Journey to Socialist Countries

Description

Journey to Socialist Countries by Gabriel Garcia Marquez… a thrilling, honest, and exotic journey through that old “Iron Curtain.” It’s a portrait of a not-so-distant past, penned by one of the greatest writers. “The Iron Curtain isn’t a curtain, nor is it made of iron. It’s just a wooden beam painted red and white, like the signs on beauty salons. After spending three months behind it, I realized it was incredibly naive to expect it to be a curtain, or even to be made of iron. But years of relentless Western propaganda and round-the-clock media bombardment have dulled one’s common sense.” “There were three of us on that adventure: Jacqueline, a French journalist; Franco, a wanderer with no fixed abode except where night falls; and myself. The story began in a Frankfurt café one June morning. Franco had bought a French car and didn’t know what to do with it, so he suggested we go and see what was happening behind the Iron Curtain.” The journey started in Berlin and stopped in Warsaw, Prague, and Moscow, where We will witness the image of these cities during the decades of Soviet dominance, when the Soviet Union controlled almost half of Europe. This journey unfolds within a crucial historical context for understanding the last century in Europe, where the scars of World War II were still vividly present, and where everything was old and dilapidated—even the people. It was the socialist experiment, not the socialism that hundreds of millions had dreamed of. This will become clear through what Márquez writes with sincerity, perhaps even with sorrow.