Gabriel Garcia-Marquez—Castro Propagandist & Police Snitch

Posted By Humberto Fontova On April 24, 2014 @ 12:30 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage

The eulogies to Nobel-winning author Gabriel Garcia-Marquez upon his death last week make two points official:

1.) No amount of moral and intellectual wretchedness will earn an artist even the mildest rebuke from most of his professional peers and their related institutions—so long as the wretch hires out to communists.

2.) The masochism (to sidestep more “Mc Carthyite” terms) of Democratic U.S. Presidents is boundless.

Not that the media eulogies sidestep Garcia-Marquez’ politics. Most are quite upfront about it. Let’s take the one run by The New York Times as emblematic:

“Like many Latin American intellectuals and artists, Mr. García Márquez felt impelled to speak out on the political issues of his day. He viewed the world from a left-wing perspective, bitterly opposing Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the right-wing Chilean dictator, and unswervingly supporting Fidel Castro in Cuba. Mr. Castro became such a close friend that Mr. García Márquez showed him drafts of his unpublished books.”

Notice the word “dictator” above. But with whom does the New York Times associate it? Pinochet, of course. Does Fidel Castro also qualify as dictator? The New York Times does not tell us.

“Mr. García Márquez’s ties to Mr. Castro troubled some intellectuals and human rights advocates,” continues the NYTimes. “Susan Sontag wrote in the 1980s, “To me it’s scandalous that a writer of such enormous talent be a spokesperson for a government which has put more people in jail (proportionately to its population) than any other government in the world…He attributed the criticism to what he called Americans’ “almost pornographic obsession with Castro.” But he became sensitive enough about the issue to intercede on behalf of jailed Cuban dissidents.”

In fact, fully contrary to the New York Times’ whitewash, Garcia Marquez’ “intercession” is what got some of those dissidents jailed and tortured by his friend Castro in the first place. Let’s not mince words. Let’s call out Garcia-Marquez categorically: on top of his decades of pro-bono propaganda services for Castroism, Garcia-Marquez was also a volunteer snitch for Castro’s KGB-mentored secret police.

Here I’ll turn over the floor to someone intimately familiar with the issue Armando Valladares, who himself suffered 22 torture-filled years in Castro’s prisons and was later appointed by Ronald Reagan as U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Commission:

“Many years ago Garcia Marquez became an informer for Castro’s secret police,” starts a recent expose’ by Mr Valladares. “At the time, back in Havana, Cuban dissident and human-rights activist, Ricardo Bofill, with help of the then-reporter for Reuters, Collin McSevengy, managed to enter the Havana hotel where García Márquez was having a few drinks. In a quiet corner, with absolute discretion, Bofill gave García Márquez a series of documents relating to several Cuban artists.

A few weeks later Castro’s police arrested Ricardo Bofill–and displayed on the table right next to Castro’s secret-policeman –were the very documents which Bofill had given Garcia Marquez.”

Bofill, a peaceful human-rights activist inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King, went on to suffer 12 years in Castro’s prisons—thanks to Gabriel Garcia-Marquez. On October 13, 1968 the Spanish newspapers ABC and Diario 16, published Bofill’s disclosures and headlined that: “García Márquez’ revelations led to the imprisonment of numerous Cuban writers and artists.” Seems all this was all conveniently “forgotten” by most media outlets last week.

But enough from me. Instead let’s hear from some folks much closer to this issue. Let’s hear from Cuban writers who were suffering in Castro’s KGB-designed dungeons and torture chambers while Gabriel Garcia-Marquez contributed his literary influence and might towards glorifying their torturer.

The late Reynaldo Arenas’ autobiography Before Night Falls was on the New York Times (no less!) list of the ten best books of the year in 1993. In 2000 the book became a movie starring Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp and Sean Penn (no less!) Throughout the 70’s Arenas was jailed and tortured by Castro’s police for his rebellious writings and gay lifestyle. He finally escaped on the Mariel boatlift tin 1980. Here’s his take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez from 1982:

“It’s high time for all the intellectuals of the free world (the rest don’t exist) to take a stand against this unscrupulous propagandist for totalitarianism. I wonder why these intellectual apologists for communist paradises don’t live in them? Or is it that they prefer collecting payment there and here, while enjoying the comforts and guarantees of the western world?”

In fact, Garcia-Marquez did live on and off in Cuba, in a (stolen) mansion Castro gifted him, where he frolicked with adolescent girls between traveling through Havana in a (stolen) Mercedes also gifted him by Castro.

Here’s Cuban-exile author Roberto Luque Escalona, briefly an Amnesty International prisoner of conscience who escaped Cuba in 1992:

“Only a five star-scoundrel would put his literary fame in the service of a cause as vile and malignant as the Castro tyranny. Simple frivolity cannot possibly justify an embrace so long and strong as the one Garcia-Marquez gave someone who devastated a nation, murdered thousands, jailed and tortured tens of thousands dispersed an entire nation and debased the rest.”

Now let’s hear from some people who fate allowed a more detached view of Gabriel Garcia Marquez than Arenas and Luque Escalona: Bill Clinton and Barack Obama.

“I once had the privilege to meet him in Mexico,” President Obama was quoted in Politico last week, “where he presented me with an inscribed copy that I cherish to this day. As a proud Colombian, a representative and voice for the people of the Americas, and as a master of the ‘magic realism’ genre, he has inspired so many others….I offer my thoughts to his family and friends, whom I hope take solace in the fact that Gabo’s work will live on for generations to come.”

“I was saddened to learn of the passing of Gabriel García Márquez,” mourned Bill Clinton. “From the time I read ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ more than 40 years ago, I was always amazed by his unique gifts of imagination, clarity of thought, and emotional honesty. I was honored to be his friend and to know his great heart and brilliant mind for more than 20 years.”

In an interview with France’s Le Monde in 1981 Garcia-Marquez remarked that, “the problem with visiting men like Fidel Castro is that one winds up loving them too much.” A few years earlier he was denouncing the desperate Vietnamese boat-people as “war-criminals,” “Yankee-lackeys” and worse.

Garcia-Marquez shared all of Fidel Castro’s hatred against the U.S., a passion that contributed much to their long and warm friendship. Given this rabid hatred for the nation that elected them, you’d really think–especially given white house speech writing budgets– that these U.S. Presidents could have found a way to express their admiration for Garcia Marquez’ art without so warmly embracing the wretched artist himself.

Gabriel García Márquez was a gifted writer but no hero

Charles Lane, Editorial writer

WP OPINIONS

Washington Post, 4/23/2014

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/eugene-robinson-remembering-gabriel-garcia-marquez-and-macondo/2014/04/21/d5cc1816-c985-11e3-95f7-7ecdde72d2ea_story.html

Statesmen eulogized Nobel Prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez, who died at age 87 on April 17. “The world has lost one of its greatest visionary writers — and one of my favorites from the time I was young,” President Obama said; he called the author of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” “a representative and voice for the people of the Americas.” Juan Manuel Santos, president of García Márquez’s native country, hailed him as “the greatest Colombian of all time.”

The obituary of García Márquez that I would most like to read will never be written. That is because its author would have been the Cuban poet Heberto Padilla — who passed away 14 years ago. No one was better qualified to assess the weird blend of literary brilliance and political rottenness that characterized García Márquez’s long career.

In 1968, just as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” was propelling García Márquez to fame, Padilla published a collection of poems titled “Out of the Game.” Cuba’s cultural authorities initially permitted and even praised Padilla’s book, despite its between-the-lines protest against the official thought control that was already suffocating Cuba less than a decade after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution.

Then instructions changed: The Castro regime began a campaign against Padilla and like-minded intellectuals that culminated in March 1971, when state security agents arrested Padilla, seized his manuscripts and subjected him to a month of brutal interrogation.

The poet emerged to denounce himself before fellow writers for having “been unfair and ungrateful to Fidel, for which I will never tire of repenting.” He implicated colleagues and even his wife as counterrevolutionaries.

Intellectuals around the world, led by García Márquez’s fellow star of the Latin American literary “boom,” Mario Vargas Llosa, condemned this Stalinesque spectacle. Many cultural figures who had backed the Cuban revolution soured on it because of the Padilla affair.

For García Márquez, however, it was a different kind of turning point. When asked to sign his fellow writers’ open letter to Castro expressing “shame and anger” about the treatment of Padilla, García Márquez refused.

Thereafter, the Colombian gradually rose in Havana’s estimation, ultimately emerging as a de facto member of Castro’s inner circle.

Fidel would shower “Gabo” with perks, including a mansion, and established a film institute in Cuba under García Márquez’s personal direction.

The novelist, in turn, lent his celebrity and eloquence to the regime’s propaganda mill, describing the Cuban dictator in 1990 as a “man of austere habits and insatiable dreams, with an old-fashioned formal education, careful words and fine manners, and incapable of conceiving any idea that isn’t extraordinary.”

To rationalize this cozy relationship, García Márquez offered himself as an ostensible go-between when Castro occasionally released dissidents to appease the West.
What Gabo never did was to raise his voice, or lift a finger, on behalf of Cubans’ right to express themselves freely in the first place.

Far from being “a representative and voice for the people of the Americas,” he served as a de facto spokesman for one of their oppressors.

García Márquez went so far as to defend death sentences Castro handed out to politically heterodox Cuban officials — one of whom had been personally close to the writer — after a 1989 show trial.

One can imagine many motivations for this shabby behavior, some more comprehensible than others. A youthful dabbler in Communist Party activity in the 1950s, García Márquez belonged to a generation of Latin American intellectuals for whom anti-imperialism was an ideological given, as well as a badge of sophistication; perhaps he never outgrew that.

“Friendship” with men like Fidel Castro is hard to escape — though, given the benefits he reaped from that relationship, tangible and otherwise, it’s doubtful García Márquez ever contemplated a break with Fidel, even secretly.

Whatever their causes, García Márquez’s Cuba apologetics will forever mar his legacy. True literary greatness is a function of not only narrative skill and linguistic creativity, which García Márquez possessed in abundance, but also moral courage, which he lacked. Against the multiple evils, social and political, that plagued his native region, he bore witness too selectively.

Castro finally let Heberto Padilla leave Cuba for the United States in 1980. In his 1989 memoir, “Self-Portrait of the Other,” the poet noted that he sought García Márquez’s aid for an exit visa but that the writer tried to dissuade him from going, saying that Cuba’s enemies might use his departure for propaganda purposes.

Apart from that book, Padilla produced little. He bounced from one college job to another before dying, a broken man, in Auburn, Ala. He was 68.

In truth, Heberto Padilla did not have half the talent Gabriel García Márquez had. Still, some of us admire him more.

Thanks for the long reply. You are welcome to your tastes of course, but I will respectfully disagree with you my fellow FReeper here. Any hard ‘venom’ you hear in my position is not directed at you personally, but at the idea that anything ‘good’ can come from evil - and evil he was. A liar and a hypocrite.
‘Magical Realism’ is nothing but ‘sparklies’ thrown on dung in order to hide it.
Evil, by nature, divides a man from himself (the God that made us - made us this way, because it divides us from Him).

The writing of a man divided against himself does not have the power of the simplest tribal chant.

He may have been a ‘gifted writer’ to some, but to me - it was in the way of Satan’s smooth lies.

Christ the Coke Machine

We sin.
Then confession’s coin rolls in.
Out bounces
sweet can of forgiveness.
We drink it all down with barely a frown
for myrrh-mingled wine’s sour business.

Thirst quenched
brief
with quick feigned repentance,
unmindful of looming death sentence,
soon
sin-licking lips,
forgetting in sips,
rejecting with gall
upon hyssop.

Tongue lolling,
pursuing next pleasure,
by thimble our sins we do measure.
Run doggedly hide
fist clutching blind pride,
behind
leaving clear water treasure.

Hard heart
deaf to empty can crinkles.
Flap clokes thin disguise
hiding wrinkles.
Slaked saccharin lies
tasting vomit satisfies
not
vinegar’d sponge
dying sprinkles.

Chins babble
while angels holding holy pens
draw all
thought’s silent scenes.
Recording pretense and pretend.
Thorn’d thickets convict
sharp briers, skin nicked
a side flowing red will soul mend.

Ho! Come to the water, it’s free,
thirsty one.
Wind’s quarters can’t count up the fee.
Blood pure washed away
to weeping streams where pebbles pray,
hushed choking crying forest echoes
constant kicking
the broke coke machine
we nailed
to a tree.

Patterns :
Mar 15:23 And they gave him to drink wine mingled with myrrh: but he received [it] not.
Jhn 19:29 Now there was set a vessel full of vinegar: and they filled a spunge with vinegar, and put [it] upon hyssop, and put [it] to his mouth.
Mat 27:34 They gave him vinegar to drink mingled with gall: and when he had tasted [thereof], he would not drink.
1Pe 2:16 As free, and not using [your] liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God.
Jhn 15:22 ….but now they have no cloke for their sin
Th 2:5 For neither at any time used we… a cloke of covetousness;
Psa 17:1 [[A Prayer of David.]] Hear the right, O LORD, attend unto my cry, give ear unto my prayer, [that goeth] not out of feigned lips.
Jer 3:10 And yet for all this her treacherous sister Judah hath not turned unto me with her whole heart, but feignedly, saith the LORD.
2Pe 2:22 But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog [is] turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire.
Sa 13:6 When the men of Israel saw that they were in a strait, (for the people were distressed,) then the people did hide themselves in caves, and in thickets, and in rocks, and in high places, and in pits.
Isa 9:18 For wickedness burneth as the fire: it shall devour the briers and thorns, and shall kindle in the thickets of the forest,
Isa 55:1 Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
(it’s free, thirsty one!)

others:
from Dylan Thomas’ “Fern Hill” :
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.

Forest crying? Why not? Soon they’ll be:
Isa 55:12 … and all the trees of the field shall clap [their] hands.

I wrote this as a result of meditating upon
the EXACT cause of death of Jesus.
I played ‘CSI Jerusalem’, and went to the eye-witnesses.
Do you know what it was?

A BROKEN heart.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.