Whether it was Oscar Wilde or José María Vargas Vila, I am writing from memory, whoever said that it is “easier to enslave the soul of a free man than to liberate that of a slave”, does not matter for the purposes of this delivery, because the obligation to write a daily column can be a benign form of slavery from which I have not been able to free myself for two or three weeks to go on vacation.
Being a columnist is not as difficult, but it is not as easy as it seems, especially if you do it daily, as I have been doing since September 1978, because you touch a lot of calluses and you run the risk of hurting people you love and admire. In the 41 years and four months as a columnist, I have published around 14,000 articles, most of them critical of power and denunciations of bad actions in the public sector, and the only merit I claim for the effort is not having made a mistake. that would motivate some lawsuit, as often happens in our political and social environment against more talented colleagues.
I also boast of having observed the rules of good speech throughout that long journey and only once did they stop me for an article. It happened during the administration of Jorge Blanco. El Caribe did not come out on Sundays and on Saturday Germán Ornes stopped its publication. In the newsroom the next day, just before leaving, Ornes handed me the column without any corrections for use in Monday’s edition, asking me only to read it again. After doing so I tore it up and ran to my desk to write a new one.
On the stairs, about to leave the paper, Ornes approved. “You haven’t read it,” I observed. Her response was: “If you broke the other one I don’t need to read this one.” This experience served me more than all my reading and college years. With him I learned everything that good journalism can teach when this trade is loved and valued.
