Reviewing El general en su laberinto, Castañon offers that fans and readers of the book were so into the novel, distraught, tired from staying up to finish it, somber, and then went back to reread the novel as characters who were locked in stone and mud. For some, the novel was or is a tribute or a betrayal to Fidel Castro. For others, the novel was about Che Guevara, a symbolic imitation of the failed guerrilla that we all carry inside.