Gabriel García Márquez and the Castro Contradiction

[Chris Brady <cdbrady@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The New York Times Magazine published an article about Gabriel García
Márquez.  Of course, it had to take a swipe at the great author's long
friendship with Fidel Castro, without any analysis.  The dig (in the
first paragraph I send below) seemed  reflexive, and, coupled with the
pronouncement of García Márquez to the author Goldman (in the second
paragraph), also contradictory.  See what you think.  Below are the two
paragraphs pertinent to my consternation, with the title and URL of the
full article:

García Márquez?s magic realism, derived from the surrealism of tyranny
and empty stomachs, is also the massacre that people pretend never
happened because it can?t be addressed in the newspapers or courts; it
is unanswerable power?s extravagant appetites; it is the foretold murder
an entire town is nightmarishly powerless to prevent. In societies
without free expression or recourse to justice, solitary imaginative
flights and haunted inner lives are also the voices of the community. In
that sense, García Márquez, in his devotion to the profession of
journalism and the nurturing of young journalists, and especially in his
role as founder of the New Journalism Foundation, which has a school in
Cartagena, Colombia, and sponsors workshops and scholarships throughout
Latin America, is doing what he can to make the world that inspired much
of his fiction obsolete. His refusal to speak out against his old friend
Fidel Castro has been a source of controversy, especially in the United
States. But it is also significant that the New Journalism Foundation
has never taken a workshop to Cuba. Last December, when I gave a class
in narrative nonfiction at the school in Cartagena, an administrator
told me that they knew that taking the school to Cuba would be a
betrayal of their role as uncompromising advocates of a free press.
 ?
Sometimes García Márquez dozed. Children ran in and out from the garden,
including little Jeronimo, who had the same eyes of immense astonishment
as his grandfather in the baby picture that adorns the cover of ??Living
to Tell the Tale.?? At one point those eyes were fixed directly on me.
The world is now in such a state, García Márquez was saying, leaning
forward, that only good journalists can save it. I could only nod.



In the Shadow of the Patriarch
By FRANCISCO GOLDMAN
New York Times Magazine, November 2, 2003
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02MARQUEZ.html?th



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