Havana/Born in 1938, Sagittarius, former ESPAOLAPE STUDENT, former military of the regime and writer passionate by Cuba, literature, sport and cinema: this was the letter of introduction of Fernando Dámaso, once one of the most active authors on Cuban themes on the Internet and deceased at 8:00 am this Friday to his 87 years, in Havana.
His wife, Rebeca Monzó, confirmed to this newspaper the death of who was also, during an era, collaborator of 14ymedio and Diary of Cuba. Knowing army’s internal machinery, he became a colonel of the armed forces under the orders of General Ulises Rosales del Toro, one of the men who moved the reins of the Cuban troops in Africa.
After the shooting of Arnaldo Ochoa and three others involved in the famous cause 1 of 1989, Dámaso resigned from the Communist Party and the Armed Forces. The protest gesture cost him expensive. Not only was he sanctioned, but also regulated under the pretext – applied to all high -ranking Cuban military that They desert– That he could reveal secrets to the “enemy.”
By then, Dámaso accumulated several military “missions” in Africa in his service sheet, an era of his life on which he preferred to maintain discretion.
Dámaso accumulated several military “missions” in Africa in their service sheet, an era of his life on which he preferred to maintain discretion
In Jam, Your blog – Active until 2020–, Dámaso addressed countless issues, from the policy of one shore and another, to the history of the island. From that space he criticized the regime again and again, always with arguments suspended and expressed ironically, especially in the form of comments to the official press.
He also published, in Hypermedia Ediciones, Havana Lost Mapwhere he collected some of his historical and cultural texts, which explored the character of the capital through the origin of its emblematic streets and corners. He was an expert in culture and politics during the Republic, whose “buried history” was a chronicler.
In Several interviewsDámaso encrypted the future of Cuba in the tension between Dogmatic and pragmatictwo ends of the nomenklature that would enter – thought – in a definitive confrontation when the so -called historical generation, starting with Fidel Castro, was dead and buried. He lived to see that the death of Castro has little moved the foundations of a dictatorship that made “continuity” a slogan.
Asked by media around the world, he invited to be cautious no longer underestimate the military structure on which the leader had cemented his dominance over Cubans. The change would not be “imminent, not even close,” predicted in the already distant 2017, at least while Raúl Castro continued to dictate the country’s course since his retirement.
On the possibility of a change, he did venture at least that he would carry it out “someone who will arise from the process, someone who nobody knows today.”
