"A good deed never goes unpunished," he once said when some critics tried to lessen the growing accomplishments of his literary career. The phrase can also be applied to certain reactions in the powerful circles of his country on the irreverent and noncompliant opinions of a writer who during his lifetime witnessed the perversion of the America dream.

Gore Vidal, 86 years old, died last Tuesday. He was a heavyweight of 20th century American literature and one of the sharpest critics of the USA political system.

He was born to a US Air Force officer on October 13, 1925, at West Point Military Academy. The fact that he was the grandson of a senator and had several relatives involved in politics --he was a cousin of former Vice President Al Gore-- made him interested in politics from his formative years; so much so that, as an adult and within the Democratic Party, he aspired to a seat. In the early seventies he founded an independent party in opposition to the moral debacle of Richard Nixon. But he also discovered early his capacity for literary creation.

The best thing he did then was to link both passions. Close to the traditions of John Dos Passos and Norman Mailer, he wrote monumental novels where history, politics and fiction go together with intensity and expressive mastery.

The pages of The City and the Pillar (1948), Julian (1964), Washington, D.C. (1967), Burr (1973), 1876 (1976), Lincoln (1984), Empire (1987), Hollywood (1989) and The Golden Age (2000) illustrate his mastery.

But he also won great admirers with his satirical narrations such as Myra Breckinridge (1969), Myron (1975), Duluth (1983), Live from Golgotha: The Gospel According to Gore Vidal (1992), and The Smithsonian Institution (1998).

He wrote for the screen and the theatre but left upset due to his lack of success and the little understanding from the producers --he was denied credit as a co-scriptwriter in the multi-award winning film Ben Hur. He wrote mystery stories under a pen name.

However, in the last three decades of his life he became one of the most widely-read American essayists. Whoever wants to understand the inside of the US political machinery will find first hand data in The Decline and Fall of the American Empire (1992), The American Presidency (1998), and The Last Empire (2001).

He felt particularly offended by the ascent to the presidency of George W. Bush, which he characterized as a coup d'etat, and the warfare adventures of his administration that, under the banner of an anti-terrorist struggle, terrorized half the world.

"We live under a dictatorship. This is what the present administration has set in the United States", he told me in Havana in 2006 during a five-day visit to the island when of his own free will he wanted to feel "only briefly a reality about which I know I have always been lied to."

My conversation with Gore Vidal took place a few yards from the John Lennon statue that sits in a park in Vedado.

When I asked him one afternoon if he knew the origins of the ignorance he and most of his colleagues had about Cuba, he answered, "We intellectuals do not escape something as evident as the fact that the American population is one of the most ignorant in the planet. Paradoxically we think we know everything and in fact we know nothing. We would have to lay the blame on the politicians, the institutions, the media and an idiosyncrasy that has made us believe we are better than others."

I then asked him to comment on an attack that at the time was targeting him with the phrase: "Vidal is a bad American". "It's funny that someone can say that, because in fact the way things are I feel as if I'm the last good American. At least I am an American that tries to defend the ethics and history of my country, to see if we can go back to being decent and respected. I dream and work so that they don't keep taking away the Republic that once was the United States, the one that has collapsed under the present regime", he declared.

They say that shortly before his death Vidal was working on a novel about the usurping of a good portion of Mexico by the United States in the 19th Century. This would have been another reason for the system to consider him an inconvenient intellectual.