Havana, Cuba. – I was one of those who regretted the uncover of the journalist Néstor Baguer as the “octavio agent” of state security during The repressive wave of spring 2003when he wasted infamy when he testified in the rigged trial against those who were his colleagues in independent journalism, Raúl Rivero and Ricardo González.
To Baguer, with all his rests and defects, which were enough – the main one, who spoke ill of half the world -, I came to be considered a friend. Therefore, it hurt so much that octogenarian, sick, almost at the gates of death, agreed to change its entire history for a decoration of the Ministry of Interior and a name of Emperor Romano to sign its blows.
When I learned that it was a sneak, I regretted the many times that by order of Raúl Rivero and Ricardo González, who had affection and worried about his health, I went to take medicines and money to the house in the neighborhood of Cayo Bone, in Centro Habana, where he lived rented (the same where it was said that several decades also lived a young and freshly graduated lawyer called Fidel Castro).
Above all, what I regretted most to know who Baguer was really the tail that I had to do at the Cuba-Rda clinic to buy him, with money from Ricardo González, the three-legged cane he needed to walk.
For having known it well, I thought it was false and very unbelievable, Néstor Baguer rabidly anti -state, anti -capitalist and communist of the lifetime of the book Secrets from the Havana Maleconby Froilán González García and Liván González Cupull, which was published in 2005 by the Editorial Abril with the help of several Spanish communist groups.
For this book, its authors used testimonies of Baguer himself and his daughter Edmé, who, judging by the aid he received from the colleagues his father spyy, does not seem to have dealt much of him, nor did his other children, also as she residents abroad.
The Néstor Baguer from the book is far from the one I met. If you retain something of the real one, in addition to the beret of its Basque ancestors, the pride of being nephew through the maternal line of the poet Gustavo Sánchez Galarraga and the obsession to correct spelling gazapos, is self -sufficiency and nursinghips with respect to others.
In the book, for which Baguer demanded that his name be mixed with that of “dissidents and mercenaries”, his role as a representative in Cuba of reporters without borders is oversized. His designation for that position in 1998 was due not to his journalistic quality-there was many more important independent journalists than him, such as Raúl Rivero, Tania Quintero, Tania Díaz Castro, Manuel Vázquez Portal, Juan González Febles, Víctor Manuel Domínguez and Manuel David Orrio, who also turned out to be an infiltrate of the G-2-but to his age Royal Academy of the Spanish Language and the Cuban Academy of Language.
It is difficult to believe that someone so elitist, aristocratizing and Bon Vivant As Baguer, he will detest the bourgeois way of life, sympathized with communism, became unconditional of Castroism and worked as a state security informant for more than 40 years. I have always thought that if he agreed to work for the Political Police it was because they blackmail him. He was probably promised to reward him with the mansion on the hill of his Uncle Gustavo Sánchez Galarraga who longed for his rental for rent and that he would never get.
In his testimonies for the book, Baguer did not sound sincere. Which student of indoctrinated primary, repeated the most threshing of the Castro Teques, and defamed of the independent journalists, ensuring that “it was disgusting to read what they wrote”, that the majority were of a very low cultural level (“many had not studied even the sixth grade”), “they had no knowledge of journalism and not even of grammar”, and ridicules such as that they had “perverse plans. make Cuba an appendix of the empire. ”
Not to mention them for their names, Baguer had no qualms about speaking horrors and lies of people who were her friends and helped her a lot like Elizardo Sánchez and Raúl Rivero, who said she was a better poet than a journalist and took out the dirty rag that “the Cuban health service rescued him from alcoholism.”
Baguer He died on October 26, 2004at 83. His last weeks spent them admitted to the Calixto García hospital, veiled by political police officers who, by order of his bosses, turned to take care of him.
They buried him with military honors. In the ribbons of the crowns of red, white and yellow flowers, sent by the union of journalists and the Ministry of Interior, his family’s Basque last name was not written, but Octavio, a name of Emperor Romano, his name as an agent. His, the real one, was lost: it was another one of the many things he lost in his tortuous life.
