Fidel and Gabo: A Portrait of the Legendary Friendship Between Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez

The story of the controversial friendship between Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Gabriel García Márquez and Fidel Castro In Fidel and Gabo, Márquez scholars Ángel Esteban and Stéphanie Panichelli examine this strange, intimate, and incredibly controversial friendship between the beloved author and Cuban dictator, exposing facets of their personalities never before revealed to the greater public. For years, Márquez, long fascinated with power, solicited and flattered Castro in hopes of a personal audience, for he viewed Castro's Cuba as the model on which Latin American would one day build its own brand of socialism. Fidel and Gabo is a vivid and in-depth look at two of the most influential men of the modern era, their worlds, and the effect this friendship has had on their life and works. There's no romance in the relationship between the Cuban dictator Fidel Castro and the Nobel-winning Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, argues this stinging j'accuse. On the surface their friendship is chummy and literary: Castro drops by García Márquez's Havana mansion--a gift from Castro himself--for endless conversation and critiques his manuscripts. But the authors view the men's bond as corrupt and neurotic: García Márquez, obsessed with power in both his fiction and real life, gets political influence; Castro, in turn, gets cultural prestige and a matchless propagandist. The authors condemn García Márquez's public silence over Cuban censorship and human rights violations. Almost compulsive in their point scoring, the authors jeer at the novelist for going to American rather than Cuban hospitals. More polemic than biography, their study tellingly rebukes the Left's propensity for blinding itself to the failings of the Cuban revolution by glamorizing its leaders.--From publisher description The story of the controversial friendship between Nobel prize-winning author Gabriel Gabriel García Márquez and Fidel Castro In Fidel and Gabo, Márquez scholars Ángel Esteban and Stéphanie Panichelli examine this strange, intimate, and incredibly controversial friendship between the beloved author and Cuban dictator, exposing facets of their personalities never before revealed to the greater public. For years, Márquez, long fascinated with power, solicited and flattered Castro in hopes of a personal audience, for he viewed Castro{u2019}s Cuba as the model on which Latin American would one day build its own brand of socialism. Fidel and Gabo is a vivid and in-depth look at two of the most influential men of the modern era, their worlds, and the effect this friendship has had on their life and works