13
IN SEPTEMBER 1960 the Argentinian Jorge Ricardo Masetti, the founder of Prensa Latina, arrived in Bogotá on his way to Brazil. Masetti, who had film star looks and a dashing manner to rival his friend and compatriot Ernesto Che Guevara, was already involved in a desperate struggle against Communist Party sectarianism, a subject he had discussed frequently in Havana with Plinio Mendoza. During his brief two-day visit to Bogotá Masetti visited García Márquez at his home and told both him and Mendoza that he could no longer afford to have two trustworthy people in Colombia. Which of them, he asked, was willing to leave for another posting? Despite being unmarried, Mendoza, who had already been to Cuba seven times that year as well as to San Francisco for a meeting of the Inter-American Press Association (SIP), said he wanted to stay in Colombia, so García Márquez, who had hit it off with Masetti from the very beginning, agreed to go.1 The idea was for him to spend a few months on and off in Havana to orientate himself about Prensa Latina’s latest methods, to help in training new journalists, and then be sent on some specific assignment. He set off almost at once, via Barranquilla, where he left Mercedes and Rodrigo for another holiday with her family.
He travelled to Havana at least four times in the next three months, staying for an entire month on one occasion. Havana was a city under siege, struggling to make its revolutionary progress amidst constant fears of counter-revolution and the daily possibility of the seemingly inevitable U.S. invasion. Castro had nationalized numerous enterprises earlier in the year and in August he had finally expropriated all U.S. property on the island in revenge for U.S. “economic aggression.” A month earlier Khrushchev had backed Cuba’s historic claim to the U.S. enclave of Guantánamo as relations began to harden. On 3 September the Soviet leader demanded that the United Nations be removed from New York to a more neutral location; by the 29th he would be thumping the desk with his shoe in the same United Nations and ostentatiously embracing Fidel Castro. This, undoubtedly was war, or at least the prelude to it.
The Prensa Latina office was just two blocks from the Malecón, the avenue that winds along Havana’s Caribbean seafront. The roads outside were barricaded with sandbags and roadblocks and there were revolutionary soldiers on guard at all times. When he was in Havana García Márquez shared a small apartment on the twentieth floor of the Retiro Médico Building with a Brazilian journalist, Aroldo Wall. They had two bedrooms, a lounge and a terrace overlooking the sea. They would eat in the Cibeles restaurant at the base of the building or in other restaurants close by. For the three months he spent on and off in Havana these were almost the only places García Márquez saw.2 Yet again he found himself in at the early stages of a project which required that everyone, including him, should strive to the very limits of their capacity. There was no timetable of any kind; everyone worked whenever it was necessary and there was some new crisis every day. Sometimes he would slip off to the cinema in the evening and when he got back to the office late at night Masetti would still be there; often García Márquez would then work with him until five in the morning; and then Masetti would be calling him again at nine.
Before long the office was heavily infiltrated by orthodox Communists, led by the influential and experienced Aníbal Escalante, who were apparently plotting to take over the revolution from within; on one occasion Masetti and García Márquez actually caught them organizing a secret meeting late at night.3 The hard-liners (known as mamertos in Colombia), “dogmatic” and “sectarian,” who had a long history in Cuba of collaborating, sometimes “opportunistically,” with “reformist” “bourgeois” parties and governments, were suspicious of anyone who was not a Party member. They kept information to themselves, attempted to channel the new revolution’s policies within Moscow-style perspectives using Moscow-style rhetoric and doctrines, and sabotaged initiatives led by others even when they suited the purposes of the new government. Watching this as closely as he now did, García Márquez would learn bitter lessons which would mark all his political attitudes and activities in the future. Already he was asking himself the same question that was being asked by almost everyone on the island and that they would still be asking almost half a century later: what was Fidel thinking?
His closest relationships were with Masetti and another Argentinian writer and journalist, Rodolfo Walsh, who was there with his wife, Poupée Blanchard, and in charge of the so-called Special Services. In 1957 Walsh had written one of Latin America’s classic documentary narratives, Operation Massacre (Operación Masacre), about a military conspiracy in Argentina, in a style not dissimilar to García Márquez’s Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor. The high point of García Márquez’s time in Cuba came when Walsh deciphered the CIA’s coded messages about the preparations for what would be known as the Bay of Pigs invasion (or as Playa Girón to the Cubans). Masetti followed the work of each national agency every day and had noticed garbled paragraphs from Tropical Cable on the teleprinter. Tropical Cable was the Guatemalan affiliate of All American Cable and Masetti began to smell a rat. Walsh, aided by a manual of cryptology, managed to decipher the entire document after several days and nights without sleep. It was a coded message from Guatemala to Washington about the plans for invading Cuba in April 1961. When the code was cracked García Márquez was called in to join in the celebrations. Masetti wanted Walsh to visit the counter-revolutionary training grounds at Retalhuleu in Guatemala disguised as a Protestant Bible-selling pastor, but the Cuban authorities had other, less romantic intelligence strategies in mind and Walsh was kept in Havana.4
Between visits to Cuba García Márquez would return to Bogotá and his family. His last trip to the island was in December 1960 on a Pan-American flight from Barranquilla via Camagüey. In Camagüey he was waiting for his connection to Havana but the weather was bad and the flight was delayed. Suddenly, as he stood around waiting for news, there was a commotion in the airport lounge: Fidel Castro had arrived with his companion Celia Sánchez. The Comandante was hungry and asked for a chicken dish at the airport cafeteria. When told there was no chicken Castro said he had been out touring chicken farms for three days and why couldn’t the revolution deliver chicken to the airport, especially as the gringos were always saying that the Cubans were starving to death and here was the airport proving their point. No one intervened when García Márquez approached Celia Sánchez and explained who he was and what he was doing in Cuba. Castro came back, greeted García Márquez and then remonstrated with him too about the problems in Cuba relating to chickens and eggs. Castro and Sánchez were waiting for a DC-3 to take them back to Havana; in the meantime chicken was finally found and Castro disappeared to the restaurant. Then he reappeared and was told the airport in Havana was closed due to the continuing bad weather. Castro retorted, “I have to be there at five. We go.” García Márquez, hoping as usual that his own flight would be long delayed, was unsure whether the Cuban leader was insane or simply reckless. When he arrived in Havana hours later in a Cubana Viscount he was relieved to see Castro’s plane parked on the runway. He has been worrying about the Cuban leader’s welfare ever since.
Just before Christmas Masetti dropped by one day and said, “We’re going to Lima, the office there has problems.” They stopped off for a day in Mexico City and García Márquez was dazzled by his first sight of the majestic Aztec capital, little imagining that he would spend much of his future life there. Alvaro Mutis had recently been released from Lecumberri Prison after fourteen months serving a sentence for embezzlement in Colombia, where he had been excessively generous to friends with the budget his employers at Esso had given him for his work in public relations. García Márquez paid him a visit and was given the usual warm welcome, with Mutis proving just as hospitable when he had to stump up himself.
Then García Márquez and Masetti flew on towards Lima via Guatemala City in a 707 jet, the first time García Márquez had had this near supersonic experience. Given Masetti and Walsh’s discovery of Guatemala’s involvement in the preparations of the Cuban exiles, Masetti was excited at stopping off, albeit briefly, in the Mayan country’s capital city. In the airport, on an impulse, Masetti argued for travelling to the insurgents’ training camp which Walsh had identified at Retalhuleu and causing some mischief. García Márquez said it would be foolhardy and Masetti sneered, “You’re just a timid little liberal, aren’t you!” So instead of that adventure they played a prank on the local dictator Miguel Ydígoras Fuentes. The information about the rebel training camp had not been published internationally but Masetti, somewhat irresponsibly, decided to give Ydígoras a fright. In the airport was a large photograph of a Guatemalan national park in front of a volcano. The two men had their photograph taken in front of the picture and then enclosed the photograph in an envelope with a message which said, “We’ve travelled your entire country and we’ve discovered what you are doing to assist in the invasion of Cuba.” They gave details of locations and numbers of troops. After they had mailed the letter the airport was closed due to bad weather. García Márquez said to Masetti, “Do you realize we’re going to have to sleep in this airport tonight and tomorrow that bastard Ydígoras is going to receive our letter and cut our balls off!” Fortunately the airport reopened in time and they flew on out.5
García Márquez never made it to Lima on that trip. When they stopped over in Panama Masetti heard him trying to call Mercedes. He asked where she was and when García Márquez said “Barranquilla” Masetti told him to go on home to his wife and baby because it was immediately before Christmas. So García Márquez changed his ticket and flew to Barranquilla, though not before being briefly detained by the Panamanian police.
Even in the few months García Márquez had been in Havana, relations had worsened in Prensa Latina between Masetti’s people and the Communist Party sectarians who wanted to bring the revolution in line with the Soviet Union’s Euro-centred conception of world revolution. He and Mendoza watched in anguish as the time-servers and bureaucrats, reciters of Moscow mantras, began to harass, supplant and eventually persecute the romantic, open-hearted, long-haired revolutionary vagabonds with whom Masetti and García Márquez identified. These men and women, and the Cuban people for whom they had fought, had established a style, prompted by Castro and Guevara, in which everything was improvised, spontaneous and informal: hence, just for a start, the two supreme leaders were called “Fidel” and “Che,” and there was also “Raúl,” and “Camilo.” But Masetti had already told García Márquez and Mendoza that a Communist Party spy was watching their every move in Colombia following the visit of a Cuban agent to the Bogotá office. Masetti reproached Mendoza for sending him letters of complaint which could be read by his enemies and forwarded to his superiors: one of them had ended up in the hands of Che Guevara himself.6 In each fibre of the new Cuba, in each office, in each factory, the struggle was under way for the heart and soul of the revolution. Plinio Mendoza believes that the old-style communists won the first round—hence Masetti’s difficulties (and, eventually, those of Guevara)—but that Castro would win the second when he put Escalante on trial and began to give the communists a taste of their own medicine.7 The struggle, far too complex for facile interpretation, has continued ever since.
Back in Havana again in the new year, Masetti, under increasing pressure, decided to send García Márquez to Montreal, to open the new office there. That quickly fell through but there was an opening in New York. Even better! García Márquez went back to Bogotá to tidy up his affairs at the Colombian office; he cancelled his apartment rental, left his dining-room suite and other furniture to Mendoza, and kept his plans quiet, staying clandestinely with his old friend from Cartagena, Franco Múnera, who by then was also living in Bogotá.8 Then he flew down to Barranquilla to pick up Mercedes and Rodrigo, who had stayed on there with her family. He left all his books with his sister Rita in Cartagena in a huge wooden box. Eligio, the family book-worm, would speculate about “Gabito’s box” for many years.9
The young family travelled to New York in early January 1961. The United States had broken off relations with Cuba on 3 January, so this was not an ideal time to be embarking on such an adventure but it shows once again García Márquez’s extraordinary knack of arriving in the right place at around the time that everything is just beginning to happen there. On 20 January John F. Kennedy was installed as the youngest ever President of the United States. Though compromised by the policy of the outgoing administration towards Cuba, he would probably have supported an invasion of Cuba in any case. The New York Prensa Latina office, in a skyscraper near the Rockefeller Center, was short-staffed so they were happy to have García Márquez aboard.10 It was a moment of maximum paranoia and the new arrival was not impressed by his prospects. “I had never known a better place to be murdered in,” he would write later. “It was a sordid, solitary office in an old building by the Rockefeller Center, with a room full of teleprinters and an editorial office with just one window which looked out on a courtyard way down below, always gloomy and smelling of frozen soot, from which rose day and night the sound of rats fighting for scraps in the garbage bins.”11 Years later he would tell American novelist William Kennedy that New York at that time was “like no place else. It was putrefying, but also was in the process of rebirth, like the jungle. It fascinated me.”12
By now there were a hundred thousand Cuban refugees in Miami and thousands more were arriving every month. Many of them came on to New York. The United States was planning on using many of these refugees in its invasion and was sending them to the clandestine camps in Guatemala for training. Although the coming invasion of Cuba was a state secret, almost everyone in Miami knew about it. As García Márquez would later say, “there never was a war more fore-told.”13 In New York pro- and anti-revolutionary Latin Americans would take care to go to different bars, restaurants and cinemas. It was dangerous to stray into enemy territory and full-pitched battles were frequent; the police were usually careful not to arrive until it was all over. García Márquez was equally careful to avoid the confrontations.
The family spent only five months in New York but García Márquez would later remember it as one of the most stressful periods of his life. They lived in the Webster Hotel near Fifth Avenue, in the very heart of Manhattan. The Prensa Latina workers were under constant pressure from Cuban refugees and anti-Castro hysteria. Telephone abuse from counter-revolutionary gusanos (“worms,” the term the revolution used) was a daily occurrence, to which García Márquez and his colleagues would routinely reply: “Tell that to your mother, you bastard.” They made sure that they had improvised home-made weapons with them at all times. One day Mercedes had a call threatening her and Rodrigo, with the caller saying that he knew where they lived and at what time of the day she took the child for a walk—usually to nearby Central Park. Mercedes had a friend in Jamaica, at the other end of the city; she said nothing about the call to her husband but went to stay with the friend for a while, saying she was bored being stuck in the hotel all day. It was probably appropriate that García Márquez was again revising In Evil Hour, his most sinister book, at the time.
After Mercedes left the hotel he spent most of his time in the office, sleeping there at night on a couch under conditions of increasing tension. On 13 March he attended a historic press conference in Washington at which John F. Kennedy announced that he was setting up the Alliance for Progress.14 This presaged a brief period in which the United States began to talk the language of human rights, democracy and cooperation after many decades supporting Latin American dictators, a policy to which the USA would soon, however, return—in 1964, in Brazil—and would ratchet up with a vengeance in the 1970s. García Márquez acknowledged that Kennedy’s speech was “worthy of an Old Testament prophet” but dubbed the Alliance “an emergency patch to keep out the new winds of the Cuban Revolution.”15
Once again, most of the internal tension in the New York office, as García Márquez saw it, was between old-style hard-line Cuban communists and the new breed of Latin American leftists recruited by Masetti. “And in the New York office I was seen as Masetti’s man.”16 Things rapidly became intolerable and García Márquez began to consider his position. Eventually he decided that he wanted out. One evening at midnight, alone in the office, he received a direct threat from a Caribbean voice which declared, “Get ready, arsehole, your time is up. We’re coming for you now.” García Márquez left a message on the teleprinter saying, “If I don’t turn this off before I leave, it’s because I’ve been killed.” A message from Havana replied, “OK, compañero, we’ll send flowers.” Then, in his panic, when he left the building at one o’clock he forgot to turn the machine off.17 He stole home to the hotel in terror, past the vast grey mass of St. Patrick’s Cathedral beneath the falling rain, afraid of his own footsteps, and slept in the clothes he was wearing.
Before long the impulsive Masetti had been trapped into resigning by increasing pressure from the communists. On 7 April García Márquez sent a letter to Plinio Mendoza informing him of Masetti’s resignation and saying that he had decided to follow suit: he had given in his notice for the end of April and told Mendoza he was thinking of going to Mexico. But after the Bay of Pigs invasion on 17 April, one day after Castro’s declaration that the revolution, as many had suspected, was now a socialist one, Castro himself asked Masetti to continue in his post and to take part in the live television interviews of the counter-revolutionary prisoners. Masetti agreed and García Márquez too decided to hold on until the post-invasion crisis was over.18 In fact he has since claimed that what he really wanted to do in those days was return from New York to Cuba.
On the day after the great Cuban victory at the Bay of Pigs, in which Castro had personally directed the defence of the island and the arrest of the invaders, Plinio Mendoza had found that, mysteriously, and for the first time, the telecom office in Bogotá refused to carry his dispatches and immediately suspected that the USA had pressured the Colombian authorities into cutting off the service to Cuba. He phoned García Márquez in New York and García Márquez said, “Hold on, there’s a public telex out in Fifth Avenue, right by the office.” Thus the two friends proudly outwitted the CIA on the day of the legendary defeat of the counter-revolutionary invaders, claimed by the Cubans as the “first victory against imperialism on Latin American territory.” But soon afterwards García Márquez went home to his hotel and wrote Masetti a letter by hand—something he almost never did (he even dated the letter)—outlining his grievances, his opposition to Moscow-style sectarianism and his fears for the future of the revolution if the orthodox communist line prevailed. He left the letter in the hotel room awaiting what he knew was the inevitable moment of his resignation. It was as well that he stayed on until the battle of the Bay of Pigs, for had he got out just before it he would surely have been branded for ever as the rat who left the sinking ship.19 Little did he know that Masetti too would soon be leaving Prensa Latina for good and that he would later return to Argentina and die in a hopeless revolutionary campaign in 1964.
It was almost the end of García Márquez’s time in New York. Plinio Mendoza flew to Havana to discuss the situation with Masetti and was lunching with him and his wife Conchita Dumois when the news came that “they,” the mamertos, the hard-liners, had finally taken over the Prensa Latina office under a new director, the Spaniard Fernando Revueltas. When Mendoza arrived in New York again on a Pan-American flight in late May, on his way home from Havana, he was met, after a CIA interrogation, by Mercedes and Rodrigo. Mercedes smiled, in that imperturbable way of hers, and said, “So the mamertos have taken over Prela, compadre?” “Yes, comadre, they have.” When he told her that he had handed in his resignation to the new head of Prensa Latina, with a copy to President Dorticós, she told him that Gabo’s own letter was already written and merely awaiting his arrival.20
García Márquez has never said much about these problems since the 1960s—even in his subsequent conversations with Antonio Núñez Jiménez, himself an orthodox communist, he merely said, without entering into details, that he felt the communist hard-liners were “anti-revolutionaries”21—despite the fact that the events of 1961 would cast a shadow over more than ten long years of his life. The reason, evidently, is that he has continued to view the Cuban Revolution as an endless struggle between the “schematic”mamertos, supposedly represented in those days by Castro’s brother Raúl, and the more intuitive revolutionary romantics supposedly represented by Fidel himself. Twenty-five years later Mendoza would say that his own experiences in Cuba, following on from the journey to Eastern Europe in 1957, were decisive in distancing him from socialism by convincing him that all socialist regimes eventually became bureaucratic and tyrannical, and that this was inevitable. And he would insist that in the early 1960s García Márquez was as alienated by all that happened as he, Mendoza, was and that in those days they saw things in exactly the same way22
Mendoza stayed on in New York for a few days awaiting the news about his friend’s back pay and tickets. He and Mercedes strolled around Central Park by day with Rodrigo, as García Márquez wound up his affairs at the office. Then García Márquez and Mendoza wandered together around Fifth Avenue, Times Square and Greenwich Village, discussing what had happened, the future of Cuba and their own uncertain plans. Stranded between two different ideologies, and two different worlds, a hard time was about to begin for both of them. García Márquez wrote to Alvaro Cepeda on 23 May:
Now, after a bloody awful crisis that went on a month and only finally came to a head this week, the decent young men of Prensa Latina have fucked off, with very high-flown resignation letters. Despite all the shit we could see looming ahead I never thought that events would become so overwhelming and I thought I would still have a few more months in New York. However, my last hope of staying here evaporated for good this evening and I’m going to Mexico on 1 June, by road, with the aim of crossing the deep disordered South. I don’t know exactly what I’m going to do but I’m trying to salvage some dollars from Colombia which I hope will allow me to live for a time in Mexico while I look for work. Who knows what the fuck as, because as for journalism I’ve thrown in the towel. Maybe as an intellectual.23
Just after Mendoza left New York Masetti called García Márquez and said that the situation was improving again. He had talked to President Dorticós and had been told that he was still in Fidel Castro’s good books after all. He asked García Márquez to delay his journey to Mexico but by this time the Colombian had made his plans and was only waiting for his pay-off, which the Prensa Latina authorities were in no hurry to concede. He was trying to persuade them to give him some kind of severance pay plus tickets to Mexico for him and the family. So he reluctantly refused Masetti’s entreaties. As he explained in a letter to Mendoza:
I know Masetti: this personal help he asks for at the start will turn, whatever we try to do, into some huge and complex undertaking which I’ll be caught up in until the comrades see the guava is ripe and decide to eat it, just as they did with Prensa Latina. Moreover: if Masetti were still entrapped and in danger, as you told me he was, I’d have done anything to overturn my plans and help him. But I have the impression that the President has found a way of making things OK for him and he is no longer in such urgent need of help.24
Later he said, “I have become a stranger in an office I’m supposed to be managing down to the most minute details. Fortunately all this will be over in 48 hours.”25 He feared that Prensa Latina would not pay the family’s return passages and said he only had 200 dollars to his name.
In effect, the García Márquez family had no way of flying back to Colombia and so they were heading for Mexico by road. In Mexico they would try to enlist help to return home (though Mendoza himself believes that an extended stay in Mexico had long been one of García Márquez’s keenest aspirations; it may be that many of the misunderstandings about his movements and motivation down the years have come from the fact that he was always reluctant to admit that he did not wish to return to Colombia and the extended family). Not surprisingly the New York management said he had resigned, not been sacked—clearly he was considered a deserter, if not actually a gusano—and that they were not authorized to give him tickets to Mexico. Later the communists would tell friends who asked about him in Havana, “García Márquez went over to the counter-revolution.”26 In mid-June, resigned to getting nothing out of Prensa Latina and the revolution, the García Barcha family took a Greyhound bus for New Orleans, where Mendoza would be sending a further 150 dollars from Bogotá.
The fourteen-day journey, with an eighteen-month-old child, was arduous, to say the least, involving frequent stops and, as the couple would later report, endless “cardboard hamburgers,” “sawdust hot dogs” and plastic buckets of Coca-Cola. In the end they began to eat Rodrigo’s processed baby food, especially the stewed fruit. They saw Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. For García Márquez himself it had the advantage of taking him through Faulkner country, a long-standing dream. Like all foreign visitors in those days, the young couple were shocked by the stark examples of racial discrimination throughout the American South, particularly in Georgia and Alabama, before the civil rights reforms later in the decade. In Montgomery they missed a night’s sleep because no one would rent “dirty Mexicans” a room. By the time they reached New Orleans they were desperate for “proper food” and used some of Mendoza’s 150 dollars, sent to the Colombian consulate, for a square meal in Le Vieux Carré, a high-class French-style restaurant. They were disappointed, however, to see a large peach atop each steak as their dinners arrived at the table.27 In 1983 García Márquez would remember their great adventure:
At the end of that heroic journey we had confronted once more the relation between truth and fiction: the immaculate parthenons amidst the cotton fields, the farmers taking their siesta beneath the eaves of the roadside inns, the black people’s huts surviving in wretchedness, the white heirs to Uncle Gavin Stevens walking to Sunday prayers with their languid women dressed in muslin; the terrible world of Yoknapatawpha County had passed in front of our eyes from the window of a bus, and it was as true and as human as in the novels of the old master.28
He would tell Mendoza in his first letter after the trip, “We arrived safe and sound after a very interesting journey which proved on the one hand that Faulkner and the rest have told the truth about their environment and on the other that Rodrigo is a perfectly portable young man who can adapt to any emergency.”29
Finally, after two long and unforgettable weeks they reached the border at Laredo. There, on the world’s most contrast-filled frontier, they found a dirty, sordid town where, nevertheless, they felt that life was suddenly real again. The first cheap restaurant provided a delicious meal. Mercedes decided that in a country like Mexico where, she had discovered, they knew the secret of cooking rice as well as many other things, she might be able to live. They took a train and arrived in Mexico City in late June 1961. There they would find a vast but still manageable city where the boulevards were lined with flowers and where—in those days—the immensely distant sky was usually a transparent, glorious blue and you could still see the volcanoes.