Havana/Mexico City: Colombian novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez met Fidel Castro after the Cuban leader grabbed power in the 1959 revolution -- the beginning of a decades-long and controversial friendship.
Garcia Marquez, who died in Mexico City on Thursday aged 87, had arrived in the Caribbean island as a journalist to cover Castro's band of bearded guerrillas who ousted right-wing dictator Fulgencio Batista in January 1959.
They quickly became friends, bringing together two of Latin America's most prominent figures of the 20th century. Garcia Marquez even worked for Cuba's Prensa Latina news agency in Bogota and New York.
But the writer's closeness with his communist "amigo" contrasted with his fierce criticism of Latin America's right-wing dictatorships.
The two men had disagreements, which they both said were often exaggerated.
Castro, who handed power to his brother Raul after falling ill in 2006, once described Garcia Marquez as a man with "the goodness of a child and a cosmic talent."
"He is a man of tomorrow whom we thank for having lived this life to tell it," the Cuban leader said.
"Our friendship is the fruit of a relationship cultivated over decades, formed by hundreds of conversations that were always enjoyable for me," Castro said when greeting the author and his wife Mercedes in 2008.
Castro's 'power of seduction'
The author of "One Hundred Years of Solitude" had a home in Havana, where Castro would sometimes pop in in the middle of the night for a chat.
The writer praised the famously garrulous Castro for "his love of verbs, his power of seduction."
"When he is tired of talking, he rests by talking," Garcia Marquez said.
But this cosiness between the pair irked some fellow intellectuals.
Peru's Nobel-winning writer Mario Vargas Llosa called his former friend Garcia Marquez "a courtesan writer of Fidel Castro," accusing him of turning a blind eye to abuses committed by the government against dissidents.
US writer Susan Sontag had voiced disappointment that Garcia Marquez had kept quiet after three men who tried to hijack a ferry to the United States were executed in April 2003.
The Colombian novelist countered that he condemned the death penalty anywhere in the world, and that he had quietly secured the release of dissidents over 20 years.
Garcia Marquez's list of friends included Bill Clinton, the former president of Castro's eternal bogeyman, the United States.
The writer acted as a special envoy for Castro to discuss with Clinton a bilateral migration agreement in 1994 to deal with the thousands of Cubans who crowded into boats to Florida.
Three years later, Garcia Marquez handed a message from Castro to Clinton, offering Cuban cooperation against terrorism. But the US-Cuban cooperation was short-lived.
Here are some excerpts from the works of Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
"Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice." - One Hundred Years of Solitude
"It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love." - Love in the Time of Cholera
"On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit." - Chronicle of a Death Foretold
"Drowning in the pandemonium of abstract formulas which for two centuries had constituted the moral justification of the family's power, Big Mama emitted a loud belch and expired " - Big Mama's Funeral
"Over the weekend the vultures got into the presidential palace by pecking through the screens of the balcony windows and the flapping of their wings stirred up the stagnant time inside, and at dawn on Monday the city awoke out of its lethargy of centuries with the warm, soft breeze of a great man dead and rotting grandeur." - The Autumn of the Patriarch
