Mario Vargas Llosa
March 28, 1936 – April 13, 2025
The Center for a Free Cuba released earlier today a statement on the passing of Mario Vargas Llosa Below is an excerpt.
The death of Mario Vargas Llosa in Lima, Peru is a great loss for Cubans in the island and around the world who benefited from his tireless efforts to denounce the crimes of Cuban communism. It is also a loss for millions of people worldwide whose struggle for human rights he defended in his many books, columns, and thousands of articles that appeared in major newspapers on three continents. Mario Vargas Llosa was a champion for the victims of oppression, and he urged the international community to assist them.
At a time when it was not fashionable to denounce tyrants in Havana, Moscow, Managua, or Caracas –and indeed in many other countries, Mario Vargas Llosa was a steadfast advocate for freedom and human dignity.
He was a Peruvian writer, university professor and politician. Vargas Llosa was the recipient of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature and is considered one of the leading writers of his generation. He has a large international audience and worldwide impact. Vargas Llosa has long been vocally opposed to the Castro dictatorship in Cuba. In 1971 following the imprisonment of Cuban poet, Heberto Padilla, Vargas Llosa, Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Susan Sontag and other world-renowned intellectuals, wrote to Fidel Castro on April 9, 1971 protesting his unjust detention.
The intellectuals’ first statement provoked Fidel Castro’s response, “gentlemen, bourgeois intellectuals and libellers and CIA agents (…) the shameless pseudo-leftists who want to win laurels by living in Paris, London, Rome,” closing the doors of Cuba to them forever.
Vargas Llosa and a larger number of world-renowned intellectuals wrote to the Cuban dictator a second time on May 21, 1971 following Padilla’s confession charging that it had been obtained through methods reminiscent of Stalinist repression.
This exchange made the front pages of newspapers around the world, and the attention provided protection to the Cuban poet.
Vargas Losa was a close friend of several Cuban writers, among them Carlos Alberto Montaner, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, and Reinaldo Arenas.The Center for a Free Cuba has included Mario Vargas Llosa in its Legion of Honor since 2016.
The Legion of Honor represents men and women from all parts of the world who came to the assistance of the Cuban people oppressed by the communist regime when many others chose to ignore their tragic plight. Cuban mothers, like mothers everywhere , teach their children to say, “thank you.” José Martí Cuba’s revered patriot and poet wrote that “Honrar, honra.” In Martí’s words, when we honor someone, we honor ourselves. It is our hope that when freedom arrives in Cuba, the name of Mario Vargas Llosa will be listed at an appropriate place in the Parliament of a Free Cuba.
He had been a man of the Left, but the systematic human rights abuses in Cuba shook his worldview, and changed the course of his life. In 2013, he spoke of this journey from Marxism to Liberalism in an address to the Montreal Economic Institute.
Background on The Padilla Affair
Heberto Juan Padilla, a Cuban poet, who like many had been an enthusiastic supporter of Fidel Castro ousting Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista in 1959, became disillusioned when the Castro regime’s dictatorial nature became clear, and reflected it in his writings. In 1968, however, Cuban judges in the national poetry contest awarded their “Julian del Casal” poetry prize to Padilla’s collection, Fuera del Juego (Out of the Game), which contained critical lines such as:
“The poet! Kick him out!
He has no business here.
He doesn’t play the game.
He never gets excited
Or speaks out clearly.
He never even sees the miracles …”
The book was published but an addendum was added that criticized the work as counterrevolutionary, and Heberto Padilla was placed under house arrest. On March 20, 1971 Heberto Padilla and Belkis Cuza Malé’s home was raided by armed state security agents at seven in the morning and they were arbitrarily detained.
Heberto Padilla with his wife Belkiz Cuza Malé in Cuba 1973
Belkis was held incommunicado for three days and released. Heberto was interrogated for over a month and psychologically tortured by the secret police and on April 27, 1971 taken to confess before the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (Unión Nacional de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, UNEAC) his counter-revolutionary tendencies. Cuban literary critic José Antonio Portuondo served as the moderator and introduced Heberto Padilla to the gathered group, and the numerous cameras of the official press. Below is an excerpt of a video from the event.
LIMA, Peru (AP) — Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa, Nobel literature laureate and a giant of Latin American letters, died Sunday. He was 89.
He was a prolific author and essayist with such celebrated novels as “The Time of the Hero” (La Ciudad y los Perros) and “Feast of the Goat,” and won myriad prizes. The Nobel committee said it was awarding him in 2010 “for his cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.”
“It is with deep sorrow that we announce that our father, Mario Vargas Llosa, passed away peacefully in Lima today, surrounded by his family,” read a letter signed by his children Álvaro, Gonzalo and Morgana, and posted by Álvaro on X.
“His departure will sadden his relatives, his friends and his readers around the world, but we hope that they will find comfort, as we do, in the fact that he enjoyed a long, adventurous and fruitful life, and leaves behind him a body of work that will outlive him,” they added.
The author’s lawyer and close friend, Enrique Ghersi, confirmed the death to The Associated Press and recalled the writer’s last birthday on March 28 at the home of his daughter, Morgana. “He spent it happy; his close friends surrounded him, he ate his cake, we joked that day that there were still 89 more years to go, he had a long, fruitful, and free life,” Ghersi said.
Tributes poured in for Vargas Llosa. In Spain, where he spent long stretches of his life, King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia expressed their condolences, writing on social media that “the Olympus of universal literature has opened its doors to Mario Vargas Llosa.”
Latin America’s new wave of writers
Vargas Llosa published his first collection of stories “The Cubs and Other Stories” (Los Jefes) in 1959. But he burst onto the literary stage in 1963 with his groundbreaking debut “The Time of the Hero,” a novel that drew on his experiences at a Peruvian military academy and angered the country’s military. A thousand copies were burned by military authorities, with some generals calling the book false and Vargas Llosa a communist.
That, and subsequent novels such as “Conversation in the Cathedral,” (Conversación en la Catedral) in 1969, quickly established Vargas Llosa as one of the leaders of the so-called “Boom,” or new wave of Latin American writers of the 1960s and 1970s, alongside Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes.
Vargas Llosa started writing early, and at 15 was a part-time crime reporter for La Crónica newspaper. According to his official website, other jobs he had included revising names on cemetery tombs in Peru, working as a teacher in the Berlitz school in Paris and briefly on the Spanish desk at Agence France-Presse in Paris.
He continued publishing articles in the press for most of his life, most notably in a twice-monthly political opinion column titled “Piedra de Toque” (Touchstones) that was printed in several newspapers.
Vargas Llosa came to be a fierce defender of personal and economic liberties, gradually edging away from his communism-linked past, and regularly attacked Latin American leftist leaders he viewed as dictators.
Although an early supporter of the Cuban revolution led by Fidel Castro, he later grew disillusioned and denounced Castro’s Cuba. By 1980, he said he no longer believed in socialism as a solution for developing nations.
In a famous incident in Mexico City in 1976, Vargas Llosa punched fellow Nobel Prize winner and ex-friend García Márquez, whom he later ridiculed as “Castro’s courtesan.” It was never clear whether the fight was over politics or a personal dispute, as neither writer ever wanted to discuss it publicly.
As he slowly turned his political trajectory toward free-market conservatism, Vargas Llosa lost the support of many of his Latin American literary contemporaries and attracted much criticism even from admirers of his work.
A pampered early life and ‘hell’ in a military school
Jorge Mario Pedro Vargas Llosa was born March 28, 1936, in Peru’s southern city of Arequipa, high in the Andes at the foot of the Misti volcano.
His father, Ernesto Vargas Maldonado, left the family before he was born. To avoid public scandal, his mother, Dora Llosa Ureta, took her child to Bolivia, where her father was the Peruvian consul in Cochabamba.
Vargas Llosa said his early life was “somewhat traumatic,” pampered by his mother and grandmother in a large house with servants, his every whim granted.
It was not until he was 10, after the family had moved to Peru’s coastal city of Piura, that he learned his father was alive. His parents reconciled and the family moved to Peru’s capital, Lima.
Vargas Llosa described his father as a disciplinarian who viewed his son’s love of Jules Verne and writing poetry as surefire routes to starvation, and feared for his “manhood,” believing that “poets are always homosexuals.”
After failing to get the boy enrolled in a naval academy because he was underage, Vargas Llosa’s father sent him to Leoncio Prado Military Academy — an experience that was to stay with Vargas Llosa and led to “The Time of the Hero.” The book won the Spanish Critics Award.
The military academy “was like discovering hell,” Vargas Llosa said later.
He entered Peru’s San Marcos University to study literature and law, “the former as a calling and the latter to please my family, which believed, not without certain cause, that writers usually die of hunger.”
After earning his literature degree in 1958 — he didn’t bother submitting his final law thesis — Vargas Llosa won a scholarship to pursue a doctorate in Madrid.
Vargas Llosa drew much of his inspiration from his Peruvian homeland, but preferred to live abroad, residing for spells each year in Madrid, New York and Paris.
His early novels revealed a Peruvian world of military arrogance and brutality, of aristocratic decadence, and of Stone Age Amazon Indians existing simultaneously with 20th-century urban blight.
“Peru is a kind of incurable illness and my relationship to it is intense, harsh and full of the violence of passion,” Vargas Llosa wrote in 1983.
After 16 years in Europe, he returned in 1974 to a Peru then ruled by a left-wing military dictatorship. “I realized I was losing touch with the reality of my country, and above all its language, which for a writer can be deadly,” he said.
In 1990, he ran for the presidency of Peru, a reluctant candidate in a nation torn apart by a messianic Maoist guerrilla insurgency and a basket-case, hyperinflation economy.
But he was defeated by a then-unknown university rector, Alberto Fujimori, who resolved much of the political and economic chaos but went on to become a corrupt and authoritarian leader in the process.
Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Vargas Llosa’s longtime friend, later confessed that he had rooted against the writer’s candidacy, observing: “Peru’s uncertain gain would be literature’s loss. Literature is eternity, politics mere history.”
Vargas Llosa also used his literary talents to write several successful novels about the lives of real people, including French Post-Impressionist artist Paul Gauguin and his grandmother, Flora Tristan, in “The Way to Paradise” in 2003 and 19th-century Irish nationalist and diplomat Sir Roger Casement in “The Dream of the Celt” in 2010. His last published novel was “Harsh Times” (Tiempos Recios) in 2019 about a U.S.-backed coup d’etat in Guatemala in 1954.
He became a member of the Royal Spanish Academy in 1994 and held visiting professor and resident writer posts in more than a dozen colleges and universities across the world.
In his teens, Vargas Llosa joined a communist cell and eloped with and later married a 33-year-old Bolivian, Julia Urquidi — the sister-in-law of his uncle. He later drew inspiration from their nine-year marriage to write the hit comic novel “Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter” (La Tía Julia y el Escribidor).
In 1965, he married his first cousin, Patricia Llosa, 10 years his junior, and together they had three children. They divorced 50 years later, and he started a relationship with Spanish society figure Isabel Preysler, former wife of singer Julio Iglesias and mother of singer Enrique Iglesias. They separated in 2022.
Vargas Llosa is survived by his children.
Their letter announcing his death said his remains will be cremated and there won’t be any public ceremony.
https://apnews.com/article/mario-vargas-llosa-obituary-511e54c5571b7486c1e57f560ce76952
Filmmaker Pavel Giroud: ‘The Cuban Revolution has the best marketing in the world’
‘El Caso Padilla’ documentary used unpublished material to expose the censorship and repression writer Heberto Padilla endured under the Castro regime
Cuban writer Heberto Padilla published a book of poetry called Fuera del Juego (Out of Bounds) in the late 1960s and was awarded a local literary award named after poet Julián de Casal for verses that excoriated the “Soviet-style” influences on the Castro regime after the Cuban Revolution. Fidel Castro waited two years before ordering Padilla’s carefully-orchestrated arrest on March 20, 1971, charging him with “treason against the homeland.”
Padilla was released from jail 38 days later and was forced to read a statement apologizing for his “subversive” writings. Foreign and local writers, artists, and intellectuals soon bombarded Castro with letters of objection. Disillusioned and downtrodden, Padilla left Cuba in the 1980s for the United States, where he died in 2000.
El Caso Padilla (The Padilla Affair), a documentary film by Pavel Giroud, explores the controversy surrounding Padilla’s treatment by the Castro regime and its significance for the Cuban, Latin American and international intellectual community. It thoroughly examines the incident from various perspectives and documents events before and after the uproar. Giroud had read Padilla’s own account of the events in his autobiography and initially planned to make a fiction movie about it. But his focus changed dramatically when new material surfaced after 50 yea
“It was quite challenging,” said Giroud. “How could I help a 13-year-old from Sweden or Japan understand this story? I made a conscious effort to focus on the narrative of a man oppressed by power, and set aside ideological matters. The most relatable historical example is Galileo. In this case, the Cuban Revolution plays the role of the Roman Inquisition, and Padilla is on trial as Galileo.”
Giroud also used the example of author Boris Pasternak’s (Doctor Zhivago) censorship and oppression by the Soviet Union as context for the documentary. El Caso Padilla, which won the award for Best Documentary at the 2023 Platino Awards, evokes the memory of the head of the USSR’s Young Communist League declaring, “If you compare Pasternak to a pig, a pig would not do what he did, because a pig, never shits where it eats.” Giroud made sure to preserve the sequence of events that occurred that night in Cuba. He edited and refined the narrative while also incorporating interviews with authors who supported Padilla, such as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Edwards, Carlos Fuentes, Jean-Paul Sartre, and even an interview with Fidel Castro himself.
“It was quite challenging,” said Giroud. “How could I help a 13-year-old from Sweden or Japan understand this story? I made a conscious effort to focus on the narrative of a man oppressed by power, and set aside ideological matters. The most relatable historical example is Galileo. In this case, the Cuban Revolution plays the role of the Roman Inquisition, and Padilla is on trial as Galileo.”
Giroud also used the example of author Boris Pasternak’s (Doctor Zhivago) censorship and oppression by the Soviet Union as context for the documentary. El Caso Padilla, which won the award for Best Documentary at the 2023 Platino Awards, evokes the memory of the head of the USSR’s Young Communist League declaring, “If you compare Pasternak to a pig, a pig would not do what he did, because a pig, never shits where it eats.” Giroud made sure to preserve the sequence of events that occurred that night in Cuba. He edited and refined the narrative while also incorporating interviews with authors who supported Padilla, such as Julio Cortázar, Gabriel García Márquez, Jorge Edwards, Carlos Fuentes, Jean-Paul Sartre, and even an interview with Fidel Castro himself.
“I believe these elements add layers to the film,” said Giroud. “I don’t mention the words tyranny or dictatorship, nor do I criticize Fidel Castro. Instead, I focus on an event and everything that went into it. I think Cuban dissidents make a big mistake in only communicating with people who are already against the regime, instead of reaching out to those who need convincing. That was my goal with this film.” The documentary explores a historical event, yet remains relevant as it sheds light on ongoing censorship in Cuba and authoritarianism in Nicaragua and Venezuela, which cannot be held up as “progressive models,” says Giroud.
“Cuba has always blamed the blockade for its problems,” said Giroud. “But how does that make you see enemies in poetry? Things are very wrong when you start fearing poets, and in that sense, the Cuban Revolution has been screwed up since 1961. The Cuban Revolution has the best marketing in the world — there are many people on the island who know what’s going on but refuse to take off their blindfolds. One of our film’s triumphs is that it exposes leftists who have turned a blind eye and remained silent for years, knowing that dignity and justice cannot be found in Cuba.”