Category: Carlos Alberto Montaner

14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Madrid, 3 July 2023 — When you read this article I will be dead. “Living is a right, not an obligation,” said Ramón Sampedro, a Spaniard who had become a quadriplegic after an accident on the beach. His life, his fight to be allowed access to assisted suicide and his death were interpreted in the cinema by Javier Bardem in the film Mar adentro.

“Don Carlos, are you going back to live in Spain?” asked an amazed neighbor from Brickell Avenue, where I was living in Miami. “No. I’m going to die in Spain,” I kindly replied, with a smile, and continued on my way. After all, I lived 40 years in Madrid, my intention was to live again in my apartment across from El Retiro park, I have Spanish nationality and I firmly believe in euthanasia and assisted death, as do, fortunately, more than 70% of Spaniards.

I started writing this article in Miami at the beginning of 2022 and I conclude it by dictating it, since I currently have great difficulties writing. At that moment, before being informed of a more severe diagnosis, I came to the conclusion that I would not allow the Parkinson’s that I had suffered for a few years to take away any more of my faculties. By then, I had already lost the ability to improvise orally, but not the ability to write. It seems that the brain houses the two faculties in different places. In any case, everything would get worse.

I started writing this article in Miami at the beginning of 2022 and I conclude it by dictating it, since I currently have great difficulties writing

In March 2021, the Spanish Congress of Deputies approved the euthanasia law by 202 votes in favor, 141 against, and 2 abstentions. It is one of the countries that has it – in the US there is assisted suicide, but only in 10 states and the District of Columbia, out of the 50 of the American Union. Belgium, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Portugal and Canada have legislated on euthanasia and assisted dying. It is a small number. There are almost 200 nations recognized by the United Nations Organization.

On April 3, 2022, I turned 79 in Miami. It was the age at which my father died of heart disease on March 7, 1992. My mother died at the age of 83 from a “minor” operation (except for her, of course) in the year 2000. According to the admired Italian neurologist Rita Levi -Montalcini, Nobel Prize in Medicine (1986), children, roughly, should calculate their life expectancy by averaging the age at death of the two parents, but adding ten percent, as a result of medical advances. My number was 88 years. It’s too much. I think starting the eighth inning, as my friend Jorge Sonville says, is more than enough. It’s quite a provocation.

My younger brother, Robert Alex, a brilliant physician with whom I discussed the Levi-Montalcini formula, was skeptical of this hypothesis. He argued, with good reason, that those averages didn’t help much. He, my younger brother, died at the age of 69 in the midst of the Covid 19 epidemic. His death occurred on August 1, 2020. At that time, there was no vaccine. I was almost eight years older than he. But my older brother, born in October 1940, Ernesto, is still alive. Of the three, he is the most resistant to life’s adversities.

The purpose of this article is to stimulate the debate on euthanasia: my position is to support it as long as it is a voluntary choice. In the same way that organs are donated while alive, I think it would be enough to put it in writing or designate a person to make the decisions in the event that it is materially impossible to assume that responsibility. This is how, when I arrived in Madrid in October of last year, I delivered a document to the public health service establishing health care and treatment in extreme situations. Thanks to the advice from the beginning of the Right to Die with Dignity Association (DMD) I have been able, with the unconditional support of my loved ones, to overcome all the bureaucratic steps required by a protectionist law. In that way, I started the legal process that has culminated in the approval of the provision of aid to die in my case, since, in accordance with the provisions of the Law, I meet all the requirements for serious, chronic and disabling illness. Until the end of the road I count on the assistance of Social Security professionals.

The purpose of this article is to stimulate the debate on euthanasia: my position is to support it as long as it is a voluntary choice

As if that were not enough, an MRI carried out at the Gregorio Marañón Hospital concluded that I actually suffer from Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), an atypical and more aggressive Parkinson’s disease. That explains my accelerated lack of eye movement, which prevents me from reading and writing, in addition to the increasing limitations in expressing myself verbally. My daily life, in which reading, writing and oral expression have been my hallmarks, are erased from one day to the next. My body hasn’t been with me for a long time.

I have lived in a country, Spain, for 40 years, at the western end of Europe, of which it was said, unfairly, that the Spanish only understood at the crack of a whip. It was not true. Democracy and freedom are within the reach of any people who propose it. I have returned in the twilight of my life. Here I have turned 80 years old. The last of my existence thanks to the euthanasia law. Does one want a greater freedom than choosing the moment of departure?

I fulfill my wish to die in Madrid, the city that I love and in which I have shared so much with Linda, my beloved wife through good times and bad. I do so while still enjoying the ability to express my will to exercise my right to end my life in a free and dignified manner in accordance with my beliefs. I will not bother you anymore, dear reader. Adiós.

____________

COLLABORATE WITH OUR WORK: The 14ymedio team is committed to practicing serious journalism that reflects Cuba’s reality in all its depth. Thank you for joining us on this long journey. We invite you to continue supporting us by becoming a member of 14ymedio now. Together we can continue transforming journalism in Cuba.

14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami, 17 September 2022 — Former Chilean president Ricardo Lagos has taken Chile’s current president Gabriel Boric as his disciple, although he doesn’t know it. The former social democratic president is practically half a century older than the brand-new socialist president. Lagos is 84 years old. He has seen it all. Boric is the youngest president in Latin America; he is only 35 years old. Protecting the boy is a sound decision. The interview with Lagos appeared in Madrid’s El País. No one in his right mind wants things to go wrong for Boric. Chile continues to be the benchmark for Latin Americans, the nation that was about to enter the first world. It is true that it had a stumble in October 2019, but I think that everything has passed.

This was also called “Octoberism.” I read the report of that atrocious period, which many Chileans find surprisingly reasonable, especially teenagers, on the website of the Interamerican Institute for Democracy, “Chile: return from hell,” written by Peruvian Luis Gonzales Posada, an APRA follower and former Minister of Justice and Foreign Affairs:

“Violence erupted to inexplicable levels. 118 of 136 subway stations and numerous cars were damaged or destroyed. Several churches, including the 150-year-old La Concepción, were burned and hooded criminals entered the temples to destroy religious images and take them out to the street to use them as barricades. There was looting in 200 supermarkets, pharmacies and stores. The statues of the Conquistadores were pulled down by Mapuche protesters. Military barracks and 400 carabineros stations were attacked with firearms and Molotov cocktails. Neither the curfew nor the state of emergency calmed the angry protest. More than 3 billion dollars and 200 thousand jobs were lost, the currency was devalued, the GDP was reduced by one point and the stock market fell 13%. There were 34 dead, 9,000 arrested, 12,000 injured and 3,400 hospitalized, including 800 carabineros.”

That is why Chilean novelist and politician Roberto Ampuero, former Minister of Foreign Affairs, with great literary experience and in the ideological field, described those events as “atrocious.” In his youth he was a member of the Chilean Communist Party and lived in Cuba. He wrote an excellent crime novel, Demonio (Demon,) in which he ventures the hypothesis that it was an international coup attempt of the unrepentant left. The protagonist of the novel is Cayetano Brulé, his permanent detective, who is hired to locate a missing painter, and ends up discovering an international plot after the events of October 2019. continue reading

14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami, 3 September 2022 — Mikhail Gorbachev has died at 91 years old. Not that bad. The life expectancy of Russians in 2019, just before the pandemic, was eight years less than the average of people in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). If you decide to be from Korea, a member country of the institution, I advise you to be born in the furiously capitalist south, and not in the gloriously socialist north. On average, you will live 12 more years (80.5 vs. 68.8) and will be three centimeters taller (168.6 vs. 165.6). But I want to write about Gorbachev, “Gorby” for his friends, which he didn’t have too many of in Russia.

I visited Moscow three or four times during Gorbachev’s last period in the government and Boris Yeltsin’s first tenure. At that time, I was traveling as vice president of the Internacional Liberal — in the sense that term has in Europe — and as president of the Unión Liberal Cubana. I didn’t meet Gorbachev, although I had friends who did establish a certain friendship with him. Instead, I met Aleksander Yakovlev, his anti-totalitarian conscience and the person who most influenced him. So I can assure that the changes that took place in that tortured region of the planet were due to Yakovlev’s advice.

Yakovlev was a hero of the USSR. He lost a leg during World War II at the Battle of Leningrad, the largest siege in history (900 days). He was barely 20 years old. He was born in 1923 to semi-illiterate, albeit communist, parents in the small town of Korolyovo. He joined the Communist Party at 21 and rose to become the Central Committee’s head of National Propaganda. He knew every last detail of Marxism and began to suspect the Party. It led to the creation of parasitic structures that only served to sustain the leadership, and to give life to ridiculous attitudes such as chauvinism and nationalism. He published an article in 1972 in Literatunaya Gazeta denouncing these attitudes. Brezhnev, who ruled at the time, felt alluded to, and he got rid of Yakovlev sending him as ambassador to Canada. There he would not “harm” the “true” communists, the ones akin to Brezhnev.

Except that in 1983 Gorbachev visited Yakovlev and was dazzled. He was in Canada. He was a lawyer who was simultaneously an agricultural technician. He was the theorist he needed, Gorbachev thought, but he didn’t tell him at the time. There were several days of endless conversations allowed by Aeroflot’s everlasting failures. He articulated like nobody else the defense of glasnost, transparency, because all the economic reforms had already been tried: the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the era of Lenin until 1924, and Stalin until 1929, with few real results, except the initial ones. The virgin lands had been brought into production in the decade under Khrushchev’s rule, more than 300,000 square kilometers (1954-1964). The terror of public discussion and the consequences of popular debate had to be suppressed. In Canada things worked differently. It was a huge and frozen territory, similar to the USSR. Really, glasnost made the difference!

They were two idealistic communists. Both wanted to reform the system without destroying it. Yuri Kariakin, a philosopher and thinker, husband of economist Irina Zorina, an expert in Cuba’s issues, had told me that there was a type of communist, resistant to violence, among whom were Mikhail Gorbachev and, indeed, Aleksander Yakovlev. They wanted to convince their opponents, not defeat them. The history of Russia was full of men and women drenched in blood who had created the myth of the inability of Russians to be obedient to anything other than the threat of punishment. continue reading

14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami, 28 August 2022 — “It’s in the genes.” Javier Figueroa de Cárdenas is a relative of Miguel Figueroa, a brilliant 19^th century autonomist. Autonomism was a way of being patriotic in Cuba, especially since the “Pact of Zanjón,” which in 1878 put an end to the “Ten Years War,” until 1898, when the United States tipped the balance in favor of the Cuban insurrection.

Independentism

Autonomism was defeated by the independentism promoted by José Martí, but, as the most reliable historians recognize today, the best Cuban minds were autonomists: Rafael Montoro, Antonio Govín, José María Gálvez, Eduardo Dolz, Figueroa himself and a very long etcetera. Unfortunately, the experiment only lasted 20 years (from 1878 to 1898,) the same period that the “Liberal Autonomist Party” lasted, the first political entity that emerged in a totally independent Cuba.

Javier Figueroa is an excellent professional historian. I met him with Sylvia, his wife, in Puerto Rico, where he taught until he retired. He got his PhD from the University of Connecticut, and he has published a very remarkable book, with more than 700 pages and with almost 2000 footnotes, which he has called “The Unfinished Dream: A History of the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE). Cuba 1959-1966”.

The unfinished dream and the “Spanish pax”

Why is it called The Unfinished Dream? Because Cuba has not been liberated and democracy has not been restored, as Alberto Muller, Juan Manuel Salvat and Ernesto Fernández Travieso, the three founders of the DRE, proposed at the beginning of the adventure, in 1961. And why could they not achieve it? Somehow, this first review tries to address that issue. In fact, Cuba and all of Latin America pay to be far from the European fighting pit. They pay (and charge) for the Spanish isolation. The 19th century brought the destruction of the “Spanish pax.”

For several centuries Spain had kept her colonies on the sidelines of European crises, only bothered by the actions of pirates and corsairs. But Napoleon appeared in European history, invaded Spain and, after a moment of doubt, the Latin American peoples became independent, except for Cuba and Puerto Rico. (I know I am oversimplifying, but this is not the place to detail the hypothesis.)

Not all were costs, of course. There were some advantages. To the extent that Spain did not participate in the two world wars, with their enormous share of blood and destruction, but with the relative advantages of the two continue reading

14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, 22 July 2022 — It has been 10 years since Oswaldo Payá and Harold Cepero were assassinated in Cuba. It was July 22, 2012. We’ll get to that later. Ángel Carromero, a Spaniard, and Aron Modig, a Swede, were, more or less, witnesses to the murder. Carromero was a delegate of Nuevas Generaciones (New Generations,) the youth organization of the Spanish Popular Party, and Modig was the president of Sweden’s Young Christian Democrats.

A few days ago, I received an excellent book by David E. Hoffman, Pulitzer Prize winner and editorialist for The Washington Post, GIVE ME LIBERTY: The True Story of Oswaldo Payá and His Daring Quest for a Free Cuba. The Pulitzer Prize is a guarantee that Hoffman knows how to investigate. He wouldn’t buy a pig in a poke.

For those unfamiliar with American history, “Give me Liberty” is a famous speech Patrick Henry delivered at St John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, on March 23, 1775, as the American Revolution was brewing. His words, which electrified the audience, ended with a well-known phrase in the country, “Give me Liberty… or give me death.”

The very well researched work, especially regarding the history of Payá, was sent to me by John Suárez, who replaced Frank Calzón, the founder and soul of the “Center for a Free Cuba,” a think tank devoted exclusively to freedom for Cubans. Perhaps it is the only one of its kind in a city where think tanks abound.

As I was saying, Give me Liberty convinced me of what Ofelia (Payá’s widow) and Rosa María (Payá’s eldest daughter and founder of “Cuba Decides,” a formidable collaborator in her father’s work) had already warned me about, that the regime assassinated Oswaldo and Harold, although it was not what Raúl Castro intended to do. He wanted to scare them, not kill them, but he condoned the action as soon as it was done. For Fidel and Raúl it was obvious where their loyalties lay. Hence the brutal cover-up, as always happens – the episodes of the sunken ships with their cargo of innocent children, the “13 de Marzo” and the “Canímar,” and the executions of General Arnaldo Ochoa and Colonel Tony de la Guardia et al, are the best known, but not the only ones.

Cuban secret services, organized and trained by communist Germany’s Stasi in the 1960s and 1970s, have conspicuous and invisible ways of carrying out the persecution of any targeted individuals on the island. They wanted to give a lesson to the “arrogant Europeans” that were on the island to train Cubans in the details of the transition, so they chose the “conspicuous” formula.

A conspicuous vehicle, typical of the fearsome Cuban State Security, a red Lada, which followed them for a long time during the journey, even hitting the rear end of their car, causing the accident that would result in the death of the two Cubans (what a coincidence!) continue reading

14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami, 13 June 2022 — The Ninth Summit of the Americas has ended. The biggest controversy aroused was the (fulfilled) threat by Mexican president Andrés Manuel López Obrador not to attend… if the three remaining – although ruined – Latin American dictatorships, Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, were not invited. They were not, and the Patron Saint of tyrannies didn’t attend. However, he sent his Foreign Affairs Secretary, a much more likeable character than himself, Marcelo Ebrard. The Americans sighed in relief. They had the best of all possible worlds. AMLO’s government, without AMLO.

But the president of Mexico was not the only one in absence. The presidents of Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras, the famous “northern triangle” of Central America (famous for its crime rate and its number of exiles) didn’t attend the event either. The Ninth Summit, fortunately, had an exceptional chronicler, Héctor Silva Ávalos for Infobae, the first Argentine digital media.

Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei did not attend the Summit outraged by the accusations of corruption. Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran, first, because he had made a pact with the gangs known as maras so he could rule the country, and second (damned if you do and damned if you don’t,) because of the mistreatment of the thousands of imprisoned gang members, when they continued murdering people in the streets of the tiny country. (Bukele’s iron fist stance against the gangs has the support of a majority of the population.) As for the president of Honduras, Mrs. Xiomara Castro, wife of the political leader Manuel (Mel) Zelaya, because she feels more comfortable in the proximity of Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, and because her husband wanted to thank these dictatorships for the favors rendered.

In Mexico, simultaneously with the Los Angeles Summit, the “mother of all marches” is being organized. I remember the origin of that phrase – “the mother of all battles.” It was the spectacle that Saddam Hussein promised if the United States dared to lead the attack after the occupation of Kuwait by the Iraqi army. A German newspaper estimated the number of weapons held by the two contenders and concluded that “the mother of all battles” would probably be won by Saddam Hussein. A few hours were enough for the coalition forces, led by the US, to show that German journalists had underestimated George H. W. Bush (the father of George W. Bush), and General Norman Schwarzkopf, the head of the Armed Forces, during the “so-called” Gulf War. Actually, it was an easy victory. continue reading

14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami, 5 June 2022 -The president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, has been unleashed and transformed into the Patron Saint of dictatorships – Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. He has threatened not to go to the California meeting if the three dictatorships are not invited. (Since ‘Andrés López’ seems vulgar to him, he uses all his names, to the despair of his American neighbors: Andrés Manuel López Obrador.)

He should be reminded that the first letter, from Clinton in 1994, clearly stated that “these are meetings of democratically elected Heads of State.” Or, at least, belonging to the OAS, and none of the three cases has remained within the organization.

In the Fifth Summit, held in Trinidad-Tobago, inexperienced President Barack Obama was harassed with the issue of the embargo on Cuba. He believed that the end of the embargo was a popular request. It was April 2009. He had started his first term on January 20. In 2014, relations between the two countries had been reestablished. But at the Seventh Summit, in Varela’s Panama, in 2015, Raúl Castro appeared, and they finalized the details for an Obama visit to Havana.

The visit took place in March 2016, very close to the end of Obama’s term. He gave a sensational speech in which he said many things that Cubans longed to hear. Raúl Castro almost accused him of trying to overthrow him and of having ‘hidden intentions.’ However, since that moment, Obama became an idol of Cubans on the island, but someone very confused and naive for the exiled community.

That dichotomy can still be seen today. Cubans on the island love Joe Biden, but outside of Cuba, in large numbers they love Donald Trump. Cubans on the island associate the Democrats with a period of hope and relief from economic misery, and they don’t care if the ultimate goal is to overthrow the tyranny. Simultaneously, Cubans outside the Island abhor any concession to the Díaz-Canel government, without stopping to think that it might lead to the end of the dictatorship.

The First Summit

I remember the First Summit of the Americas. It was in 1994. I was invited by Luis Lauredo, then the Bill Clinton administration’s ambassador to the OAS. There was the purpose of dealing with regional issues within that institution. Cuba was a “regional issue,” and Ambassador Lauredo, with a reputation for being very competent, had the mission of monitoring the movements of what was already called “Socialism of the 21st Century.” continue reading

14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami, 22 May 2022 — What’s going on is very strange. According to an American dictum, one does not change horses in midstream. According to the analysis of Politico – an online portal that is much closer to the Democrats than to the Republicans – the recent announcement of a change in strategy by Joe Biden in his perception of Cuba and Venezuela, means that he is giving up the next election in Florida. Compromising with these two dictatorships means leaving the way clear for the Republicans, as US senator Bob Menéndez and Florida senator Annette Taddeo, both from the Democratic Party, complain.

Something fishy is going on here. The politicians – and Biden is the quintessential “politician” – or the president know something of which we have no idea, perhaps because Juan S. González, the person who manages the foreign policy of the White House in that area of ​​the world, has told him directly. Or perhaps because Biden is going through a stage of dangerous naiveté, unbecoming of a 79-year-old man who has seen the entrails of the authoritarian monster.

Cuba and Venezuela know that they have to move towards democratic change, but there is not the slightest symptom of that. Cuba has just approved a Criminal Code that is infinitely more restrictive than the previous one. The new code increases the “reasons” for which the State can execute people, while keeping in jail hundreds of demonstrators who protested peacefully on July 11, to the tune of the excellent song Patria y Vida (Homeland and Life). continue reading

14ymedio, Carlos Alberto Montaner, Miami, 20 March 2022 –David Beckham is a great English soccer player. He is 46 years old. He started playing professionally at a very young age for Manchester. He retired at 38. He was in the Real Madrid team and there he learned to speak some Spanish. It was then when I knew his name. He is half businessman and half Jewish, although he was not raised Jewish. (His maternal grandfather was Jewish). He has just signed a juicy contract for public relations with Qatar for 277 million dollars. The deal includes promoting the 2022 World Championship, but it will be for a decade. The championship will be played in Doha, the capital of Qatar, at the end of this year.

When UK-based human rights activist Peter Tatchell (he was actually born and raised in Australia, where he was a Labor Party candidate for MP), found out, he lamented that Beckham, just for money, lent his name and well gained prestige to mortify LGBTQ people, linking himself to a government that has in its criminal code penalties of up to five years in prison against two adults of the same sex who consent to have sexual relations.

However, Beckham has a much more serious problem with the State Department. Especially, when we have seen the enormous importance that today is given locally, nationally and internationally to sanctions for repeated violations of the law. In this case, it is a serious crime that the United States and other civilized nations take very seriously – “Human trafficking,” as it is shown in Conchita Sarnoff’s book Trafficking, focused on the Jeffrey Epstein case.

This includes child prostitution, importation of illegal immigrants, and the hiring of people under a semi-slavery regime. With the aggravating circumstance that the first two crimes are promoted and committed by lone criminals (for example, human traffickers known as coyotes), or mafias that fight ruthlessly and fiercely to establish a territory, while the third crime is carried out by necktie-wearing executives in governments interested in doing themselves ideological favors, or by simple and brutal corruption, or by a sum of the two elements, defying the agreements signed within the International Labor Organization.

They call it “The Cuban Hospital of Qatar” and there is not the slightest exaggeration in that name. The 475 doctors, nurses and technicians who operate the institution are Cuban. Why are they all Cuban? Perhaps to watch them better? Or so that there is no “foreign” witness to their violation of the laws? The first breach of the rules is that everyone has had to hand over their passports to the “comrade in charge of Security.” That is totally prohibited. There he is known as “Manolo el de la Seguridad” (Manolo from Security.) It is a false name. It could be “Felipe, Carlos or Agustín.”

I read parts of an extensive article from The Guardian, a UK newspaper known for its leftist position. The headline says, “Cuba’s secret agreement with Qatar that allows Cuba to keep 90% of the salaries that Cubans receive.” That is “trafficking” in my dictionary. That is to sustain a regime continue reading