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The Cuban writer and professor Enrique del Risco published this weekend an emotional tribute to Carlos Alberto Montaner on the occasion of the 83rd anniversary of his birth, April 3rd. The writer remembered the Cuban intellectual who passed away in Madrid in June 2023 as someone who "was Cuba" in its deepest and most civilized sense.
Del Risco, who lived in Cuba until the 1990s and met Montaner in Madrid after his exile, describes how the works of the renowned intellectual circulated clandestinely in Havana during the early 1990s, before the internet era, as if they were pages from a smuggled Bible.
"I can't think of anything to compare to the reading of Carlos Alberto Montaner during my years in Cuba," writes Del Risco, who recalls receiving one of those articles at the entrance of a cemetery where he worked, passed to him by a friend who was an architect.
That particular text mourned the death of the Cuban historian Leví Marrero —author of a monumental series of fourteen volumes on the History of Cuba— for having died in exile without witnessing the island's freedom which he described like few others, a situation that also happened with Montaner.
For Del Risco, what set Montaner apart from much of the Latin American intellectual landscape was his moral coherence: "His texts reminded us that all the anger in the world does not justify abandoning reason, nor adopting an ethics that does not align with balanced reasoning or a basic sense of justice."
While other intellectuals turned a blind eye to the atrocities of Castro's regime, Montaner—persecuted by the regime since adolescence—saw no reason why the actions of dictators Pinochet or Videla should be considered worse or better than those in Havana.
Del Risco recalls that in the Madrid they coexisted in, the Cuban journalist mingled with Mario Vargas Llosa and José María Aznar during the days when he published, alongside Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Álvaro Vargas Llosa, the Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot (1996), a work that the professor describes as "an intelligent and biting warning" that "has ultimately proven to be prophetic."
The only meal they shared was arranged by the Cuban musician Paquito D'Rivera, and Del Risco recalls daring to joke with the very "Number 1 Enemy of Castroism": "Be careful, this photo with me could compromise you."
Montaner, Del Risco writes, "immediately understood the joke and laughed heartily," in contrast to those who spend too long perched on their own importance.
The tribute highlights the elegance, sobriety, grace, and humility of Montaner, whose "stature grew when one got to know him closely." A friend who accompanied Del Risco to one of those encounters summarized it in a whisper by the building elevators: "He is a gentleman."
"A Cuban gentleman, even if it seems like an oxymoron to those of us who were born in the disheveled and rough Cuba that still exists today," adds Del Risco.
The text also notes that Montaner was not afraid to contradict the enthusiasm in Miami for Donald Trump or the Latin American support for Gustavo Petro, and that the irrational attacks he received for it must have seemed to him "an additional proof that reason was still on his side."
The moving tribute concludes with a direct call to the new Cuban generations raised under official propaganda: "The youngest Cuban generation, raised on the island amidst the relentless barrage of official propaganda against Montaner, will assume that there must be some truth to the 'terrorist lackey of imperialism' with which he was portrayed in Cuba. And they will be wrong. When referring to Montaner, the Cuban media was impeccably false. Aside from the name and date of birth, they lied about everything else. For those young people, it will never be too late to start reading him."
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