Garcia Marquez's Undying Support for the Castro Regime (Law and Literature‪)‬

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Colombian writer, is one of our greatest living authors. His novels One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Autumn of the Patriarch, and Love in the Time of Cholera will live forever. I have been a huge fan of his work since first encountering it in 1975. I thus read with great interest the first major English language biography of this literary magician by Gerald Martin entitled Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life. It is a fine biography and recommended for all those interested in learning about Garcia Marquez's heroic struggle over many difficult, impoverished years to develop his talent and become a first-class novelist. Martin's biography touches on the writer's support for the Castro regime in Cuba and the extremely close friendship between Garcia Marquez and the long-time Cuban dictator. He offers some insights into the motivation for Garcia Marquez's fascination with Fidel. I myself find the ongoing support that the Colombian novelist has provided to the Castro regime and his considerable involvement in Cuban affairs deeply troubling and would like to delve into it. I am aided in this endeavour by Angel Esteban and Stephanie Panichelli's Fidel & Gabo: A Portrait of a Legendary Friendship Between Fidel Castro and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. It surveys the interviews Garcia Marquez has given over the years about his growing friendship with the charismatic dictator. It is not a particularly penetrating analysis of the relationship. I would like to have had a deeper consideration of the human rights abuses by the Castro regime, of the censorship and denial of due process and the right to a fair trial, and what precisely Garcia Marquez has had to say about these abuses, both to the world at large, and to Castro and his cronies.