Mauricio Vicent, journalist in Havana

2023-06-11 15:03:32

Fatigued by asthma, which seized him by the lungs at dawn in Madrid, he died at dawn this Sunday Mauricio Vicent, a senior journalist español who for thirty years sent chronicles to his newspaper, The country, from Havana. He was also a very active correspondent for Ser and other European media. He was sixty years old, he was the son of the writer Manuel Vicent.

In recent years, the Cuban authorities had withdrawn his permission to inform. He managed to turn his ability to Time.news stories written like Havana tales, which implied his enormous real knowledge of the city and the island.

His colleagues by trade, as well as the Havana authorities, knew that it was not by chance that he was considered the best foreign correspondent in Cuba. His long stay on the island made him a open book on all aspects that concerned daily life and political life of the network of relationships and secrets that he was revealing. His work deserved awards, such as the International Press Club award in 1998 and, the following year, the Cirilo Rodríguez finalist award.

He was, like his father, an extraordinary prose writer, to whom several books are owed. Among them, Chronicles of Havana, with cartoons by Juan Padrón, one of the great Cuban artists, of whom he was a close friend, and Havana 500 years, a beautiful volume from Havana that he wrote and that the Spanish artist Javier Mariscal illustrated. The latter was presented on that anniversary of the city by the then King of Spain Juan Carlos I.

He is also the author of Che’s companions with photos by Francis Giacobetti, from the film script Music for live, by Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, and the documentary Baracoa 500 years later. With Norman Foster, the British architect, he formed the book Havana: Autos & Architecture, Edited by Yvory Press in 2016. This publication also had the collaboration of the cartoonist Juan Padrón.

Both in his time as a regulated informant and when he did his job with the expertise of his literature, telling inside and outside, the strange skin of Havana, Mauricio Vicent was always faithful to the essence of journalism: telling people what happens to people.

Enthusiastic about Cuban life, and also scared of the political contradictions that led the islandHe came and went from Madrid or Denia, where his parents spent the summer, so he maintained his usual relationships everywhere and was, like Rudyard Kipling’s character, a friend to everyone. The last time I saw him, a few months ago, he was on the street, with recent friends, or at the same time, like another Madrid gathering, with one difference: at the same time he had an ear in Havana, from which he news came that no one knew and that he received as if he were there.

That journalistic acumen also made him one of Havana’s great prose writers.. In recent times he wrote in his newspaper a series that he titled More was lost in Havana. He allowed himself to be guided there by a character of his invention, Lázaro, who guided him through the different adventures that were surely his but that he attributed to that Havanan who allowed him to see the inside of the island without the authorities thinking that he was counting, like a correspondent, the life of Cubans.

“We haven’t had verses for months,” he said in one of those deliveries, “and as soon as we met, Lázaro fired one of his depth charges: ‘I was in the catacombs, which is the best place to be today in Cuba.’ I tell him, man, things aren’t that bad, but don’t go too far, and he responds with a ‘I’ll tell you right now’ face. As a preview, he blurts out: Look, Galician, when you left in the summer the dollar was 100 Cuban pesos, today on the street it is exchanged for 175 and it has reached 200. We are screwed”.

Mauricio Vicent was always faithful to the essence of journalism: telling people what happens to people

The story, like all those that were shared throughout the series to which fatality put an end, ended with a coffee and rum at Café Bohemia. “Plaza Vieja, although empty, looks beautiful. Irma la Dulce winks at us, grabs her belongings and goes to make braids ”.

Leonardo Padura, the great Cuban writer, said yesterday in Ser that this Mauricio Vicent who is now leaving us left his mark on the city of Havana and was always there, through his sister Nora, his parents, the children who were going and they came from Cuba, present in this country, in Madrid and Denia. But it was above all in the streets of the Cuban capital where he was like another citizen, “whom,” said Padura, “the waiters and the authorities knew.” Although they forbade him to say what was happening on the island, he managed, between reality and fiction, to filter to the world what was impossible to hide.

Havana, that legendary humidity, is the land of asthmatics, like José Lezama Lima. There are concentrated humidity and other dangers for those who suffer from this treacherous disease. In Madrid, Mauri was struck by that stupor that makes the air you lack impossible. The dry city was the scene of his drowning. Far from Havana and so close to the world that he loved so much and whom he has loved so much.