Miami, United States. – The Cuban writer and ex -military Fernando Dámaso died this Friday at 8:00 in the morning in Havana, at 87. The news was confirmed by his wife, artist Rebeca Monzó. to the newspaper 14ymedioof which he was a collaborator.
Dámaso was a complex figure in the recent history of Cuba: Colonel of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, critic of Castroism in his last years and prolific author on Cuban issues.
Born in 1938, Sagittarius and educated in a school of Escalapios, Dámaso was part of the institutional gear of the Cuban Revolution. He was under the orders of General Ulises Rosales del Toro, one of the main responsible for Cuban military operations in Africa. After the rifle of the general Arnaldo Ochoa In 1989 and the judgments of Cause 1, he resigned from the Communist Party and his position in the Army. The rupture cost him sanctions and restrictions: he was regulated by the authorities under the argument that he could reveal secrets to the “enemy.”
Since then he dedicated himself to writing. He founded the blog Jamwhere he criticized the regime with an ironic and measured tone, analyzing from the republican history to the political and economic present. He also collaborated with media such as 14ymedio, Diary of Cuba And published the book Havana Lost Map (Hypermedia editions), an intimate and cultural exploration of the Cuban capital.
Dámaso was not defined as optimistic against the future of Cuba. In an interview granted to Free newspaper In 2017with almost 80 years, he said: “In political terms it will not change much.” Its system reading was focused on the tension between the “dogmatics”, defenders of the fidelist model, and the “pragmatic”, closer to the vision of Raúl Castro and open to an Vietnamese -style market economy.
“Today the economy is destroyed and that will force you to take some more liberalizing measures,” he said then, although he also pointed out that these reforms faced structural obstacles, such as technological obsolescence, lack of foreign investment and state control over foreign trade. “A small investor who uses one or two tens of people is not the solution for the Cuban economy,” he insisted.
In his analysis, the genesis of the Cuban crisis was not only in external sanctions, but in internal decisions such as the incorporation into the CAME in 1972, which held Cuba to the economic plans of the Soviet block. “That seriously compromised our development potentialities and ended up castrating it with the systematic failure of the five -year plans,” he said.
Fernando Dámaso was also a critical observer of the Cuban social present. He pointed out the contradiction between official speeches and daily experience. “It is said that health is free, and it is a lie. Usually, for a doctor to attend as is due to a patient, he has to take his ‘gift’,” he denounced. He also questioned the official narrative about education: “Before 1959, Cuba had one of the best rates in Latin America. What the revolution did was deepen these achievements.”
For Dámaso, the greatest obstacle to any attempt of transformation was systemic corruption. “Traffic with everything is trafficible is the only way to survive,” he said. In his vision, the system even pushed the honest citizen to transgress the law to live.
Although he was a dissident, his speech was not strident. He was close to Naty Revuelta, mother of Alina Fernández and former lover of Fidel Castro.
From the discretion of his apartment in Nuevo Vedado, along with Rebeca Monzó, Dámaso maintained a coherent voice and without boasts. His criticism was constant, but without fuss. Skeptic regarding miraculous solutions, it always returned to a starting point: in Cuba the problems with abstract speeches, but with concrete solutions to vital needs such as food, salary and future will not be solved.
