Gina Montaner narrates the end of life of her father, the man who knew how to listen, the antithesis of Fidel Castro
14ymedio, Yoani Sanchez, 23 November 2024 — Just by reading the first pages of Wish Me a Good Journey we already know the ending: this is a book that ends with death. We enter into the narration of the last months in the life of Carlos Alberto Montaner, the Cuban writer, journalist and analyst. However, it is not a heartbreaking approach to the end of an existence, but rather a testimony built from the sweetness and understanding of a daughter who asserts, not without doubts and pain, her father’s will to die.
The volume, which has just been published by Planeta, shows Gina Montaner’s maturity as a writer, an exercise in which it is easy to detect her training and experience as a journalist. We are faced with a carefully crafted account, which largely maintains a linear chronology, although with the necessary leaps into the past to explain eight decades of a man who seems to have compacted several lives into one.
Gina gives us a map, but not a treasure map. She spreads before our eyes a plan to follow the rough road of saying goodbye to someone we love. If, in addition, that person is going to close the door of their own free will, choosing the month and the day, Wish Me a Good Journey will then be an indispensable companion on the road. Little has been written, in Spanish literature, about euthanasia, much less by a front row witness to the emotions and responsibility.
In just over 200 pages, we witness with Gina and Carlos the long and tortuous bureaucratic process of claiming the use the Euthanasia Law that was passed two years ago in Spain. The family returns to the place they considered home after the exile they were forced into six decades ago. In Madrid, they deal with bureaucracy, emotions and the deterioration of Montaner’s health due to progressive supranuclear palsy, the neurodegenerative disease that affected his facial expression and locomotion, as well as his ability to speak and write.
Montaner imparts a master class in courage that his daughter manages to capture in the small anecdotes of everyday life
However, even though the reader sees a man who was synonymous with elegance in language and politics gradually deteriorate and fade away, CAM, the acronym by which many called him, emerges in a greater light. Without excesses, without displays of feigned courage or lessons of bravery in the face of the approaching Grim Reaper, Montaner gives a master class in bravery that his daughter manages to capture in the small anecdotes of everyday life. From the enjoyment of the cinema in the family room, even hours before his death, to his calm but determined stance in front of the doctors.
We walk alongside them and Linda, the eternal partner who shared her life with Montaner, through the paths of health bureaucracy. A journey that is sometimes frustrating and moving in circles, but flanked, of course, by a right that Spanish legislation enforces and to which, little by little, patients and doctors are getting used to, the latter often anchored to the conviction that euthanasia goes against the Hippocratic oath.
The book also has other readings through the prism of Cuban history. Carlos Alberto Montaner is confirmed to us as one of the most lucid and consistent human beings who inhabited the rarefied scenario of the politics of this Island. The most libertarian among the island figures, he exercised his will until the end, deciding the way and the moment of leaving this world. With the exception of several famous national suicides, Cuban leaders have shown attitudes towards death that range from the irresponsible search for a heroic end to the fearful denial that the last breath is approaching.
Fidel Castro, the man who was Carlos Alberto Montaner’s nemesis in so many ways, clung to a long and debilitating final agony with the sole objective of prolonging his control over the lives of Cubans. The dictator spent ten long years fading away and writing delirious reflections in which he mixed moringa plantations with the light years that separate us from the most distant galaxies. In the face of death, he hid, behaving in the same way as in that early morning of 26 July 1953, when he did not enter the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba but ordered dozens of young people who blindly followed him to die and be killed.
Montaner took his last breath surrounded by the family he founded, a brotherhood based on love and understanding.
While Montaner knew how to put a final point, already in time, to the articles of international analysis that he published punctually each week, Castro imposed the diffusion of his ramblings on the front page of the main media on the Island. One had the nobility to spare his readers any stumble that cognitive deterioration could cause him, and the other forced us to listen to his disjointed litanies read by the anchors of the main news program and repeated in morning school assemblies and party meetings.
Montaner took his last breath surrounded by the family he founded, a brotherhood based on love and understanding. Castro hid his children and his wife for decades, he even refused to give his surname to several of his children and those who knew him closely defined him as a person incapable of feeling empathy for anyone, not even for those who carried his own blood. Authoritarians are known by their lives but above all by how they die. Perhaps it is because they sense that after closing their eyelids they will no longer be able to dictate orders, imprison enemies and shackle countries.
The leader and the writer portrayed in their final moments. One, with his sickly need to dictate to others what they should do, even after his death. The other, gathered in that intimate circle made up of his wife, his children and his granddaughters, doing what he did best: listening. Because Carlos Alberto Montaner was one of those rare Cubans with the ability to listen to others, to sit back and become all ears while his interlocutor told him about prisons, exiles or literary projects.
Reading Wish Me a Good Journey is especially emotional and at times very difficult.
If one asked for a mausoleum to be erected for him that must be visited, the other knew that the most honorable pantheon where his memory should rest was in the books he left behind, the family he founded, and the thousands of friends he had everywhere. For the latter, reading Wish Me a Good Journey is especially emotional and at times very difficult. We are witnessing a testimony that confirms what we already knew but had not wanted to accept: that the most complete public figure that Cuba has produced in the last half century is no longer here.
The man who taught us not to fear freedom, which of course implies immense amounts of responsibility and civic maturity, has left us; nor to fear the leader who sank a country run by an ancient family clan that has caused the ruin of the nation, the greatest exodus in our history, and a political infantilism that is horrifying. The writer who did not reach the shelves of our national bookstores but who people sought out with the eagerness not only for what is forbidden but for what is of value. The analyst who had read with delight and was one of the most cultured minds that has represented our country on the world stage.
The book ends, the last page finishes before our eyes. We must say goodbye, or better yet, hasta luego. The journey continues and Carlos Alberto Montaner has left us the map to explore it fully and at will.
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