The notion that prevails about the Spanish Civil War is the one conveyed by Ernest Hemingway in For Whom the Bells Toll. A thick bibliography of valuable information exists about that horrible slaughter, but the novel -- later carried to the movie screen by Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper -- is the one that created the permanent images of that conflict.

That also may have happened because of Hemingway's personal prestige. He was an author who converted his life -- Paris, bullfights, deep-sea fishing, hunts in Africa, the Nobel Prize for literature -- into a kind of archetypal biography that was envied by the world's journalists and writers.

I make this observation apropos The Passion According to Carmela, an extraordinary ''Cuban'' novel written by Marcos Aguinis, the leading Argentine storyteller today. (Ernesto Sábato is not dead yet, true, but his work, though valuable, is very brief and -- now 97 -- he has spent more than a decade in understandable silence.)

As Hemingway did in his Spanish book, Aguinis has told a story of love inside the violent revolutionary Cuba that confronted Batista's dictatorship and later Castro's. He has narrated it in such a seductive manner that his fiction (sprinkled with real people such as Huber Matos, who is an important character in the book, and Guillermo Cabrera Infante and Heberto Padilla, who appear fleetingly) probably will remain in the international memory as the most faithful account of those painful events of half a century ago.

Aguinis, whose name has been mentioned in Europe more than once as a likely candidate to the Nobel Prize, also has (or has forged) an almost amazing biography, as Hemingway did, but for different reasons. The great Argentine writer was, in the past, a neurosurgeon, a psychiatrist and a piano concert soloist. He lived several intense and impassioned professional lives while searching for his most lasting vocation, literature, and in all of them he achieved a remarkable level of excellence. While the cliché of a ''Renaissance'' man who excels at the sciences and the arts is almost always false, this time the adjective is accurate.

Nevertheless, there is something in Aguinis' behavior that impresses me as much as his literary talent: his commitment to liberty:

To the liberty of his Argentine compatriots, always in danger because of the authoritarian tendencies of Peronism, usually mixed with an irrepressible urge to strip the people of their savings.

To the liberty of Israel (Aguinis is a Jew), permanently compromised by the aggressiveness of anti-Semitism, a barbaric prejudice ferociously entrenched in Argentina for the past many decades.

To the liberty of the Cuban people, whose cause he defends along with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Mario Vargas Llosa and other major intellectuals in the International Committee for Democracy in Cuba, which Vaclav Havel created in Prague several years ago.

And, in sum, to the liberty of any oppressed people, regardless of any harm that might do to his image as a writer.

That intellectual honesty is costly in Argentina. Unmindful of the cost, Aguinis opposes populism in the homeland of Perón, which has more populists per square inch than any other place on the planet. He refuses to be anti-American in the most anti-American of all South American nations.

He is a Zionist in a country where anti-Semitism abounds, and does not fear to condemn the Castros' Cuban dictatorship, although he is aware that the old Comandante has many fans in Argentina and plenty of agents of influence, especially in the communications media and literary circles.

In 1970, shortly after I settled in Spain, I heard about Marcos Aguinis. He had been awarded the Planeta Prize for his novel The Inverted Cross. It was the first time that prize had been awarded to a Latin American writer, and the reaction was impressive. A long time later appeared The Epic of the Marrano, The Desecration of Love and a dozen other valuable novels and essays.

The Passion According to Carmela may well be considered in the future among his most valuable works. I don't think Cubans will ever forget it. Latin American readers will see Cuba differently, in a way closer to reality. And that's a great service to the truth.