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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.
7:26
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