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This is an archive article published on October 8, 2002

Castro seeks reincarnation as Marquez

After 43 years in power, 76-year-old Cuban President Fidel Castro has decided he wants to be reincarnated as the image of his close friend a...

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After 43 years in power, 76-year-old Cuban President Fidel Castro has decided he wants to be reincarnated as the image of his close friend and Nobel prize winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

Garcia Marquez, who won the Nobel prize in 1982, is known for his ‘‘magical realism,’’ a genre that mixes myth, magic and reality and which established him as the leading exponent of Latin America’s ‘‘boom generation’’ of writers in the 1960s.

‘‘In my next reincarnation, I want to be a writer. And I want to be one just like Gabriel Garcia Marquez,’’ said Castro, in a letter published on Sunday in Colombia’s Cambio magazine.

Praising Garcia Marquez’s on Tuesday’s launch of his memoirs, Castro said he idolised his friend’s ‘‘obstinate and persistent attention to detail.’’ Castro recounted how both he and Marquez, were both in Bogota on April 9, 1948. On that day, a lone gunmen killed charismatic Colombian opposition leader Jorge Eliecer Gaitan, unleashing a civil war known as ‘‘La Violencia,’’ which claimed as many as 300,000 lives over the next decade.

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