Carlos Alberto Montaner, a writer who escaped Cuba shortly after its Communist revolution, then built a career as one of the exile community’s leading opponents of the Castro regime, died on June 29 at his home in Madrid. He was 80.
His son, Carlos, confirmed the death, from euthanasia. Mr. Montaner had been suffering from progressive supranuclear palsy, a neurological disease similar to Parkinson’s.
In a column published four days after his death, Mr. Montaner praised Spain for making it legal to end one’s life in cases of terminal illness like his. “I fulfill my wish to die in Madrid,” he wrote. “I do so while still enjoying the ability to express my will.”
Throughout his career as a novelist, essayist and political commentator, Mr. Montaner developed a reputation as a fierce critic of the Castro government and defender of classical liberalism.
“He was someone who was able to articulate the hopes, aspirations, frustrations and views of Cuban exiles better than anyone,” Ricardo Herrero, the executive director of the nonprofit Cuba Study Group, said in a phone interview.
Though Mr. Montaner considered himself slightly left of the political center, he was embraced by anti-Communist conservatives in the United States and Europe. Like them, he saw the situation in Cuba as part of a global conflict between dictatorships and liberal democracies.
“We need to tell the international community and democratic countries that we all share a moral responsibility with those countries and societies that suffer the consequences of totalitarianism,” he said in a 2011 interview with the George W. Bush Presidential Center.
He wrote frequently for conservative opinion pages like that of The Wall Street Journal, and he was a close friend of like-minded Latin American intellectuals, like the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. He was also a commentator for CNN en Español and a regular contributor to The Miami Herald.
He drew frequent criticism from Cuban exiles further to his right, especially in 2020, when he endorsed Joe Biden for president and recorded a Spanish-language advertisement pushing back on the accusation, common in the Cuban American community, that Mr. Biden was a socialist.
Mr. Montaner was equally disliked by the far left. The Castro government had long accused him of being a tool of the C.I.A., a charge repeated by left-wing critics.
Mr. Montaner wrote more than 25 books, including five novels and a 2019 memoir, “Sin Ir Más Lejos,” published in English that year as “Without Going Further.”
In novels like “Perromundo” (1972), translated as “Dog World,” he often dealt with themes of exile and the existential choices faced by people caught in the web of totalitarian oppression. His nonfiction work outlined a counternarrative to the traditional Latin American leftist vision of a region under the imperial thumb of the United States.
One of his best-known books is “Manual del Perfecto Idiota Latinoamericano,” which he…
2023-07-15 13:32:21
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