The first of those events was the Padilla affair. While García Márquez was reluctant to publicly support Heberto Padilla — a Cuban writer who had been persecuted and jailed in 1971 for his opposition to the Castro regime — he nevertheless believed he helped Padilla get permission to eventually leave Cuba. When Castro that same year supported the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, García Márquez expressed dismay, but described the world as caught between “two imperialist states equally cruel and insatiable.”

In the decade and a half between the publication of “One Hundred Years of Solitude” and his receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, García Márquez, in his public statements about Castro, vacillated between unqualified support and mild criticism.

He described Soviet communism in 1971 as “only symptoms of a system that resembles socialism less and less.” But in 1973 he was so disturbed by the U.S.-backed coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende that he vowed not to write another word while Gen. Augusto Pinochet was in power. (He later recanted, saying this was tantamount to self-censorship.) In an exhaustive 1975 article about Cuba, he cited the lack of free speech but predicted free speech would come; Cubans had enshrined it in the constitution. He also praised Cubans’ innovative adaptation to U.S. sanctions, which he depicted as cruel.

García Márquez’s support for Castro likely prevented him from getting a visa to come to the U.S. until President Bill Clinton lifted the ban in the late 1990s. When García Márquez did travel to the U.S., he met with Clinton and during their talks defended Castro.

“In 1996,he dined with President Clinton and told him that ‘if you and Fidel could sit face to face, there wouldn’t be any problem left,” Mexican author Enrique Krauze wrote.

“After Sept. 11, [Marquez] published a long letter to Bush: ‘How does it feel now that the horror is erupting in your own yard and not in your neighbor’s living room?"’

None of this clumsy diplomacy would protect him from attacks over his politics. Exiled Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante accused García Márquez of “delirium totalitarium,” while Peru’s Mario Vargas Llosa, a former friend of García Márquez’s and also a Nobel laureate, called him “Castro’s courtesan.” Others called him “Castro’s gopher, messenger and go-between.”

Whatever one’s politics, the consensus is clear: Castro and other powerful men fascinated García Márquez and will remain entwined in his legacy. When writing his 1975 novel, “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” García Márquez is said to have turned to a friend who mentioned Spanish dictator Francisco Franco and asked, “What is power? It’s as if it’s a little ball that some people hold in their hands and they’re constantly caressing it.”

Latin America scholar and University of California at Berkeley lecturer Patrick Iber writes in an email that García Márquez overestimated Castro. But he adds, “It is clear that García Márquez was one of the few people who could speak freely with Castro, to criticize the revolution privately and constructively. If he had broken with Castro publicly, he would have lost that power.”

Stephanie Panichelli, a co-author of the 2009 book “Fidel and Gabo,” thinks it’s important to separate the author from the friend and political ambassador: “His support of the Cuban revolution, even after the Padilla affair ... should not influence readers’ … appreciation for his literary work.

But García Márquez’s translator Edith Grossman doesn’t think the friendship would affect the Nobel laureate’s legacy in the least. “His political loyalties and support of Fidel Castro,” she wrote in an email, “aren't crucial to his books and, in a sense, aren’t anyone's business but his.”