‘Marquez is a Malayali’—Kerala loves Cuba & its romantic communism

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Castro made an unlikely statement in Argentina’s favour more than a month after Britain launched the war, although the right-wing junta in power in the Latin American nation was backed by Cuba’s archenemy, the United States. Cuba had been silent and its communist ally, the Soviet Union, ambivalent for weeks. Perhaps sensing that Britain was winning the war, Castro called upon non-aligned nations (those part of the Non-Aligned Movement) to take ‘whatever steps you may seem appropriate’ to ‘stop the British-US aggression’.

The Americans who had initially tried to negotiate a peace deal for their Latin American ally later threw their weight behind the UK, their NATO ally from Europe, when it became clear that the Argentine regime was in no mood to relent. Its leaders used the occasion to distract the public from the excesses of the ‘Dirty War’ (which started in 1976 and would end in 1983) against suspected leftist political opponents during the course of which up to 30,000 citizens were killed or made to disappear. Obviously, the reason why Castro lashed out against the NATO forces had more to do with the existential threat his country faced from the US rather than politics in Argentina.

After this event, I did not hear about Castro until 1983, when he was covered extensively in India as the man who bear-hugged the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the inauguration of the Non-Aligned Summit in New Delhi, which was attended by more than a hundred heads of state. At a time when Indian women, especially those in positions of power, were not photographed hugging men, certainly not those unrelated to them, the incident at Delhi’s Vigyan Bhavan created a stir and sensation—and left Mrs Gandhi blushing. A dashing man with a beard and film-star looks, and more than that, charisma—for us kids, his photographs in dailies left a lasting impression.

Show Full Article I would read later from the account of the veteran career diplomat K. Natwar Singh, a Congress leader and an associate of Mrs Gandhi, that it was at this summit that Castro introduced Mrs Gandhi to someone admired by the world and idolized by us Malayalis: Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Bogota-born Nobel Prize-winning writer. The Castro–Marquez friendship had elicited considerable interest in the Colombian literary genius, whose position on Cuba made him unpopular among some other contemporary writers like the Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, who attacked Marquez using an expression that translated to ‘courtesan of Cuba’. Although I love Llosa, I believe he was being grossly harsh to his former friend.

In sharp contrast, in Kerala, Marquez’s support for Cuba only added to the unending mystique around him. He even wrote a non-fiction work titled Images of Cuba, in which he talks about various events in Cuba’s history in the first decades since the 1959 Revolution. Some excerpts from that work were included in The Strange Pilgrims, a collection of short stories he had written over a long period. That book was translated into Malayalam, along with a few other important works of his, and is widely appreciated.

Marquez became one of my favourite authors ever since I first read him in Malayalam in 1990. His Cuban link did make him more popular in the state—and surprisingly it didn’t make him unpopular even among those who disagreed with his political views. The first Marquez book I read was the translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude ( Ekanthathayude Nooru Varshangal in Malayalam). He also became the favourite of publishers and booksellers in the state. Malayali publisher Ravi D.C., who runs Kerala’s top

publishing house DC Books, had this to say about Marquez in an interview shortly after his passing away in 2014, ‘Marquez has been accepted and enjoyed by Keralites as a Malayali writer and not as a foreigner. We first published Marquez in Malayalam in the early 1980s and he continues to be a best-seller.’

Journalist and Marquez buff K.P.M. Basheer wrote shortly after the literary icon’s demise, ‘The Malayali’s fixation with Marquez, which began in the 1970s, is best told in these jokes: Marquez is “the best known Malayali writer in Latin America” and the “first Malayalam author who has won the Nobel”.’ In recognition of his fanbase in the state, Malayali novelist-short story writer N.S. Madhavan, a former civil servant and leftist political commentator, proclaimed in jest that ‘Marquez is a Malayali’. In February 2023, when the Mathrubhumi Daily organized its annual literature festival in the state capital Thiruvananthapuram, one of the participants was Marquez’s grandson Mateo García Elizondo. I met him at the festival, which was curated by my friend and classmate Sabin Iqbal, and found Mateo overwhelmed by how much we Malayalis knew about his grandfather. Following my advice, he paid a visit to the Modern Book Centre, one of the finest booksellers in the state from where we used to purchase his grandfather’s books in our college days in the mid-1990s.

Kerala is not just known for its fascination with the books of Marquez, the great lover of Cuba, but also for its romantic notion of communism that flowered with the success of the Cuban Revolution. It was in that left politics-effervescent climate of 1980s Kerala that I read the Malayalam translation of Fidel & Religion: Conversations with Frei Betto on Marxism & Liberation Theology . I was in high school then. The title in the Malayalam translation by C.P. Narayanan was Fidel Castro Mathathe Patti (Fidel Castro on Religion).4 The book features a conversation between Castro and the Brazilian Dominican friar Frei Betto on Christianity, his school days, and the revolution. The sheer pleasure of reading this inspired me to later re-read the work in English. In their chat, Castro told Betto about meeting a delegation of US bishops, ‘I told them that if they organized a state in accord with Christian precepts, they’d create one similar to ours.’ On the other hand, Castro regretted that in practice, the Catholic Church had been used more for doing evil than good. He had also famously noted, ‘I believe Karl Marx could have subscribed to the Sermon on the Mount as a tool for domination, exploitation and oppression for centuries.’5 By saying so, Castro was trying to project a certain convergence between Marx’s views and the sayings of Jesus (picked up from the Gospel of Mathew) as evident from the latter’s call to stand up for the destitute and marginalized. Nothing else was a more overriding concern for Marx than the emancipation of the poor, the working class.

This excerpt from Mad About Cuba: A Malayali Revisits the Revolution by Ullekh NP has been published with permission from Penguin Random House India.

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