14ymedio, Madrid, 30 June 30, 2023 — The writer and journalist Carlos Alberto Montaner died this Thursday at his home in Madrid, where he lived since October 2022, “peacefully and accompanied by his loved ones after facing a neurodegenerative disease,” according to a statement issued by his family.
In the statement, his wife Linda, his children Gina and Carlos and their granddaughters Paola, Gabriela and Claudia express their gratitude “to the Spanish public health professionals, to the Right to Die with Dignity Association and to all the relatives and friends who showed so much affection to him in the final stretch of a prolific life marked by the defense of individual freedoms.”
Carlos Alberto Montaner was diagnosed in the Madrid public hospital Gregorio Marañón, as he himself said in his last farewell column, of Progressive Supranuclear Paralysis (PSP), a rare disease of the Parkinson’s family that has no cure and whose origin is unknown.
In May, the author made the decision to publish a text in which he reviewed his life, dedicated to the vindication of democracy and political pluralism by writing, the best thing he knew how to do and that, in fact, he did in the pages of some of the best newspapers in America and Europe.
Carlos Alberto Montaner supported the birth of 14ymedio by signing its manifesto of support, and for this newspaper it has been an honor to have his signature on a regular basis. He departs, however, without achieving his dream of seeing a free Cuba.
His farewell will be an intimate and private act, according to the family, which closes with a phrase from Montaner himself, published in his memoir, Sin ir más lejos [Without going any further]. “The time has come to recapitulate. We have to pack our bags. Disappearing is an ungrateful activity that is only justified because it is the only irrefutable proof that we have lived.”
Translated by Regina Anavy
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