“Many years later, in front of the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía would remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” This is how “One Hundred Years of Solitude” begins. Executions are a recurring theme in the masterful work, that classic of magical realism, which takes place in a mythical town called Macondo, straight out of the fertile imagination of Gabriel García Márquez.
Executions have played a predominant role in universal history, and of course in our towns. They are also a recurring theme in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” which actually begins with Aureliano facing his execution. It is the same Aureliano Buendía who escapes from such a terrible end and the author reminds us, on his wedding day, while he puts on his boots; They would be the same ones he was wearing the day he saw himself in front of the platoon. But half a century after the publication, I wonder how much the shootings he witnessed in 1959 influenced García Márquez when he arrived in Cuba at a time of a recently launched and triumphalist revolution that shook the island with the force of a gale. According to a publication by the Gabo Center, “On January 20, 1959, García Márquez attended the trial against Jesús Sosa Blanco at the Ciudad Deportiva in Havana, which changed his idea about the dictator’s novel that he had been thinking about for years.” . That was a Roman circus in the 20th century. But it was not until I saw the scene in the adaptation of the novel brought to the screen by Netflix that, like a flash of light, one of those that clears your view rather than blinding you, that I returned to the Cuba of 1959.
The phrase of one of the most famous executioners in Cuba, Colonel Cornelio Rojas, was pronounced by the mayor of Macondo, Apolinar Moscote. Captured on screen, the shots that penetrated Cornelio Rojas’s very white guayabera and made his hat fly were preceded by the phrase: “There you have your revolution, take care of it.” The Moscote created by García Márquez was more poetic: with his classic white linen suit, in a kind of ironic scolding and resignation he stated: “There you have your liberal paradise, enjoy it!”
The execution of Cornelio Rojas was broadcast incessantly on television. Photos of it appeared in reports accompanied by the famous phrase, flooding magazines and newspapers. History that could not have escaped García Márquez in the turbulent days of that beginning of bloody revenge.
García Márquez has said that his first trip to Cuba was in January of that year of jubilation over the triumph of the revolution. In his chronicle, “Cayo el Hombre,” he never acknowledged that it was a time marked by excessive bloodshed. The band of outlaws that came down from the mountains with rosaries around their necks killed thousands more in the supposed peace than they killed in the supposed war. One mother, Juana Gros de Olea, lost her three children in two days during the first week of celebration, two of them in a ditch dug by Raúl Castro in Oriente, where more than 70 men were shot without trial in those turbulent days in those that Cuba lost its mind in the same way that Macondo lost its sleep. Others, in trials with predetermined sentences, were sentenced to die by firing squad by a foreigner who, despite there being evidence that exonerated the accused, asked: Did he wear the blue uniform? Then he goes on a trip. Later, the same adventurer, appointed director of the national bank, would sign the bills with his nickname: Che, to further humiliate the Cubans.
Journalists from all over pounced on Cuba, attracted by morbidity and a growing left that, like leaf litter, destroyed everything in its path. The vast majority kept quiet about the bloodbath that covered the island daily. They were dazzled by those bearded men who robbed, murdered and imprisoned like rustlers from some primitive village where there were no laws, no shame and much less empathy.
García Márquez arrived in Cuba in the first days of the cruelest of January months from Caracas. True or not, fiction or reality, he claims to have forgotten his passport. “Show something that identifies you!”, they demanded and he produced his laundry receipt: “The Venezuelan immigration agent—more Cubanist than a Cuban—stamped it on the back.” It was that document with which the illiterate people who swarmed the command posts authorized their entry into a country where chaos reigned. The Colombian journalist must have been influenced by that excessive display of violence in the executions, when years later he would describe that of Alirio Noguera and the people of Macondo witnessed it in its entirety. It was the same in Cuba, only they were broadcast on the small screen and the bloodthirsty crowd shouted: “Paredón! Wall!
“Wall!” Noguera died shouting: “Long live the revolution!” The cry that was heard in Cuba before the lifeless bodies fell, full of holes, was “Long live Christ the King!”
When I read the novel in the 1970s, one of the questions suggested by the teacher was whether the story was a chain of errors that were repeated over and over again. To me it seemed more like a story composed of fables and legends that were not foreign to me for having been born on a Caribbean island, which, long before magical realism, its inhabitants had considered enchanted. There was already a Fernando Ortiz and a Lidia Cabrera. Long before reading his work, I remember Fernando Ortiz when he visited my childhood home and he dazzled us with incredible stories of Cuban fights against demons and told us what to do so that the salt loses all its power.
Time passed and they also knocked down the “lousy eagle” in front of the Malecón. From a young man dazzled by the events of that disastrous revolution and despite his fear of the military, García Márquez would soon become an apologist for that island marked by the stench of olive green and death. A few days after Ricardo Masetti founded the Prensa Latina news agency in Cuba, García Márquez was already its correspondent. His defense of the indefensible earned him the very sad achievement of becoming a faithful ally of Fidel Castro.
Who was going to tell him in 1967, after writing that novel where Úrsula places her body before Moscote, the father-in-law of her son Aureliano, to avoid his execution, or when Arcadio, together with his wife Rebecca, stop the execution of his brother? , Colonel Aureliano Buendía, that in 1989 Gabo and all his influence and friendship with Fidel Castro could not prevent the execution of another colonel, Antonio de la Guardia, father-in-law of son of your friend from Prensa Latina, Ricardo Massetti? Magical realism pales before reality because it surpasses fiction.
When years ago I interviewed his daughter, Iliana de la Guardia, upon her arrival in exile, she told of her desperate efforts before García Márquez to save the lives of her father and her uncle Patricio. She and her husband, Jorge Massetti, went to see him at protocol house number 35 where he lived to ask him to do something. Fidel Castro’s ally, who enjoyed bourgeois luxuries in a way that Cubans themselves could not, told them not to worry, but warned them not to see anyone from human rights or the media because it would be worse for them. He asked them to trust his personal efforts before Fidel. The next day he left the country. The Council of State and Fidel Castro himself would ratify the sentences of Cause Number One of 1989: death penalty by firing squad. Antonio de la Guardia, along with General Arnaldo Ochoa – hero of the republic – and two other high-ranking officers, Jorge Martínez Valdés and Amado Padrón Trujillo, would be killed by the bullets of the same regime that they had defended with their own lives and that now imposed on them. the death penalty for the simple fact of having followed the orders of the highest command and thus Fidel Castro tried to disassociate himself from his participation in drug trafficking.
Netflix’s Macondo, more than half a century later, has not had the same reception as the book in the 60s. The adaptation to the screen, as Sergio de Molino described it in the newspaper El País, “is a horrible series.” For me, the horror was learning that a writer was a genius in his prose, but miserable in life. His friendship with Fidel Castro and his regime of terror would end up staining his poncho, as Chilean President Michelle Bachelet would be warned before heading towards Cuba to embrace the tyrant.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” begins with a man before the firing squad. Upon García Márquez’s arrival in Cuba, he was shot daily. Those men did not have the luck of Aureliano Buendía. What the famous writer could not imagine was that the end of the novel would be a harbinger of today’s Cuba. When Aureliano manages to decipher the scrolls of Melquíades, he understands “why the races condemned to a hundred years of solitude did not have a chance on earth.” Neither did the victims of such a disastrous regime. While threads of blood ran through the island and the troubled Cuban mothers shed endless tears, the so-called intellectuals raised their glasses and toasted despite the fact that the prisons were full of political prisoners, men and women.
The fateful Che Guevara appeared before the United Nations to reiterate the harsh reality: “We have shot, we shot and we will continue to shoot as long as it is necessary.” No one then stood between the victims and the perpetrators to stop those crimes as happened in Macondo because the socialist plague that García Márquez and the so-called intellectuals supported to the hilt had fallen on the island. Gabo’s opportunism had already been manifested previously by his lack of solidarity during the Padilla case. He stood on the side of the commander in chief, supporting the failure of a colleague forced to read a crude self-criticism written by the political police. A poet was taken out of the game because the slogan “Within the Revolution, everything” had to prevail; Outside of the Revolution, nothing.”
The implacable reality left them with their guayaberas splashed with blood, although it was not recognized by those who, due to their proximity to power, had already lost their lucidity, as José Arcadio was losing it. Except that, instead of tying them to the chestnut tree, some were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. In the end, Macondo was carried away by “the wrath of a biblical hurricane” and Úrsula’s terror that descendants with pig tails would be born to her manifested itself in the sad story of a cursed town. Today other ghosts roam the cursed island bathed by bloody waters, forcing Cubans to abandon their homeland on journeys through unthinkable jungles, fleeing from the pigs who lead a regime of terror. The same terror that José Arcadio Buendía and Úrsula Iguarán would have felt when they fled Riohacha in search of new horizons, overwhelmed by the incessant presence of the ghost of Prudencio Aguilar.
Like Macondo, in Cuba, that island that Guillermo Cabrera Infante described as imperishable, everything that its inhabitants had built was also carried away by “the wind, warm, incipient, full of voices from the past, of murmurs of ancient geraniums…” Now I see, in a new light, the irony of how much there was of Cuba in Macondo and vice versa. Big island and small town crowned with the halo of doom, so much so that they are difficult to differentiate.
