Havana, Mar 7 (Prensa Latina) Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel has recalled Nobel Literature Prize winner Gabriel García Marquez (1927-2014) on his 95th birthday and highlighted how the writer’s work is inseparable from the island.
On Twitter, the president noted that, Garcia Marquez, who is considered the master of magical realism was born on March 6, 1927 “in Aracataca, a remote Colombian town that Gabo immortalized.”
The head of State also stressed that Garcia Marquez was a close friend of the historic leader of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro.
The journalist traveled to Havana in January 1959 to participate in Operation Truth, a massive press conference called by Fidel Castro to fight the misinformation campaigns against the nascent Revolution and the trials of the torturers and murderers of the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship (1952-1958).
Five months later, the Latin American news agency Prensa Latina was set up, and by 1960 Garcia Marquez was already part of the staff of correspondents in the region.
In fact, the writer founded the agency’s Bogota office and later the New York office, under the direction of Cuban reporter Francisco Portela.
Diaz-Canel also recalled in his tweet that the International Film and Television School, founded in Cuba in 1986, had the Colombian intellectual as its main inspiration.
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