2023-05-07 16:04:32
For many, many years, Carlos Alberto Montaner It has been, for me and for many others who will never admit it, the best political columnist in Spanish. As an anti-Castro Cuban, he was banned from all the prizes, recognitions and bargains of the trade that those who did not reach the sole of his shoe reaped. He wore it with sportsmanship. He always had the support of his readers and also that of those who listened and saw him, because he had, like few I have known, the gift of words and a good image. Read or heard, or, better, listened to, he always left you wanting to repeat, to hear it again, to read, to see, which is the basis of this hard-working industry.
Carlos traveled a lot and wrote a lot, but I never read him a bad column; merit, in part, of his sobriety, which has ruined so many writings on the fly in America, and, in part, also, of a difficult discipline, seeking a certain lightness that does not overwhelm the reader, a subtle humor that makes him want to continue frequenting atrocious issues, such as the martyrdom of Cuba. In The New Herald, where we met for several years, you could read good and solid articles, but defeated by the solemn funeral of Castroism. And to return the following week to cultivate anti-Castroism, it was necessary let the prose breathe and introduce some satirical elementhappy factor and consolingly abundant in Cuba.
For many years I collaborated with his Firmas agency. But the day I remember the most was when he told me: “He has bought your column The Trumpet of Cholula!”. “That is popular immortality,” I replied. “In Mexico, a fine mortality, between Comala and the castle of Chapultepec”. We laughed out loud at the abracadabrant stories of the New World. Carlos was capable, as a vaccine, of finding some anecdote to relativize the horror, in the Hitchcock way. He didn’t annul it, but he placed it in a bearable, enigmatic, crossword puzzle and, of course, addictive dimension.
It is probably, the author of more thousands of columns in Spanish. And you won’t find a bad one. Debatable, yes, of course. Poorly written, never. she was of a rare generosity in exiles. In her house on Calle Cervantes I have met generations of dissidents, of all walks of life, who, Linda’s guests, always ended up forgetting about the Montaners. But there was always another prisoner to be released, another to be welcomed in Madrid, another who would surely never be seen again. I never heard a complaint about it. It was and is a moral imperative that Carlos, Linda and Gina have served for a lifetime.
Was one of the founders of Grupo Libertad Digital in those liberal days of Albarracín on which theses will be written in the future. I wish they would never forget to quote the best of the columnists, to the best of the liberals, to the best of the Cubans: to Carlos Alberto Montaner.
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