Ian Padrón on his father's death: "I was very surprised."

Ian Padrón on the death of his father, the legend of Cuban animation Juan Padrón, confessed that it caught him by surprise at the time.

“I was very surprised by my father’s death. My father had battled cancer several times, but he had overcome it all. In this last case, he had pneumonia, but that illness also deteriorates your defenses,” said the filmmaker and communicator on the podcast Between You and Me from Los 3 de La Habana.

"Then for my dad, a cold would turn into pneumonia, but he always recovered from the pneumonia as if it were normal. He would go in, they would give him antibiotics, and he would come out, but this time no antibiotics could stop the pneumonia in any way," he continued.

For Padrón, his father's final days came unexpectedly.

"On the night of the 15th, my sister said to me: 'Send a message to Dad; he's feeling a bit down.' We sent him a message, a family message, something like a selfie, where the girls were saying, 'Grandpa, I don't know...'" she recounted.

"And on the 16th, when I got up in the morning, my sister told me, 'They just took your dad to intensive care,' as if he were intubated like that. And that surprised me a lot because I had talked to my dad the day before. It's one of those things in life," she added.

"Death catches you off guard; it's something you didn't see coming," he concluded.

Juan Padrón passed away on March 24, 2020, at the age of 73, after several days in intensive care due to a lung disease.

"'The last mambí' fought for 20 days and leaves full of love and tranquility," wrote his son in a moving message announcing the passing.

"We will always remember you as the most friendly, humble, and brilliant person we will ever know in our lives. Thank you for Elpidio Valdés, for the Vampires in Havana, and above all, for being such a noble and loving father and husband. Until we meet again, compay!" Ian concluded.

The memory of his father

Ian has been living in the United States for years, where he hosts and directs the interview and debate program Derecho a Réplica, which is broadcast online and gives a platform to personalities critical of the regime.

In December 2021, he debated in that space with a Cuban who demanded on social media that he "not tarnish his father's work".

Padrón invited Elier Fernández Guerra, who sent him a public letter stating that the character of Elpidio Valdés "does not belong to you, but rather, it is or should be an intangible heritage of Cuba and the Cubans for what it represents to us."

The letter from Fernández Guerra was made in response to the program that Padrón produced with graphic designer Alex Bandrich to reject the use of a drawing of Elpidio Valdés in a text from the official portal Razones de Cuba, where they labeled the Cuban filmmaker as a "complacent propagandist" for individuals "funded by Washington" who attack the government of the Island.

In the public letter to Padrón, Fernández Guerra assured him that he was not like his father, who indeed “honored his surname” and “is still, and will always be, a model for all of us who grew up with his work.”

"Please, I ask you not to distort your father's work, because it would be very crude to give the voice of Media Cara to the character of Elpidio Valdés; we would all notice, it would be very obvious, and Cubans are not fools," she added.

In response, Ian told him "that he should first clean his mouth before speaking of his father," and he added that Juan Padrón's work is rotting in Cuba.

"The master files of his work are being lost. The last thing my father tried to do while he was alive, two years ago, was to rescue that. And the only thing he and my family received was the disdain of Cuban institutions, which are allowing all of Juan Padrón's work to deteriorate," he emphasized.

Frequently Asked Questions about the Death of Juan Padrón and His Legacy