Vargas Llosa loved and loathed Castro’s Cuba | Ash Narain Roy

The death of Peruvian writer, journalist, essayist and politician and Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa marks the end of a golden age of Latin American literature. With his demise the Latin American boon has faded. As Angel Esteban del Campo of University of Granada, Spain, writes, “diversity, perfection, originality and technical experimentation defined Vargas Llosa’s literary output.”

He was the last of the protagonist of the literary movement, the Latin American Boom. Vargas Llosa leaves behind an enduring impact on the world of literature. Some critics consider him to have had a more substantial international impact and worldwide audience than any other writer of the Latin American Boom.

Vargas Llosa, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and many others were enamoured of Fidel Castro’s revolutionary ideals. To them, Castro’s Cuba was as fashionable a topic of debate as women’s liberation, the war in Vietnam and civil rights. They believed what Castro claimed in 1959, months after the revolution: “our revolution is neither capitalist, nor Communist. It is not red, but olive green, the colour of the rebel army that emerged from the heart of the Sierra Maestra.”

American sociologist C. Wright Mills who popularised the term ‘new left’ wrote that the Cuban government of the mid-1960s was "not communist in any of the senses legitimately given to this word”. American journalist and writer Norman Mailer said of Castro that he was “the first and greatest, hero to appear in the world since the Second World War".

The endorsements from leading figures from the 20th century French philosophy like Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir and Latin American literary giants like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes and Vargas Llosa put a stamp of originality on Castro’s revolutionary credentials.

Sartre and de Beauvoir were the darlings of the left though they never embraced socialism. They were the unofficial philosophers of the non-Communist left. In the early 1960s Sartre and de Beauvoir visited Cuba, travelled across the country with Fidel Castro and fully endorsed the revolution.

Gabriel García Márquez, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1982, wrote of Castro’s "love of the word" as being one of his defining traits that attracted intellectuals. He described Castro as a “voracious reader”.

Not even the ardent admirers of Castro among the literary world went to the extent of admiring Castro as Marquez did. He went as far to compare Castro to Simon Bolivar and Jose Marti. Marquez worked for Prensa Latina, the news agency of the Cuban revolution. The Colombian novelist even used to send drafts of his novels to Castro for his comments.

Vargas Llosa visited Cuba five times. He was dazzled by Castro’s long speeches and highly impressed by his intellectual depth. In 1953, during the government of Manuel A Odria, Vargas Llosa enrolled in Lima’s National University of San Marcos to study law and literature. While at the university, he was a member of a Communist group, embracing the ideology as a reaction to the corruption and inequality endemic to Latin America.

As he said in his Nobel lecture, like many writers of his generation, “I was a Marxist and believed socialism would be the remedy for the exploitation and social injustices.”

He joined a communist cell named “Cahuide” in honour of an Inca commander. He believed socialism was the path to achieving the purity of the “new man”. Hence embracing Castro came natural to him. But he was also among the first to get disillusioned with Castro’s authoritarian streak. The Prague Spring shattered his illusions about communism. He wrote, “from then I never wrote a word I did not believe, unlike many writers”.

Castro’s triumph in 1959 was a bout of fresh air among all recent revolutions. Castro himself meticulously promoted Latin American literature. He needed legitimacy from intellectuals by hosting them and organising events to promote literature but also his worldview. Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, one of the leading lights of the “Latin American boom”, wrote his much -celebrated book, The Death of Artemio Cruz in Cuba.

Castro received visits and endorsements from the luminaries of Latin American men of letters like Pablo Neruda, Julio Cortazar, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa. They conferred legitimacy on Castro and his revolution by saying that the Latin American boom was made possible by the Cuban revolution:

To Vargas Llosa, literature was fire. He said that great literature was a radical political act. While receiving the Romulo Gallegos Prize in 1967, he gave a fiery speech titled “literature is fire” which he explained signified non-conformism and rebellion and that the writer’s very reason for being “is protest, contradiction and criticism.” He further explained that “there are no half-measures, that societies always suppress that human faculty which is artistic creation and eliminate once and for all that social agitator who is the writer, or that they admit literature into their midst, and in this case, they have no choice but to accept a perpetual torrent of aggression, irony, satire …”
Vargas Llosa said while accepting the Nobel Prize how grateful he was to France for “the discovery of Latin America”. This is where he read Jorge Luis Borges, Octavio Paz, Garcia Marquez, Carlos Fuentes, Julio Cortazar whose writings “were revolutionising narrative in the Spanish language.”

Vargas Losa’s views on Latin America’s cultural identity are quite radial. He believed that the notion of cultural identity is dangerous. He believed that from the social point of view, cultural identity merely represents a doubtful, artificial concept, but from a political perspective it threatens humanity’s most precious achievement: freedom.

Vargas Llosa’s turn to the right disappointed large sections of his admirers. He defended globalisation saying it doesn’t suffocate local cultures but rather liberates them from the ideological conformity of nationalism. He dismissed the critics of globalisation for their delirium of persecution complex.

He was equally harsh on French government’s campaigns in defence of a French “cultural identity”. He wrote: “a vast array of intellectuals and politicians is alarmed by the possibility that the soil that produced Montaigne, Descartes, Racine and Baudelaire… can be invaded by McDonald’s, Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken, rock, rap, Hollywood movies, blue jeans, sneakers and T-shirts.”

It is not easy to explain why he began to support Latin America and Spain’s rising authoritarian far-right movements. He openly supported Jair Bolsonaro, the Trump-like, authoritarian incumbent, against the leftist Lula. He also supported Chilean Presidential candidate José Antonio Kast against leftist Gabriel Boric.