
on Tuesday, I had a bundle of cables with news about the meeting in
Japan of the most highly industrialized powers. I shall leave that
material and take it up some other time, if it does not grow cold and
stale. I decided to take a rest. I chose to get together with Gabo
and his wife, Mercedes Barcha, who are visiting Cuba until the 11th.
How I wanted to chat with them, to recall almost 50 years of sincere
friendship!
Our
news agency, as suggested by Che, had just been born, and it hired,
among others, the services of a modest Colombian journalist named
Gabriel García Márquez. Neither Prensa
Latina
nor Gabo had the slightest idea that there would be a Nobel Prize; or
maybe this son of a small-town Colombian post-office telegraph
operator buried in the banana plantations of a Yankee company had
some inkling, with that "Brobdingnagian" imagination of
his. He shared his lot with a bunch of siblings, as was the custom,
still his father, a Colombian with the privilege of being employed
thanks to the telegraph keys, was able to give him an education.
I
experienced the opposite. The post office with its telegraph keys and
the little public school in Birán were the only facilities in
that hamlet that were not owned by my father; all the rest of the
goods and services of any economic value belonged to Don Ángel,
and for that reason I was able to go to school. I never had the
privilege of getting to know Aracataca, the small town where Gabo was
born, but I certainly had the privilege of celebrating my 70th
birthday in Birán, with him as my guest.
It
was also a fortuitous circumstance that in 1948 when, on our
initiative, a Latin American Students’ Congress was being held in
Colombia, the capital of that country was also the place where,
following the dictates of the U.S., the Latin American States were
meeting to establish the OAS.
It
was an honor that the Colombian students introduced me to Gaitán.
This man offered his support and gave us pamphlets of what came to be
known as the Peace Prayer, a speech made on the occasion of the
Silent March, that massive and impressive demonstration which
streamed through Bogotá protesting the massacres of peasants
by the Colombian oligarchy. Gabo took part in that march.
In
his book Transparency
of Emanuel, Germán
Sánchez, our current Cuban ambassador in Venezuela,
transcribes paragraphs quoting Gabo’s words on that episode.
It
was chance until this point.
Our
friendship is the result of a relationship cultivated over the course
of many years, in hundreds of conversations which were always
pleasant to me. Talking with García Márquez and
Mercedes whenever they came to Cuba –and it was more than once a
year– became a healing experience for the tremendous tension,
subconscious but constant, that assailed a revolutionary Cuban
leader.
In
Colombia itself, on the occasion of the 4th Ibero-American Summit,
the hosts organized a horse-drawn carriage tour of the walled city of
Cartagena, a kind of Habana Vieja, a protected historical relic. The
Cuban comrades in charge of security had told me it wasn’t
advisable for me to participate in the scheduled tour. I thought that
this concern was excessive since, due to too much
compartmentalization, the people giving me this information were
unaware of concrete facts. I always respected their professionalism
and cooperated with them.
I
called Gabo, who was close by, and jokingly told him: "Get on
this carriage with us so they don’t start shooting!" And
that’s what he did. In the same vein, I told Mercedes who stayed
behind at the starting point: "You are going to be the youngest
widow!" She hasn’t forgotten! The horse took off, limping
along from its heavy load; its hoofs skidding across the pavement.
Later,
I found out that the same thing had happened there than in Santiago
de Chile, when a TV camera hiding an automatic weapon was pointed at
me during a press conference, and the mercenary operating it didn’t
dare fire. In Cartagena, they had rifles with telescopic sights and
automatic weapons positioned for ambush at a spot in the walled area,
and once again the fingers which were to squeeze the trigger grew
stiff. The excuse was that Gabo’s head obstructed the view of the
target.
Yesterday,
during our conversation, I recalled this and I asked him and Mercedes
–an Olympic champion of facts and figures– about a number of
events experienced both inside Cuba and abroad where we were present.
The New Latin American Cinema Foundation, created by Cuba and
presided over by García Márquez, located in the old
Quinta Santa Bárbara –historically significant for both
positive and negative developments occurring in the first quarter of
the last century– and the School for New Latin American Cinema run
by that Foundation and located in the proximity of San Antonio de los
Baños, took up some of our meeting.
Birri,
with his then long black beard, which today is as white as snow, and
many other Cuban and foreign personalities passed through our
reminiscences.
I
gained respect and admiration for Gabo because of his capacity for
organizing the school in such a meticulous fashion, without
overlooking a single detail. I initially had certain prejudices about
this intellectual with a marvelous sense of fantasy; I had no idea
how much realism dwelled in his mind.
Scores
of events in and out of Cuba, at which we both were present, came up
while we talked. So many things can happen in decades!
As
it’s only natural, two hours were not enough for our conversation.
Our meeting had begun at 11:35 a.m. I invited them to lunch,
something I had not done with any of my visitors during these past
almost two years, since I had never thought of it. I realized that I
was really on vacation and I told them that. I improvised. I solved
the problem. They had their lunch, and as for me, I followed my
special diet with discipline, without deviating an inch, not to add
years to my life, but productivity to my time.
No
sooner had they arrived that they gave me a small, lovely present
wrapped up in bright, attractively colored paper. It contained tiny
volumes a little bigger than post cards, but shorter. Each one was
between 40 and 60 pages long, printed in small but legible letters.
They are the speeches given in Stockholm, capital of Sweden, by five
of the Nobel Laureates for Literature in the last 60 years. "So
you have something to read" –Mercedes told me as she gave them
to me.
I
asked them for more details about the gift before they left at five
in the afternoon. "I have had the most wonderful time today
since my illness almost two years ago" –I told them
forthrightly. That’s how I felt.
"There
will be other times", Gabo replied.
But
my curiosity continued. A little later, as I was walking, I asked a
comrade to bring the gift. Conscious of the rhythm with which the
world has been changing in the last few decades, I wondered: What did
some of those brilliant writers, who lived prior to this turbulent
and uncertain era, think about humanity?
The
five Nobel Prize Laureates selected for the small collection of
speeches, which hopefully one day our compatriots will be able to
read, in chronological order were:
William
Faulkner (1949)
Pablo
Neruda (1971)
Gabriel
García Márquez (1982)
John
Maxwell Coetzee (2003)
Doris
Lessing (2007)
Gabo
didn’t like making speeches. He spent months searching for facts, I
recall, in agony over the words he had to say upon receiving the
Prize. The same thing had happened with the short speech he had to
make at the dinner in his honor following the presentation of the
Prize. If that had been his profession, for sure Gabo would have been
dead from a heart attack.
It
must not be forgotten that the Nobel is awarded in the capital of a
country that has not been ravaged by war in more than 150 years,
ruled by a constitutional monarchy and governed by a
Social-Democratic Party where a man as noble as Olof Palme was
assassinated for his spirit of solidarity with the poor of the world.
Gabo’s mission was not an easy one.
The
Swedish institution, which cannot be suspected of being
pro-communist, granted the Nobel Prize to William Faulkner, an
inspired and rebellious American writer; to Pablo Neruda, a Communist
Party member who received it during the glorious days of Salvador
Allende, when fascism was trying to gain control of Chile, and to
Gabriel García Márquez, one of the brilliant and
prestigious writers of our era.
One
doesn’t need to say how Gabo was thinking. It is enough to simply
transcribe the final paragraphs of his speech, a jewel of prose, upon
receiving the Nobel Prize on December 10, 1982, while Cuba, dignified
and heroic, was resisting the Yankee blockade.
"On
a day like today, my master William Faulkner said in this place: "I
decline to accept the end of man," he said.
"I
would feel unworthy of standing in this place that was his, if I were
not fully aware that the colossal tragedy he refused to recognize
thirty-two years ago is now, for the first time since the beginning
of humanity, nothing more than a simple scientific possibility. Faced
with this awesome reality that must have seemed a mere utopia through
all of human time, we, the inventors of tales, who will believe
anything, feel entitled to believe that it is not yet too late to
engage in the creation of the opposite utopia.
"A
new and sweeping utopia of life, where no one will be able to decide
for others how they die, where love will prove true and happiness be
possible, and where races condemned to one hundred years of solitude
will have at last and forever a second opportunity on earth."
Fidel
Castro Ruz
July
9, 2008
