Mr. García Márquez’s friendship with Mr. Castro, though, caused him trouble. Other Latin American writers, among them the Cuban exile Guillermo Cabrera Infante, criticized him for cultivating warm ties with a dictator.
“Castro’s courtesan,” the Peruvian author, Mario Vargas Llosa, took to calling Mr. García Márquez.
Mr. García Márquez said he was able to use his direct line to Mr. Castro to win the release of jailed dissidents.
“I know how far I can go with Fidel,” the author told the New Yorker. “Sometimes he says no. Sometimes later he comes and tells me I was right.”
Mr. Vargas Llosa famously ended his once-close friendship with Mr. García Márquez when he punched him in a Mexico City theater in 1976 after accusing him of betrayal, wrote Mr. Martin’s biography.
Mr. García Márquez’s relations with the U.S. were also strained, with his close ties to Cuba and sharp criticism of American policies leading the State Department to deny him a visa for years.
Mr. García Márquez had humble beginnings, born in the sleepy town of Aracataca on March 6, 1927 and raised for much of his early years by his maternal grandparents—Tranquilian Iguarán Cotes and Colonel Nicolás Márquez —and two aunts.
The superstitions and otherworldly tales he heard in their small, wood-plank home would fire his imagination, especially those from the colonel. A veteran of the War of a Thousand Days—a Colombian civil conflict—Col. Márquez told his precocious grandson about the country’s harrowing history, like the mass killing of United Fruit Co. banana workers.
“The great old man didn’t tell me about Little Red Riding Hood,” Mr. García Márquez said years later. “He told me terrible stories about war, about the massacre of the banana workers that took place the year I was born.”