The Scandal of the Century Read online

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  IN JANUARY OF 1959, two weeks after Fidel Castro’s rebel army overthrew dictator Fulgencio Batista and seized power in Cuba, Gabo and Mendoza managed to travel to the island onboard a beat-up old plane that had been flown to Caracas by the triumphant “barbudos,” as the bearded rebels were known, to bring journalists back with them. For Gabo, the trip marked the beginning of a relationship with Cuba, and its revolution, that would last the rest of his life. About this first Cuban experience, he wrote memorably in “I Can’t Think of Any Title.”

  In his text, Gabo situated the nascent revolution in the political context of the moment via a genial vignette about the Cuban poet Nicolás Guillén, whom he had known in Paris when both of them were lodged in the same seedy hotel in the Latin Quarter a few years before:

  [E]ven in the cruelest times of winter, Nicolás Guillén maintained in Paris the very Cuban custom of rising (without a rooster) at the crowing of the first roosters, and of reading the newspapers as he sipped his coffee lulled by the sweet wind of the sugar mills and the counterpoint of guitars in the clamorous dawns of Camagüey. Then he opened the window of his balcony, also as he would in Camagüey, and woke up the whole street by shouting the news from Latin America translated from French into Cuban slang.

  […] So one morning Nicolás Guillén opened his window and shouted a single piece of news:

  “The man has fallen!”

  There was a commotion in the sleeping street because each of us believed the man who had fallen was his. The Argentinians thought it was Juan Domingo Perón, the Paraguayans thought it was Alfredo Stroessner […], the Guatemalans thought it was Castillo Armas, the Dominicans thought it was Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, and the Cubans thought it was Fulgencio Batista. It was Perón, actually. Later, talking about this, Nicolás Guillén painted a distressing panorama of the situation in Cuba for us. “The only thing I see for the future,” he concluded, “is a kid who’s getting a lot done over in Mexico.” He paused like a clairvoyant, and concluded:

  “His name is Fidel Castro.”

  As for his own arrival in Havana at the height of revolutionary fervor, Gabo recalled it the following way:

  Before noon we landed between the Babylonian mansions of the richest of the rich of Havana: in the Campo Columbia airport, then baptized with the name Ciudad Libertad, the former Batista fort where a few days earlier Camilo Cienfuegos had camped with his column of astonished peasants. The first impression was rather comical, for we were greeted by members of the former military air force who at the last minute had gone over to the Revolution and were keeping to their barracks while their beards grew enough to look like old revolutionaries.

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  WITH THE PUBLICATION and spectacular success of One Hundred Years of Solitude, the year 1967 was one of the great milestones in the life of Gabriel García Márquez. From that moment on, Gabo and his family enjoyed economic stability and he was internationally acclaimed, deservedly so, as one of the great novelists of his era. For the next twenty years, Gabo remained at the literary pinnacle, publishing his other great works, such as The Autumn of the Patriarch and Love in the Time of Cholera. Much less well known to his millions of readers outside of Latin America, Gabo continued to be a journalist as well, albeit with an increasingly political focus.

  The 1970s saw rising political tensions in Latin America ushered in by the Cuban Revolution and the violent counterinsurgency policies introduced by the United States to roll back communism. At this time, García Márquez embarked on a phase of militant journalism. When the socialist Chilean president Salvador Allende was brutally overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet in 1972, for instance, Gabo went so far as to declare that he would not publish another book until the regime had fallen. Although he didn’t follow through on that promise, he did begin to express his sympathies with leftist causes more openly from then on.

  Together with some Colombian journalist friends, he founded Alternativa, a leftist magazine; he wrote articles and columns that were critical of U.S. policies and in favor of Cuba and of Fidel Castro, with whom he also began to develop a close friendship. He wrote a long and flattering article about the Cuban military expedition in Angola and another, included in this volume, entitled “The Sandinista Heist: Chronicle of the Assault on the ‘Hog House,’ ” in which he rendered the circumstances of a mass abduction of Nicaraguan parliamentarians by a group of Sandinista guerrillas as a heroic epic.

  In the article “The Cubans Face the Blockade,” included in this anthology, Gabo used his narrative skills to make his readers understand the implications of the famous trade embargo—“blockade,” to the Cubans—which the United States had imposed against Cuba in 1961. He wrote:

  That night, the first of the blockade, in Cuba there were 482,560 automobiles, 343,300 refrigerators, 549,700 radios, 303,500 television sets, 352,900 electric irons, 286,400 fans, 41,800 washing machines, 3,510,000 wristwatches, sixty-three locomotives, and twelve merchant ships. All these things, except for the wristwatches, which were Swiss, had been made in the United States.

  It seems that a certain amount of time had to pass before the Cubans realized what those mortal numbers meant to their lives. From the point of view of production, Cuba soon found that it was not actually a distinct country but rather a commercial peninsula of the United States.

  Because of texts like these, Gabo was widely criticized by conservative media in the United States and Latin America, which branded him, not altogether inaccurately, as a propagandist of the Cuban regime. Some went so far, more unfairly, as to call him Fidel Castro’s useful idiot. Gabo was undeterred by these critiques, however, and carried on supporting those causes he believed in, which were on the left, by and large, and definitely included advocacy for Cuba and the region’s left-wing causes. Behind the scenes, he also used his political access and Nobel clout to play a diplomatic role in efforts to broker dialogue between the United States and Cuba, as well as between Colombian guerrilla leaders and the government.

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  TOWARD THE END of the 1990s, Gabo was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer—and although he recovered from that illness, he became weaker in the final decade and a half of his life.

  In 1996, before his health problems began, he published the book News of a Kidnapping, one of his few in-depth journalistic works, and the only one to become widely known internationally. It is the story of the terrifying ordeal of a group of influential Colombians, most of them journalists, who were taken hostage by Pablo Escobar in an effort to convince the Colombian government to abandon the extradition agreement for narcotraffickers it had signed with the United States.

  In 1998, Gabo used part of the money he received from his Nobel Prize to buy Cambio, a magazine owned by a friend of his, and to relaunch it with a new team of editors and reporters. In Cambio he published some of his last pieces of journalism, including a profile of the singer Shakira, who is from Barranquilla, and another of the Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez. In the end, the magazine didn’t work out, but while it lasted, Gabo greatly enjoyed being immersed, once again, in “the best job in the world.”

  In 1994, Gabo had launched the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for New Ibero-American Journalism, with its headquarters in the place he had begun his reporting life all those years before, Cartagena de Indias. Gabo founded it for the purpose of imparting new journalistic techniques and providing encouragement to a new generation of Latin American journalists. In a conversation we had in 1999, he invited me to become one of the teachers at the foundation, enthusiastically describing his vision of a future hemispheric fraternity of reporters and chroniclers as a “mafia of friends” that would not only elevate the standards of Latin America’s journalism, but also help to fortify its democracies.

  Remarkably, Gabo’s vision has come true, with the resul
ting paradox that one of the most emblematic authors of the Latin American Boom in fiction should also be regarded today as the maximum godfather of a new boom in Latin American journalism. But so it is. In the years that have transpired since its founding, thousands of journalists have attended the foundation’s workshops and have competed for the annual awards given out in the Gabriel García Márquez Journalism Prize. Many have attributed their later professional success to their stints with the “Gabo Foundation,” as they call it, and some have gone on to write books and found magazines and websites of their own, specializing in long-form journalism and investigative reporting.

  After Gabo’s death, a law passed by the Colombian congress established that in his beloved Cartagena de Indias, there would be a permanent “Gabo Center,” to operate in tandem with his foundation, so that along with his other legacies, his devotion to journalism could be acknowledged and passed on to new generations.

  —JON LEE ANDERSON

  Editor’s Note

  To the memory of Carmen Balcells and Claudio López de Lamadrid

  Gabriel García Márquez called journalism “the best job in the world,” and he identified more as a journalist than a writer: “I am basically a journalist. All my life I have been a journalist. My books are the books of a journalist, even if it’s not so noticeable,” he once said.

  These fifty journalistic pieces by García Márquez, published between 1950 and 1984, were selected from the hundreds compiled in Jacques Gilard’s monumental five-volume collection, Obra periodística, in order to provide readers of his fiction a sample of his writings for the newspapers and magazines for whom he worked a great part of his life. He always considered his training as a journalist the foundation of his work in fiction. In many of the writings collected here, readers of his novels and short stories will find a recognizable narrative voice in the making.

  Those who want to delve into the subject can find an exciting and erudite explanation of García Márquez’s journalism career in the prologues of Gilard’s compilation. As Gilard wrote, “García Márquez’s journalism was mainly an education for his style, and an apprenticeship toward an original rhetoric.” The first works of journalism published as books were the reportage Relato de un naúfrago (The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, 1970) and an anthology of articles written in Venezuela, Cuando era feliz e indocumentado (When I Was Happy and Undocumented, 1973). Crónicas y reportajes (Chronicles and Reportages), a selection made by the author, was published in 1976 by the Instituto Colombiano de Cultura. A compendium selected by García Márquez’s journalist colleagues, Gabo periodista, published in 2012 by the Fundación para el Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano and Mexico’s Conaculta, also provides a detailed chronology of his career.

  Although some of his first fictional stories were written before he worked as a reporter, it was journalism that allowed the young García Márquez to leave his law studies and start writing for El Universal in Cartagena and El Heraldo in Barranquilla. He later traveled to Europe as a correspondent for El Espectador of Bogotá. Upon his return, and thanks to his friend and fellow journalist Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, he continued to write in Venezuela for the magazines Élite and Momento, until moving to New York City in 1961 as a correspondent for the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina. Later that year he settled in Mexico City with his wife, Mercedes Barcha, and his son Rodrigo, where he published No One Writes to the Colonel, began working in screenwriting, and later devoted all his time to writing One Hundred Years of Solitude. Although his work as a writer would occupy most of his time, he always returned to his passion for journalism. During his lifetime he founded six publications, including Alternativa and Cambio: “I do not want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude, nor for the Nobel Prize, but for the newspapers,” he said.

  The Scandal of the Century takes its title from the masterful reportage sent by García Márquez from Rome and published in fourteen consecutive installments in El Espectador in September of 1955. In those five words we find a condensed journalistic headline with a touch of literary hyperbole. The subtitle’s fantastical and evocative imagery is signature García Márquez: “In Death Wilma Montesi Walks the Earth.”

  Among the pieces are press releases, news reports, columns, op-eds, features, and profiles. The reader will also find a few literary pieces published concurrently in the press or in literary magazines.

  In selecting these writings, I have tried to avoid any academic, stylistic, or historical categorization. As a reader and editor of García Márquez, I have chosen texts that contain a latent narrative tension between journalism and literature, where the seams of reality are stretched by his unstoppable narrative impulse, offering us the chance to once again enjoy the “storyteller” that he was.

  In these works, readers will also see the journalistic skills that García Márquez brought to his works of fiction. “But those books have such an amount of research and fact checking, and historical rigor,” he said of his novels, “that in fact they are basically great fictional or fantastic reports, but the method of investigation and the way of handling the information and the facts is that of a journalist.”

  The reader will find journalistic texts from his youth in which the budding narrator tries to find a reason to cross the line into literature, as in the opening story about the president’s barber, early snippets of narrations where characters or places that will populate One Hundred Years of Solitude begin to appear; a reportage from Rome about a young woman’s mysterious death in which the country’s political and artistic elites appear to be implicated, where García Márquez attempts a mixture of police procedural and the society pages that brings to mind La Dolce Vita; an investigation into trafficking of women from Paris to Latin America that ends with an interrogation; overseas wire dispatches presented as short stories; reflections on his craft, as he does in many of the articles written for El País in later years; and dozens of other stories that bring us back the García Márquez we miss.

  For this edition, I have worked with Anne McLean to bring to the English translation the same feeling of immediacy of the original, avoiding any notes, as García Márquez advised in his article “Poor Good Translators,” included here. Remembering Gregory Rabassa’s masterful work on One Hundred Years of Solitude, he writes, “He never explains anything in a footnote, which is the least valid and unfortunately most well worn resource of bad translators.” The same goes for the decision not to fix some mistaken Italian names or the incorrect lyrics of some Beatles songs. About that, he writes that a text should “pass into the other language just as it was, not only with its virtues, but also with its defects. It is a duty of loyalty to the reader in the new language.” Finally, a paragraph and a half, missing in Gilard’s edition from a section titled “A crucial half hour” within “The Scandal of the Century,” was restored from the original version found in Crónicas y reportajes.

  I owe a special debt to Carmen Balcells and Claudio López de Lamadrid, who put this project in my hands. I had already worked with García Márquez on his memoirs, and we had spent a lot of time in his house in El Pedregal working on I’m Not Here to Give a Speech. As always, my immense gratitude to Mercedes, Rodrigo, and Gonzalo for their suggestions and advice. The legacy of the journalistic work of Gabriel García Márquez continues its journey through the Fundación para el Nuevo Periodismo Iberoamericano, lead by Jaime Abello, through workshops where hundreds of journalists from around the world have been and still are trained every year. My greatest thanks to Gabo himself, for his confidence and support of my work. And especially for his friendship.

  —CRISTÓBAL PERA

  The Presidential Barber

  A photograph of His Excellency, President of the Republic, Mariano Ospina Pérez, appeared a few days ago in a government newspaper inaugurating the new direct telephone service between Bogotá and Medellín. The chief executive looks serious and worried in the picture, surrounded by ten or fifteen telepho
ne sets, which seem to be the cause of the president’s concentrated, attentive look. I don’t think there is any object that gives a clearer impression of a busy man, of a public servant entirely dedicated to finding the solution to complicated dissimilar problems, than this flock of telephones (and I request, parenthetically, applause for the surrealistically corny metaphor) that adorn the presidential image. From the look of the man who’s using them, it seems that each receiver might put him in touch with a different one of the many problems of state, and that el señor presidente finds himself obliged to spend twelve hours of every day trying to channel them by long distance from his remote head of state’s office. However, in spite of this sensation of an incalculably busy man, Señor Ospina Pérez is still, even in the photograph I’m looking at, an appropriately dressed man, the strands of his snowy summit carefully combed, his closely shaved chin soft and smooth, as evidence of the frequency with which the president turns to the intimate and efficient complicity of his barber. And, in fact, this is the question I’ve posed as I contemplate the latest photo of the best-shaved leader in the Americas: Who is the palace barber?

  Señor Ospina is a cautious, astute, and wary man, who seems to profoundly know the nature of those who serve him. His ministers are men who have his complete trust, whom it is not possible to imagine committing sins against presidential friendship, be they sins of word or thought. The palace chef, if the palace has a chef, must be a functionary of irrevocable ideological conviction, who prepares with exquisite care the stews that a few hours later will serve as a highly nutritious factor for the Republic’s first digestion, which must be a good, carefree digestion. Furthermore, given that the opposition’s malicious slanders must penetrate as far as the palace kitchen, clandestinely, the president’s table will not lack an honest taster. If all this happens with the ministers, the chef, the advisor, how must he be with the barber, the only voting mortal who can allow himself the democratic liberty of caressing the president’s chin with the sharpened steel of a razor blade? Besides, who is this influential gentleman to whom every morning Señor Ospina communicates his preoccupations of the previous night, to whom he relates, with meticulous detail, the plot of his nightmares, and who is, after all, an efficient advisor, as all worthy barbers must be?