How Kerala fell for Fidel Castro, Cuba, the charm of revolution, and Marquez

Kerala, in southern India, flaunts a special history: it was here that the Communist Party of India (CPI) was voted to power in an election in 1957. It was a first for Asia and, besides San Marino (a microstate enclaved by Italy) and British Guiana (located in South America), it was the third communist government to be formally elected. As they say in Malayalam, Kerala manassu edathu manassu (The Kerala mind is a leftist mind). The influence of leftist politics in Kerala was so deep that it spawned a literary culture that familiarized the people with classics and heroes associated with liberation movements from afar.

From Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and Julius Fučík’s Notes from the Gallows to Ethel Lilian Voynich’s The Gadfly (all works translated into Malayalam), books were lapped up by those under the spell of the romance of the Revolution. Alongside, high literacy rates ensured an above-average interest in world politics. A combination of all these made Castro a recognizable name in the state. Castro, at that time in my childhood, was in the news over his comments about the war in the Falkland Islands, which the military junta of the time in Argentina decided to occupy by force, prompting a war with the British, who claimed that the islands southeast of Argentina — and 8000 miles away from England — were theirs.

A lasting impression

Castro made an unlikely statement in Argentina’s favour more than a month after Britain launched the war, although the right-wing junta in power in the Latin American nation was backed by Cuba’s archenemy, the United States. Cuba had been silent and its communist ally, the Soviet Union, ambivalent for weeks. Perhaps sensing that Britain was winning the war, Castro called upon nonaligned nations (those part of the Non-Aligned Movement) to take whatever steps may seem appropriate to ‘stop the British-US aggression.’

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The Americans who had initially tried to negotiate a peace deal for their Latin American ally later threw their weight behind the UK, their NATO ally from Europe, when it became clear that the Argentine regime was in no mood to relent. Its leaders used the occasion to distract the public from the excesses of the ‘Dirty War’ (which started in 1976 and would end in 1983) against suspected leftist political opponents during the course of which up to 30,000 citizens were killed or made to disappear. Obviously, the reason why Castro lashed out against the NATO forces had more to do with the existential threat his country faced from the US rather than politics in Argentina.

After this event, I did not hear about Castro until 1983, when he was covered extensively in India as the man who bear-hugged the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi at the inauguration of the Non-Aligned Summit in New Delhi, which was attended by more than a hundred heads of state. At a time when Indian women, especially those in positions of power, were not photographed hugging men, certainly not those unrelated to them, the incident at Delhi’s Vigyan Bhavan created a stir and sensation-and left Mrs Gandhi blushing. A dashing man with a beard and film-star looks, and more than that, charisma — for us kids, his photographs in dailies left a lasting impression.

Márquez’s support for Cuba added to mystique around him

I would read later from the account of the veteran career diplomat K. Natwar Singh, a Congress leader and an associate of Mrs Gandhi, that it was at this summit that Castro introduced Mrs Gandhi to someone admired by the world and idolized by us Malayalis: Gabriel García Márquez, the Bogota-born Nobel Prize-winning writer. The Castro- Márquez friendship had elicited considerable interest in the Colombian literary genius, whose position on Cuba made him unpopular among some other contemporary writers like the Peruvian writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, who attacked Márquez using an expression that translated to ‘courtesan of Cuba.’ Although I love Llosa, I believe he was being grossly harsh to his former friend.

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In sharp contrast, in Kerala, Márquez’s support for Cuba only added to the unending mystique around him. He even wrote a non-fiction work titled Images of Cuba, in which he talks about various events in Cuba’s history in the first decades since the 1959 Revolution. Some excerpts from that work were included in The Strange Pilgrims, a collection of short stories he had written over a long period. That book was translated into Malayalam, along with a few other important works of his, and is widely appreciated. Márquez became one of my favourite authors ever since I first read him in Malayalam in 1990. His Cuban link did make him more popular in the state — and surprisingly it didn’t make him unpopular even among those who disagreed with his political views. The first Márquez book I read was the translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude (Ekanthathayude Noor Varshangal in Malayalam). He also became the favourite of publishers and booksellers in the state. Malayali publisher Ravi D.C., who runs Kerala’s top publishing house DC Books, had this to say about Márquez in an interview shortly after his passing away in 2014, “Márquez has been accepted and enjoyed by Keralites as a Malayali writer and not as a foreigner. We first published Márquez in Malayalam in the early 1980s and he continues to be a best-seller?”

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Journalist and Márquez buff K.P.M. Basheer wrote shortly after the literary icon’s demise, 'The Malayali’s fixation with Márquez, which began in the 1970s, is best told in these jokes: Márquez is “the best known Malayali writer in Latin America” and the “first Malayalam author who has won the Nobel”? In recognition of his fanbase in the state, Malayali novelist-short story writer N.S. Madhavan, a former civil servant and leftist political commentator, proclaimed in jest that ‘Márquez is a Malayali.’ In February 2023, when the Mathrubhumi Daily organised its annual literature festival in the state capital Thiruvananthapuram, one of the participants was Márquez’s grandson Mateo García Elizondo. I met him at the festival, which was curated by my friend and classmate Sabin Iqbal, and found Mateo overwhelmed by how much we Malayalis knew about his grandfather. Following my advice, he paid a visit to the Modern Book Centre, one of the finest booksellers in the state from where we used to purchase his grandfather’s books in our college days in the mid-1990s.

(Excerpted from Mad About Cuba: A Malayali Revisits the Revolution by Ullekh N.P., with permission from Penguin Random House)