"Persona non grata gave visibility to the schism of the generation of the boom for Cuba"

How did the different authors of the Latin American boom shape their political trajectory in the 1960s and 1970s? When did the disengagement with Fidel Castro and the Cuban revolution begin? Why was Gabriel Garca Mrquez not so close to Hugo Chvez as Fidel Castro? What role did the Colombian Nobel play in the 1994 raft crisis?

Rafael Rojas, a Cuban historian based in Mexico, discusses all these questions and more in his new essay "La polis literaria" (Taurus, 2018, available in digital format), which deals with the context of Guerra Fra in which writers such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, Jos Donoso, Jorge Edwards and Julio Cortzar, among others, have built their work. In an interview with "El Mercurio", the intellectual tells how culture and politics were deeply connected in those years and helped shape the current panorama.

– In Mexico, he describes the political-intellectual paths taken by Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes, his approaches and his departures from the Cuban Revolution, the later stage of liberalism, the differences that marked an entire generation of # 39; intellectuals. How did these struggles influence the political-intellectual panorama in Mexico today?

"The poetic, fictional and essayist work of Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes is a major badet to the democratic transition in Mexico.This, we know, has been a slower transition than in the past. Southern Cone country, among others, because in Mexico there was no military dictatorship right, but between the 60s and 90s, the poems and essays and novels of Paz Fuentes, in addition to its own public positions against the authoritarianism of the PRI, has decisively contributed to the access to democracy today. "

– How do you see the positioning of intellectuals and artists in the world? Mexico before the almost certain triumph of López Obrador?

"It seems to me that this time the artistic and intellectual community was a little more divided than in 2006 in its support for López Obrador." Twelve years ago the enthusiasm of the intellectuals was more palpable than now, because the candidate for a successful government in Mexico City and unacceptable stigma on the part of the Vicente Fox government. López Obrador is now much more accepted in the country's political system, largely because of the many campaigns of his opponents. "

-Do you remember the article that Garca Mrquez wrote in 1999 for Cambio magazine," The riddle of los dos Chévas ", in which the Colombian Nobel did not exclude that the Venezuelan president is an "illusionist", history as more dspota ". What do you think of Garca Mrquez's badessment of the process that has just started in Venezuela?

"The fact that Garca Mrquez has no sympathy for Hugo Chvez has always seemed to me a very telling fact that his detractors are unaware of." Gabo was a friend of Fidel, though, as he may be documented, he had many reservations about the political regime of the island and, in particular, the limitation of freedom of information in the bureaucracies of real socialism.A Colombian peacemaker, Garca Mrquez learned the ambivalences and the manipulations of Chavism compared to the neighboring country. "

-Why do you think the role of Garca Mrquez in American negotiations? and Cuba during the Clinton administration, in the 1994 raft crisis, they went so unnoticed?

"Many details of this negotiation have been known in recent years by testimonies such as those of the late President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and the studies of Peter Kornbluh, William LeoGrande and Homero Campa. It turns out that in 1994 Garca Mrquez was a friend of the three governors involved in the Cuban chevrons conflict: Castro, Clinton and Salinas. "

-see some similarity or continuity between caudillos and Latin American dictators romanticized in books like "El otoo del patriarca", by Garca Mrquez, or "La fiesta del Chivo", by Vargas Llosa, with the series of strong leaders who have taken power in the region over the past decade, such as Hugo Chvez, Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Rafael Correa or the Kirchner?

"Of all the leaders of the Bolivarian left, the only one that seems to me to be fully inscribed in this dictatorial tradition is Hugo Chvez, that his political regime was not a military dictatorship like those described by the novelists of the boom Chvez came from the army, he was mesical, narcissistic, melancholy and shared all this imaginary depot, inherited from the 19th century, and that goes back to Bolvar himself. "

-You tell how, with Different shades and trends, the Politics was a central element of the work and life of the writers of the boom, there are indications that have made think, in the 60s and 70s, that Vargas Llosa will be the writer with the most concrete political aspirations, considering that he came to apply for Per's presidency?

"Mario Vargas Llosa has always been the author of the boom that has shown greater familiarity with the ideological and theoretical debates of modern politics.He was a great reader of the French existentialists, especially Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, but it was very difficult to suppose it at the height of 1966, when "The Green House" was published, or 1969, when Conversation in the Cathedral appeared., Who attempted his chance in Peruvian professional politics. "

– In his book you say that" Persona non grata "(1973)" has entered an intellectual field that was at the same time disappointed by the Cuban Revolution, by its characteristics The Stalinists were keenly interested in the possibility of a democratic socialism in Chile, after Allende's electoral victory. "What impact had the publication of Jorge Edwards' book at that time had definitions that the intellec What about the government and the Cuban regime? 19659002] "Persona non grata" was the book that gave visibility to the schism that, during the generation of the boom, had produced the stalinization of Cuban socialism and, specifically, the arrest and forced confession of the poet Hébert his wife Belkis Cuza Mal. In 1973, Edwards' courageous testimony represented, at the same time, the disenchantment with the island regime and the enthusiasm that Chilean democratic socialism woke up in the narrators of the boom. "

-You describe Vargas Llosa, Lezama Lima and Jorge Edwards, among others, moved away from the regime mainly from the Padilla affair and from the invasion of the USSR in Czechoslovakia. Beyond the context of the Fra war of those years, why do you think that today a situation as polarizing as the Venezuelan crisis has not moved writers and intellectuals?

"L & rsquo; Explanation lies, in my opinion, in the rarity Resonance that Chavismo has achieved within the Latin American intellectual community The writers and artists of the region did not identify as strongly with Chvez's project that The Cuban Revolution, Chilean Socialism or Nicaraguan Sandinism. Chavismo has been more intense in the field of Latin American social sciences, where this polarization has been felt in recent years. "