“I did what I could,” Carlos Alberto Montaner paraphrased Julián Marías to say goodbye to his readers last May. The Cuban intellectual, journalist and writer, indefatigable in his fight against dictatorships, autocracies and populism in the Americas, including Donald Trump, died yesterday in Madrid almost two months later without fulfilling his great dream: the triumph of freedom in his country .
7,000 kilometers from his island, to which he never returned since he was able to escape the clutches of the revolution, but to which he “traveled” every day from journalism and literature. Viaje al corazón de Cuba is part of the small library that is essential to get to know the Caribbean country beyond rum, Fidel’s Havana cigars and Che Guevara’s t-shirts.
Without giving up, but bowed down by nature, Montaner announced his retirement at the age of 80, haunted by progressive supranuclear palsy, “a rare brain disease”, neurodegenerative, diagnosed at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital. The family (his wife Linda, their children Gina and Carlos and their granddaughters Paola, Gabriela and Claudia) thanked in a statement the Spanish public health professionals, the Right to Die With Dignity Association and family and friends after “a prolific life marked by the defense of individual liberties”.
Montaner had the “privilege of fighting for and for freedom,” as he himself wrote, through his journalistic work, a good part of it against the Castro dictatorship, which is on its way to turning 64. Accused of being a CIA mercenary, “worm”, counterrevolutionary bomb-thrower and other inventions imposed by the Castro propaganda apparatus with the complicity of his allies to stigmatize him, he chose to live between Miami and Madrid to continue fighting with his writings. . We do not know what the attributes of the agents of the famous agency are, but if Montaner stood out in something it was because of his prudence, that he only broke with that torrential sense of humor that Havanans have.
The reality is that what Montaner could do was a lot, a lot. A vast journalistic work, made up of thousands of articles and some thirty books, including the last one, the autobiography Without going any further, apart from his time at the Liberal International, in which he served as vice president for 20 years. A political window that he kept open since he disbelieved in the revolution, which he only supported in the initial euphoria. After being imprisoned for 17 years and sentenced to 20, he managed to escape to the Honduran Embassy and from there move to the US to begin his life in exile in 1960.
Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot, together with Plinio Apuleyo and Álvaro Vargas Llosa; Perromundo and The Last Battle of the Cold War are some of his most cited works.
“One of the most lucid, profound and committed Cubans to freedom,” summed up the playwright Yunior García Aguilera, also in exile in Madrid, to attest to the enormous dimension of a character that Havana did not hesitate to “pursue” during his exile. , as he already did with Guillermo Cabrera Infante or Reinaldo Arenas. The epistolary duel with Silvio Rodríguez, resolved by a landslide in his favor, marked another milestone in Cuban dissidence.
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