A dictator can ignore freedom, but never mortality.
14ymedio, Xavier Carbonell, Salamanca, October 5, 2025 –I read in El País Semanal an enthusiastic and disturbing declaration of principles: “Aging is no longer taboo. Women and men with gray hair proliferate on magazine covers and in advertising. The number of anti-aging clinics and spas continues to grow. Longevity (and the pursuit of it) has become a new status symbol. The struggle to extend the limits of life by attempting to reverse biological aging is the latest religion.”
Below is an interview with Maye Musk, Elon Musk’s mother, a platinum-plated, futuristic beauty whose merit—besides giving birth to the technoprole—is being the oldest swimsuit model in the world. I delve into the soap opera of her life. Wife of an abuser, mother of a genius or two, grandmother of 17 grandchildren, at 77 she never stops working.
It symbolizes the death of retirement, an outmoded idea—like vacations or human rights—that today’s workaholism, embodied and also demanded by Elon, is unwilling to tolerate. But what really worries lazy people like me—or Socrates, or Sherlock Holmes—is this “last religion” that El País dignifies. The dogma of old age as a “status symbol,” the realm of old adolescents, as Cicero would say.
Maye is inoffensive, or she wants to appear to be. There are worse things. Trump is 79, Putin and Xi are 72, Netanyahu is 75, Ayatollah Khamenei is 86, Raúl Castro is 94, and Díaz-Canel—a political quinceañera—recently turned 65. I can’t explain how comforting these numbers are. A dictator can ignore freedom, but never mortality. Perhaps that’s why several strongmen kept the remains of the leader they overthrew close by. Mengistu, a close friend of Fidel Castro, is known to have hidden the bones of Haile Selassie under his desk in the Grand Palace in Addis Ababa. A talisman, a memento mori with a touch of witchcraft.
Neither Putin nor Xi are jellyfish or tardigrades, they do not want to be robots, they aspire to something more modest and therefore terrifying: to live longer, a little longer, as long as they can.
The interview with Maye Musk appeared a few days after a microphone recorded part of a conversation between Xi and Putin about living to 150 years. The headline was that both dictators were seeking immortality, like kings of the Holy Grail, but this is a technical error. Neither Putin nor Xi are jellyfish or tardigrades; they don’t want to be robots; they aspire to something more modest and therefore terrifying: to live longer, a little longer, as long as they can.
It appears (we don’t know Russian or Chinese, the message comes in distorted by translators), that Xi praises human longevity thanks to science: “Now at 70, you are still a child.” Putin provides the sci-fi plot: “Biotechnology is making impressive advances,” he says, “there will be continuous transplantation of human organs, and perhaps people will become younger as they age, even to the point of achieving immortality.”
Xi bursts out laughing—dangerously interjected by Kim—and answers measuredly: “It may be that in this century humans will live to be 150 years old.” This fairytale conversation took place in a fairytale setting: the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Beijing. Díaz-Canel was also there, so it is possible that a little immortality might be splashed on him.
The international media didn’t give much importance to the anecdote. As with Maye Musk, it is assumed that neither Putin nor Xi will leave office until they die. Phrases about real life expectancy were repeated, conspiracy theories were floated, and the conversation was played down.
One remembers with nostalgia that joke from 2016, just as Fidel was about to die, when we Cubans said: “No evil lasts 100 years, but 90, yes.”
One nostalgically recalls that joke from 2016, just as Fidel was about to die, when we Cubans said: “No evil lasts 100 years, but 90, yes.” How wrong we were. There is a way to achieve immortality—Putin, Xi, and especially Trump know this well—and it isn’t symbolic. The mantra “I am Fidel” summed it up well. The entire country became Fidel; we continue to live Fidel’s destructive project; his historical insanity never died; his administrative clumsiness has more than just heirs; it has its own identity.
That’s immortality, and to achieve it, these crazy old men—how could we not invoke Porno para Ricardo?—want to work until the very end. They also want us to work, of course, but not as swimsuit models or as attendees at diplomatic receptions. Many will have to die so that others can become Fidel, or Trump, or Putin, or Xi.
An article on immortality can become a homily or a harangue. If it is—what else can I do?—I’d rather end with an exhortation: cultivate laziness; defend the waste of time as sacred; meditate on the Gate of Heavenly Peace (but not like Putin and Xi); live happily, don’t be too annoying, and die peacefully. In short, don’t be Fidel.
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