By Albert Traver

Austin, Texas, Oct 24 (EFE). – The personal archive of late Nobel literature laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who for decades was barred from entering the United States due to his friendship with Fidel Castro, makes clear his close bond with the Cuban revolutionary leader, University of Texas academics told EFE.

“There are lots of (photos) of Fidel,” said Daniela Lozano, one of the archivists at that Austin-based university’s Harry Ransom Center, a humanities research library and museum that acquired the archive from the Colombian author’s family last year and has spent the past 11 months cataloguing the manuscripts, letters, photographs and other items it contains.

The former Cuban leader, now 89, appears frequently in the four albums titled “La Habana,” which include photos of the two in informal settings, including relaxing on a yacht and roasting a goat.

Another album called “Fidel – Biran” documents the visit that Castro and Garcia Marquez made in 1996 to the small town where Fidel and his younger brother, Cuban President Raul Castro, were born in 1926 and 1931, respectively.

Castro appears in an album titled “Amigos” that includes photos of Garcia Marquez with other famous figures such as Woody Allen, Carmen Balcells, Luis Buñuel, Julio Cortazar, Carlos Fuentes, Graham Greene, Milan Kundera and Pablo Neruda.

He is also included in another called “Gabo with Presidents” that contains photos of the novelist with, among others, Bill Clinton, who lifted a three-decade U.S. travel ban on the author in 1995, and Mikhail Gorbachev.

Garcia Marquez (1927-2014), recipient of the Nobel Prize in literature in 1982, is affectionately known as Gabo throughout Latin America.

“A lot has been written about Garcia Marquez being Fidel’s friend, but it hasn’t been thoroughly examined,” Gabriela Polit, a professor at the University of Texas’ Department of Spanish and Portuguese, told EFE, adding that the archive “needs to be calmly looked at” and could “offer some nice surprises.”

Garcia Marquez was among a group of journalists who founded the Cuban news agency Prensa Latina shortly after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959.

He began his work there in Bogota and opened the agency’s bureau in New York in 1961, when then-FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover began monitoring him due to his ties with Castro’s Cuba.

Garcia Marquez’s personal archive also contains notebooks on his travels to Cuba and a speech and three articles typed by Castro himself.

“He had the ability to speak to the powerful. For some reason, he particularly developed that ability with Fidel,” Cesar Salgado, a Puerto Rican professor at the University of Texas, said, noting that he had interceded to help dissidents leave the island and been given permission to co-found the International Film and TV School in the western Cuban town of San Antonio de los Baños.

In interviews and articles, Garcia Marquez always praised his friend’s “political intelligence,” his “instinct” and his “infinite curiosity.”

Castro, for his part, described a visit from Garcia Marquez and his wife, Mercedes Barcha, in 2008 as the “most pleasant time” he had spent since falling ill two years earlier and being forced to resign all of his state and political offices.

Some of the intimate moments of that relationship, evidence of the close bond that formed between the two men, are visible with the opening of the beloved author’s personal archive in Texas. EFE