"It’s worth imagining what might have happened had García Márquez come out against Castro over the Padilla Affair. In 1971, the year after the English-language translation to One Hundred Years of Solitude was published, García Márquez was probably the world’s third-most famous Latin American, after the Brazilian soccer star Pelé and Castro himself. Had he joined his less famous Latin American colleagues as well as other writers like Susan Sontag and Italo Calvino in coming out against Castro, García Márquez would have stripped the revolution of any of its remaining luster. That’s not to say that Castro would’ve fallen or that other revolutionary movements would’ve died in the womb, but the Cuban revolution would have been exposed by the continent’s most popular spokesman, its greatest living writer, for what it truly was—a brutal dispensation that turned husbands and wives against each other, jailed dissidents, writers, homosexuals, and anyone who deviated from the strictures of Castroism, all in order to extinguish freedom. The issue then isn’t simply that García Márquez made the wrong choice when he backed Castro in the Padilla Affair, but that he legitimized totalitarianism, in Cuba and throughout the rest of Latin America."
Read the rest of Lee Smith's essay in The Weekly Standard.
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