CAMAGÜEY.- Maybe to see it personally looked like a mirage. His name, his photos and his exploits were walking in a stream of means of press, and to sight him personally had the merit of a privilege.
It was in 1959 when his look met that dynamic, bearded young man, of walking in strides, of whom he heard speak for the first time in 1955, when Nicolás Guillén said to him, in Paris, that this combatant had just gone out of the jail after leading the assault to barracks.
Now, four years later, he had him in front, while “… he was convincing an employee of the airport of Camagüey that he always had a chicken in the icebox so that the foreign tourists did not believe the imperialist fib that the Cuban we are dying of famine”.
They were going to be big friends, but he could not know this fact of the future.
Then the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, although he already had journalistic and literary prestige, was still not the symbol extremely internationally well known that he would become some years later.
It turned out to be logical that Fidel did not notice his presence in the airfield, in which the visitor made - proceeding from the exterior - a scale in transit towards Havana, where the Commander was also going, in the plane named Turquino Peak, a twin-engine plane DC-3.
Because of the bad weather up to the capital of the country, as they announced to the passengers, the flights towards this city were delayed.
Fidel decided to risk himself and went out in the direction of Havana.
The South American supposed that he would be one of the last persons in seeing the Leader of the Revolution alive.
The plane in which there traveled García Márquez, a four-engine plane Viscount, set off after the abnormal situation, and in the capital´s José Martí airport the visitor saw to the Turquino Peak in the track.
The journalist - writer corroborated that his presumption was mistaken, and he very loving of the overturned predictions as he alludes in his fiction texts, neither he could predict that Fidel would be one of his best literary advisers.
He came to Cuba initially in 1959, interested in bringing about the Revolution, and in this intention he managed, among other targets, to be one of the correspondents of the news agency Latin Press, founded in this year in Havana.
He returned other times, with different objectives, and one of the routes of the beginning and consolidation of the friendship with Fidel took root in the books.
He was bringing to him originals of unpublished texts so that he checked them, for example, those of History of a castaway, and of Chronicle of an announced death, in that type detected, respectively, errors about the speed of a ship cruise, and as regards the weapon.
“The answers have to be exact, since it is capable of discovering the minimal contradiction of a chance phrase. The books are another source of vital information. He is a voracious reader. Nobody explains how the time is enough not of what method he makes use to read so much and with so much speed, although he insists that he does not have any especially. Often he takes a book in the dawn and on the following morning he comments on it. He reads English, but he does not speak it. He prefers to read in Castilian and at any time, he is ready to read a role with letter that he comes across. He is a habitual reader of economic and historical topics. He is a good literature reader and he follows it with attention”.
It is almost an unknown fact, and it is worthy to remember it: it was in the airport of Camagüey where García Márquez saw Fidel for the first time. This was the prologue of a fecund friendship born of the books.
- Translated by Linet Acuña Quilez