Many people think that Vargas Llosa had a turn at some point in his life, because when he was a university student, he was a communist. He was a member of a very radical leftist group in the University of San Marcos in Lima. In recent years, he’s become known as a staunch defender of liberalism, especially economic liberalism. So, people wonder how a communist became a liberal. However, what I see is a continuity: what has remained the same, constant, in Vargas Llosa’s life is his commitment to individual freedom, to the freedom of writers, of thought and of expression.
One of his first run-ins with the left was over Cuba. Vargas Llosa began to travel to Cuba in 1962, a few years after the Cuban Revolution. He was actually one of the very first important writers to show a commitment to the Cuban Revolution as a cultural project. But he broke with it in 1968 when there was a debate, which all started when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia. Of course, everyone thought this was horrifying and Vargas Llosa protested against it. He wrote a column criticising it and then got a message from Cuba that he couldn’t criticise the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia because Fidel Castro had defended it. So, Vargas Llosa had to make a decision: ‘Do I support the Cuban Revolution or do I defend my individual freedom as a thinker, as an intellectual, as a writer?’ He chose the latter.