The Cuban poet and essayist Michael H. Miranda is preparing an essay titled "The Reader Fidel" to dismantle the image of Fidel Castro as an intellectual and great reader, a mythical construction that he claims was largely propagated by Gabriel García Márquez.
The trigger was the removal of the statues of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara from the Tabacalera Garden in Mexico City, which took place in July 2025 when the mayor of Cuauhtémoc ordered their removal due to administrative irregularities.
Upon observing the photograph in the news, Miranda noticed a detail that motivated him to take notes: "When I looked closely at the photo in the article, the statue was Fidel Castro with a book. Reading. Then I thought: but this is another myth."
For Miranda, that image encapsulates a narrative he considers false: "They want to sell him as a reader, as a man of books, when he was simply a soldier."
The writer clarifies, however, that he does not intend to reduce Castro to a caricature: "I also don't want to create a caricature of a figure like Fidel Castro. He wasn't just any ordinary person." But he insists that "I also don't want him to be sold to me as a man of extensive readings because he was not."
Miranda directly points to García Márquez as the main architect of that mythologizing: "García Márquez is largely responsible for that mythologizing of the reader that exists with Fidel Castro. Because all the time he would tell us that the originals before being published were taken by Fidel Castro, and Fidel Castro made corrections to them."
That narrative, publicly reiterated by the Colombian Nobel laureate for decades, helped to construct the image of Castro as a literary editor and man of culture.
For her essay, Miranda references the book "Gabo y Fidel: el paisaje de una amistad," by the Andalusian professor Ángel Esteban and the Belgian philologist Stéphanie Panichelli, published in 2004. This work examines their friendship from political, literary, and moral dimensions, including the controversial Padilla case and García Márquez's fascination with Cuban power.
"We also need to challenge the mythologization of the intellectual that Fidel Castro represents," asserts Miranda, who believes that this critical task is still necessary.
In the same conversation, Miranda warned of a parallel risk: that Raúl Castro, if he dies or is removed from power, might face a fate similar to that of Che Guevara and be mythologized by certain sectors of the left.
"We run the risk of turning it into a myth as well, like it happened with Che Guevara," he noted, adding, "I believe he is already mythologized too, albeit on a smaller scale than Fidel Castro."
Miranda, author of "Deserta," "Hilachas," and "Asilo en brazos," spoke with CiberCuba as part of a broader interview regarding the political situation in Cuba and the prospects for the day after Raúl Castro.
The book by Ángel Esteban, which Miranda cites as a starting point for his analysis, was also published in English under the title "Fidel and Gabo: A Portrait of the Legendary Friendship Between Fidel Castro and Gabriel García Márquez," and it remains the definitive academic work on a friendship that defined the relationship between Latin American intellectuals and the Cuban dictatorship for over four decades.
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