Madrid/The writer and journalist Carlos Alberto Montaner died this Thursday in his home in Madrid, where he had lived since October 2022, “peacefully and accompanied by his loved ones after facing a neurodegenerative disease,” according to a statement issued by his relatives.
In it, his wife Linda, his children Gina and Carlos and his granddaughters Paola, Gabriela and Claudia wanted to show their gratitude “to the Spanish public health professionals, to the Right to Die with Dignity Association and to all the family and friends who have shown him so much affection in the final stretch of a prolific life marked by the defense of individual freedoms.”
Carlos Alberto Montaner was diagnosed, as he himself said in his last farewell column, at the Gregorio Marañón public hospital in Madrid with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy.
Carlos Alberto Montaner was diagnosed, according to what he himself said in his last column farewell, at the Gregorio Marañón public hospital in Madrid for Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), a rare disease in the Parkinson’s family that has no cure and whose origin is unknown.
In May, the author made the decision to publish a text in which he reviewed his life, dedicated to the vindication of democracy and political pluralism through writing, the best thing he knew how to do and which, in fact, he did in the pages of some of the best newspapers in America and Europe.
Carlos Alberto Montaner supported the birth of 14ymedio signing your manifest of support and for this newspaper it has been an honor to have his signature on a regular basis. He leaves, however, without achieving the dream of seeing a free Cuba.
His farewell will be an intimate and private event, as reported by the family, which closes the informative note with a phrase from Montaner himself, published in his memoirs, Without going any further. “The time has come to recapitulate. We have to pack our bags. Disappearing is an unpleasant activity that is only justified because it is the only irrefutable proof that we have lived.”
Son of a journalist and a high school teacher, Montaner was born in Havana on April 3, 1943. After spending his childhood and youth on the island, he witnessed the “worst monstrosities” promoted by Fidel Castro’s Revolution in 1959, including the “executions with trials that were repugnant,” the cries of “Stop!”, and the 20-year prison sentences for “absolutely innocent” people.
After spending his childhood and youth on the Island, he witnessed the “worst monstrosities” promoted by Fidel Castro’s Revolution in 1959.
In an interview for the media Digital Freedomthe journalist diagnosed the Cuban problem as an evil inherited from the first decades of the Republic, when a group of intellectuals assumed that the solution to the problems lay in a revolution, “and not in institutions and democracy. That was where the country went to waste.”
At the age of 14 he met his wife Linda, whom he would marry shortly after. Opposed to the communist direction that the process took, at 17 he joined the Revolutionary Rescue group, which earned him arrest and condemnation by Castro. He managed to escape from prison and ask for protection at the Honduran Embassy in Havana, in 1961.
He traveled to the United States, where he studied Latin American literature, and worked as a teacher in Puerto Rico. He completed his doctoral studies in Madrid, the city where – after the fall of the dictator Francisco Franco in 1975 – he founded the Cuban Liberal Party.
In 1989, when Soviet communism was coming to an end, he created the Cuban Liberal Union and the Cuban Democratic Platform, foreseeing a possible debacle of the Castro regime during the so-called Special Period.
He stood out as a prolific author. He has been president of several institutions in favor of democracy and human rights and has been awarded numerous times for his intellectual and political work. On more than one occasion he said he felt “especially proud” of his novels. dogworld (1972) and 1898: The Plot (1987), and his essays Latin Americans in Western culture and The twisted roots of Latin America. Furthermore, notable is its Manual of the perfect Latin American idiot (1996), written with Álvaro Vargas Llosa and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza.
He always considered it dramatic that Spain, a country he wanted as his second homeland, did not lead international support for the freedom of Cuba.
He always considered it dramatic that Spain, a country he wanted as his second homeland, did not lead international support for the freedom of Cuba. When presenting his memoirs in 2019, he noted that the transition to democracy in this country was a useful experience and learning that Cubans could take advantage of.
Montaner was especially hated by the regime, which perceived him as a formidable ideological enemy against whom it launched numerous smear campaigns. The official encyclopedia Ecured describes him as a “terrorist by profession as a journalist” in the crude biographical page dedicated to him, where he is also accused of being an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Among his numerous recognitions are the Independent Journalism Foundation Award, in 1999; the Tolerance Award from the Autonomous Community of Madrid, in 2007 and the Juan de Mariana Award, for his defense of freedom, in 2010.
His friend, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, has said of him that “he is an extraordinary case, an example for future generations, especially because he does not know what defeat is.”
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