The exiled Cuban writer and journalist Carlos Alberto Montaner, who suffered from a neurodegenerative disease and had moved his residence from Miami to Madrid since 2022, died at his home in Madrid accompanied by his loved ones, sources close to him informed EFE.
Death occurred this Thursday in a “gentle way”.
“On his behalf, his wife Linda, his children Gina and Carlos and his granddaughters Paola, Gabriela and Claudia thank the Spanish public health professionals, the Right to Die with Dignity Association and all the relatives and friends who They have shown so much affection in the final stretch of a prolific life marked by the defense of individual liberties,” a statement said.
Your farewell will be an intimate and private act.
Last September the writer, essayist and journalist, one of the most relevant critical voices of exile, received recognition in Miami for his defense of democracy and freedom.
“It will be an emotional and massive farewell to very close friends before my trip to Spain in October with my wife,” this intellectual, born in Havana on April 3, 1943 and of three nationalities: Cuban, Spanish, told EFE at the time. and american.
The son of a journalist and a teacher, Montaner was initially sympathetic to the Cuban Revolution, but soon learned of Fidel Castro’s communist orientation and joined the efforts of the Rescate Revolucionario group, which opposed this trend.
He was arrested and sentenced to 20 years in prison, but since he was only 17 years old, he was admitted to a prison for minors political prisoners.
With the help of other comrades, he managed to escape and found asylum in the Honduran Embassy, where he stayed from March to September 1961 along with 150 other people.
When diplomatic relations between Honduras and Cuba were broken after the Bay of Pigs invasion, the asylees were left under the protection of Venezuela.
About six months later, Carlos Montaner traveled to the United States, where he reunited with his family. He began studying Spanish American literature at the University of Miami and upon graduation he began teaching literature at the University of Puerto Rico.
He successfully applied for a PhD scholarship in Madrid. In Spain she started a regular column and increasingly focused on writing. He published several books and, after the fall of the Franco regime in 1975, he joined the liberal movement and founded the Cuban Liberal Party.
When he understood that change in Cuba was not yet possible, he returned to intellectual life: he was a correspondent for various prominent newspapers in the world; he wrote columns, published books and was on the screen for CNN en Español as an analyst and commentator.
In his last days in Miami, he was president of the Inter-American Institute for Democracy, the entity that organized the tribute last September.
In that act he told that when he was settled in Spain he was going to dedicate himself to concluding the writing of a story that delves into the life of one of the three daughters of Carlos Marx, Laura, and her husband, Paul Lafargue, who gave him an injection of hydrocyanic acid and then inoculated himself with the poison.
“I am going to finish this book about Lafargue, who was really Cuban, since he lived in Cuba until he was 11 years old and then went to France, and my theory is that he killed Laura before committing suicide in 1911,” said the Juan de Mariana Prize winner. 2010 in defense of freedom.
Montaner’s first vocation, that of a storyteller, was successfully exercised in novels such as “Perromundo” (1972) or “La mujer del colonel”, the latter a story of a failed love, charged with strong eroticism and with the Cuban totalitarian regime of macho features as a backdrop.
Among his essay work, “Manual of the perfect Latin American idiot” (1996) stands out in his bibliography, the bestseller he published together with the Colombian thinker Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Álvaro Vargas Llosa, in which he caustically portrayed the left of Latin America and their elites.
In 2019, during the presentation of his memoir “Without going any further” in Coral Gables (Florida, USA), the essayist and novelist referred to the “Spanish experience” after 40 years of “Franco dictatorship” to predict that in Cuba can undergo a similar democratic transition.
In the course of a talk he had with his daughter, the journalist Gina Montaner, the intellectual stressed that, as written in his memoirs, there has not been “a single day in which he has not lived linked to the Cuban reality.” , a fact that reflects that “the horror and oppression of the revolution” has marked his life and that of his family.
In an interview with Efe on the occasion of these memories, Montaner acknowledged that throughout 55 years in exile to return to Cuba, from which he fled at the age of 18, he did what he could, “but it was not enough.” .
