Adios, Amigo: RIP Carlos Alberto Montaner, Author of “The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot”

Carlos Alberto Montaner is no longer among us, writes José de Córdoba in the Wall Street Journal. 

Montaner, who during a more than half-century career wrote thousands of columns and more than two dozen books and novels, was a leading Castro critic, especially known in Latin America where his columns were widely syndicated.  

As I was building my personal website 20 years ago without understanding much of the internet, it was his weblog, El Blog de Montaner (then with yellow or cream colors dominating and under possibly a slightly different name), that influenced me the most, possibly because it also was in two languages. Then I learned of his book, “The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot,” and both blog and best-seller were a revelation that I quoted a number of times on the blog which I was invited to join the following year (2004, the very blog that you are reading now).

Montaner, along with two other Latin American co-authors, wrote “The Manual of the Perfect Latin American Idiot,” published in Spanish in 1996. The book, which ridiculed the left for blaming Latin America’s ills chiefly on the U.S., became a bestseller, sparking debate throughout Latin America.

I admit that I hadn't read him in years, but I'm glad I didn't learn that in 2020, CAM had supported the presidential campaign of Hunter Biden's dad.

Breaking with Miami’s deeply Republican Cuban-American community, Montaner publicly backed Joe Biden’s first presidential campaign. In a column last year, he said former President Donald Trump didn’t “give a damn” about telling the truth.

If anyone doesn't “give a damn” about "telling the truth", CAM (in case you can read this), it's the left, from the current occupant of the White House to the culture via the MSM and the Department of Education (not to mention the installation of a one-party state in the USA). I'm curious to know what was Humberto Fontava's take on that (lack of?) policy.

Like most Cubans, Montaner initially welcomed Castro’s 1959 triumph. But he soon rejected Castro’s excesses and the new government’s Communist lurch. Arrested for his clandestine anti-Castro activities, Montaner was just 17 years old when he was sentenced to 20 years in prison in 1960. But he escaped and made his way to the Honduran Embassy in Havana where he was granted asylum. In 1961, he was allowed to leave for the U.S. 

After studying literature at the University of Miami in the U.S. and teaching at a Puerto Rican university, Montaner moved to Madrid, where he started a publishing house, Editorial Playor. He lived much of his life between Miami and Madrid where he witnessed Spain’s transition to democracy after Francisco Franco, hoping it could serve as a model for Cuba.

In the hothouse world of Cuban exile society and politics, known for its sometimes violent rhetoric and extreme views loudly expressed, Montaner stood out for the equanimity of his voice and for his trenchant analysis. 

“Carlos Alberto created a space to analyze and discuss Cuba in a rational and calm manner,” said Pedro Freyre, a Miami-based lawyer active in Cuban affairs. “He was an example of moderation, intelligence and cordiality.” 

He was feared by the Castro regime as perhaps its most dangerous intellectual adversary.

Actualización: Gracias por el Instalink, Señor Driscoll

In the New York Times (surprisingly enough), one Clay Risen gives more details about Montaner's 1996 book.

One of his best-known books is “Manual del Perfecto Idiota Latinoamericano,” which he wrote in 1996 with Alvaro Vargas Llosa (the eldest son of Mario Vargas Llosa) and Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza. It was published in English in 2000 as “Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot.”

“The perfect idiot,” the trio wrote, “leaves us in third world poverty and backwardness with his vast catalog of dogmas presented as truths.”

 

A fellow revolutionary who fought with Castro and Che to overthrow Batista's "vile" dictatorship compares life (plus prison conditions) under Batista and under Fidel

A fellow revolutionary of Castro's who fought with Fidel and Che Guevara to overthrow the "vile" dictatorship of Batista compares life (plus prison conditions) under Batista and under El Comandante
(From Romanticists Overlook Allende's Many Faults (as well as those of many other leftist strongmen)):

Again and again, the truth eventually reveals how the sequels "of arrests, death, torture, and exile" are often worse under would-be leftist authoritarian régimes than under rightist ones. Stalin, of course, killed far more people than Hitler did, and a recent best-seller (Checas de Madrid by César Vidal) teaches that the Spanish Republicans ran a series of sinister detention centers patterned on the Soviet Checas, which savagely tortured and often slaughtered its prisoners, without the slightest hint of legality; the dead and disappeared in the province of Madrid alone were, in only a couple of years, almost four times as numerous as the victims over 17 years of none other than… Chile's Pinochet (almost 12,000 in Madrid versus some 3,000 in Chile). In the Miami Herald, Carlos Alberto Montaner added that before going after alleged criminals abroad, such Europeans as Judge Baltasar Garzón would perhaps do better to start bringing their own killers (both left and right) to justice.

Is it too much to say that more Chiliens would have died and suffered (if only economically), had Allende's party remained in power? Maybe. But if the past — and other leftist systems — serve as any kind of example, that has often been the case, including in Latin America. In that perspective, the testimony of a Cuban dissident is instructive: the jails of Fidel Castro are far worse than those of Fulgencio Batista, he says. Who is the writer? A capitalist reactionary? An imperialist? A (neo-)fascist? A Batista ally? No. Gustavo Arcos Bergnes is Castro's fellow revolutionary, imprisoned with the future Líder Maximo in the mid-1950s. And he experienced Castro both as a fellow cell-mate and (twice) as a warden.

Castro's violent revolutionaries of the 1950s were treated far more humanely by the dictator Batista than non-violent human rights activists are treated by Castro today, he says as he recalls getting special treatment (hospital rooms as cells, private cooking facilities, etc) and pardons after only 21 months. (Since Castro's coming to power, incidentally, there have been 20,000 summary executions, but — unlike Pinochet's 3,000 victims — these are not of any more concern to "human rights activists" than those killed by Spain's Republicans in the 1930s.)

Read the whole thing™ (Romanticists Overlook Allende's Many Faults).

Ted Cruz echoes Gustavo Arcos Bergnes in The Truth about Fidel and Raul (gracias por Señorita Sarah) about "a new, even more brutal, form of repression" replacing the Batista dictatorship after la revolución of 1959:

My father, Rafael, had been an early supporter of the revolution against Fulgencio Batista — and spent a time in prison getting his teeth kicked in for his efforts. He fled the island, only to return to what he hoped would be a liberated Cuba. Instead, he found a new, even more brutal, form of repression had taken hold. In 1960, he left again, never to return. His sister, my Tia Sonia, bravely joined the resistance to Castro and was jailed and tortured in her turn.

The Boston Globe's Jeff Jacoby: Castro shed far more blood than the dictator he replaced.

According to the Cuba Archive, which is documenting the deaths of each person killed by Cuba's rulers since 1952, Batista was responsible for approximately 3,000 deaths. Castro's toll has been far higher. So far the archive has documented more than 8,000 specific victims of the Castro regime -- including 5,775 firing squad executions, 1,231 extrajudicial assassinations, and 984 deaths in prison. When fully documented, the body count is expected to reach 17,000 -- plus the tens of thousands of Cubans who lost their lives at sea while fleeing Castro's Caribbean nightmare.

Related: Fidel Castro dies. Justin Trudeau issues statement. Much hilarity ensues. #TrudeauEulogies

Here is one of No Pasarán's tweets:

Tho Saddam jailed husbands, tortured sons, & murdered both, at least he championed Iraq women's rights! #TrudeauEulogies (not even made up!)

— ¡No Pasarán! (@nopasa) November 27, 2016

Are Streets Throughout France Named After a KGB Collaborationist?

Two hammer blows have been delivered against the myth of Salvador Allende, writes Carlos Alberto Montaner, the second of which, he says, comes from

Vasily Mitrokhin of Russia and Christopher Andrew of Britain. The former, now dead, was a patient archivist for the KGB who had the fortunate thought of taking home copies of his work. The latter is a respected British historian.

In 1992, amid the collapse of the Soviet Union, Mitrokhin defected to the West, carrying that valuable information and began to publish it. The second and final volume of his book contains this information about Allende: The late Chilean president was a KGB collaborationist, who received money, transmitted information and contributed to Soviet plans for the conquest of Latin America.

Allende was known as a confidential contact, someone who Moscow counted on to undermine democratic regimes and -- in accordance with the great Soviet project for world hegemony -- to eventually achieve the political defeat and destruction of the United States.

In reality, there is no contradiction between the young Allende, captivated by the fascist ideas prevalent in the 1930s, and the old Allende of the 1970s, a KGB collaborationist.

Read also about the KGB agent who became a coffee expert…

Charity Kidnapped by States

Carlos Alberto Montaner on

an inflexible law of social physiology: Governments have no heart; they have only rules and laws. The politicians and bureaucrats who manage them have only interests, clients and voters. The huge drama provoked by the tsunami was a matter of the heart, of deeply affected people who wanted to help fellow humans who had been battered by nature. It was the moment for compassion, and emotions do not fit within the cold institutional structure of states.

…Unfortunately, charity and compassion have been kidnapped by governments. The relation between those who need aid and those who want to give it is handled best within the fabric of civilian society. The supremely kind giants, such as Albert Schweitzer or Mother Teresa of Calcutta, never emerge from public bureaucratic structures. The missionary spirit always is an intense personal zeal that must be aided without placing limits or obstacles to stifle it.

There is something terribly sick in a culture that neither forgives nor forgets…

Shortly before Franco's death, in 1975, Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi delivered to [a Spanish socialist senator] $50,000 to help him liberate the province of Andalusia from Madrid's tyrannical control. Gadhafi dreamed of restoring an Islamic state in southern Spain that would recreate the glory of Granada, the last Moorish redoubt in the Iberian peninsula, seized by the Catholic monarchs in 1492.

Thus begins Carlos Alberto Montaner's article Islam's Gaze is Stuck on the Past.

There is something terribly sick in a culture that neither forgives nor forgets, that looks permanently toward the past, convinced that all the truths have already been inscribed in a sacred book that determines who are the infidels who must be vanquished or exterminated.

Within that moral aberration lies the infinite capacity of Muslim Arabs to inflict harm to others and to themselves without the slightest vestige of remorse. That's something that has nothing to do with the existence of Israel or the position of the United States, as exemplified by the periodic massacres in Sudan, Algiers, Syria, Jordan or Saddam Hussein's Iraq.

This reflection comes to mind after hearing of Yasser Arafat's death. It is true that his disappearance opens a space to the hope that peace may come to the Middle East if Arafat's authority is inherited by Palestinians who are willing to coexist serenely with Israel. But to anyone who knows the despotic behavior of the Arab ruling classes, their manifest contempt for human life and their cult of violence should harbor no illusions.

On the other hand, it is hard to believe that the whole of Palestinian society truly sympathizes with the murderers in Hamas, Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad. The guilty party is the Palestinian elite, which establishes its hierarchy by means of force and the subjugation of the weak. Ordinary people undoubtedly shudder in horror at the sight of the suicidal assassins who strap bombs to their waists to blow up buses or supermarkets.

These same people must be tired of living in poverty, terrorized by their own bullies in an atmosphere of bloodthirsty heroism fed by the victims those bullies can exact from their enemies — even if victims are innocent children — or by the ``martyrs'' they contribute, fanatical youths goaded to their deaths with the help of the darkest superstitions and the vilest promises.

How Should the West Reward Castro for Releasing Prisoners from His "Pigsty"?

Confronted with Fidel Castro's early December release of a handful of political prisoners, members of the European Union, pressed by Spain's Zapatero, have eased their opposition while debating to what extent they should normalize relations with the Caribbean island.

Meanwhile, Olivier Languepin has an article on the "hellish" prison of Boniato. The Cuban Guantánamo (it is located not far from its Yanqui counterpart) is quite a different place from the American Guantánamo ("If I were to make a one-sentence summary of this ordeal" at Boniato, said Manuel Vazquez Portal, "I would say I spent 15 months inside the latrines of an army barracks or inside a pigsty"), but apart from this (token) article, the least one can say is that Le Monde has not written a whole hell of a lot about the subject. (More here…). When you think about it, though, isn't that normal, after all, given that the independent daily's clear responsability to its readers is to keep them informed of "the crimes of the Americans"? (The latest example, in which Éric Fottorino coined a new word, appeared as long ago as… this afternoon.)

A year or so ago, I quoted a New York Times op-ed column:

Is it too much to say that more Chiliens would have died and suffered (if only economically), had Allende's party remained in power? Maybe. But if the past — and other leftist systems — serve as any kind of example, [the fact remains that the sequels "of arrests, death, torture, and exile" are often worse under would-be leftist authoritarian régimes than under rightist ones], including in Latin America. In that perspective, the testimony of a Cuban dissident is instructive: the jails of Fidel Castro are far worse than those of Fulgencio Batista, he says. Who is the writer? A capitalist reactionary? An imperialist? A (neo-)fascist? A Batista ally? No. Gustavo Arcos Bergnes is Castro's fellow revolutionary, imprisoned with the future Líder Maximo in the mid-1950s. And he experienced Castro both as a fellow cell-mate and (twice) as a warden. Castro's violent revolutionaries of the 1950s were treated far more humanely by the dictator Batista than non-violent human rights activists are treated by Castro today, he says as he recalls getting special treatment (hospital rooms as cells, private cooking facilities, etc) and pardons after only 21 months. (Since Castro's coming to power, incidentally, there have been 20,000 summary executions, but — unlike Pinochet's 3,000 victims — these are not of any more concern to "human rights activists" than those killed by Spain's Republicans in the 1930s.)

Back to the position that the EU and the West should adopt:

This is … the moment to ask ourselves two key questions:

writes Carlos Alberto Montaner (while informing us, among other things that "a grandson of Ernesto 'Che' Guevera" has gone into exile abroad).

Why is Castro relenting at this time? and What should the international community do now that Castro has given ground? In Don't reward Castro for releasing prisoners, he provides the answers:

The answer [to the second question] was given by Socialist Javier Solana, who happens to be the high representative of the European Union for Foreign Policy and Security: "The European Union has nothing to give Cuba for correcting an injustice."

That's a fact. It would be a huge mistake to reward Castro for pausing in the commission of a crime. For half a century, the Comandante has learned that the simplest way to achieve his ends is to mistreat the Cubans or harm any unfriendly society and then "sell" to his adversaries a halt to his dastardly behavior.

Lessons from Zapatero's Withdrawal from Iraq

Based in Madrid, Carlos Alberto Montaner always hits the nail on the head on his website, including this:

José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, Spain's new prime minister, sounded the call to retreat with impressive speed. It was the first thing he did when he reached La Moncloa, Spain's government house. 'Tis a pity that haste is never elegant, wrote a tearful poet in love. But Zapatero went farther: he encouraged Dominican President Hipólito Mejía and Honduran President Ricardo Maduro to follow his example.

And — if the information published the Madrid daily La Razón is correct — he secretly asked the Iraqi warriors for a truce so that he could bring the Spanish troops home without placing them at risk in any more battles. …

In Spain in 1937 and 1938, many thousands of Leftists of all descriptions, were executed or tortured to death in Communist prisons (one who escaped was George Orwell)

On this day, VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM DAY (spasiba to Tovarich Glenn Reynolds), and in view of Ed Driscoll's thorough post over at Instapundit on George Orwell and his Spanish War period (gracias por los Instavínculos, compañeros Ed Driscoll y Sarah Hoyt), I would like to take the opportunity to add to the discussion by quoting from Paul Johnson's history of the 20th century, from which there is much to learn, not least the appalling truth about the "Republican" camp during the Spanish Civil War. 

Tom Wolfe is quoted as saying that, with the publication of the Venona transcripts, “it turns out that “the Loyalists secretly called in the Soviets at the very outset of hostilities—and if they’d won, Spain would have been the first Soviet puppet state!”

True enough. But according to Modern Times (A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s), Paul Johnson points out that while the war lasted, this was already the case: the Kremlin's Soviet NKVD (forerunner of the KGB), not the Spanish, were in fact already in charge of the country (or of that part held by the so-called Loyalists).

Behind [Prime Minister Juan] Negrin's complaisant ignorance, the Communists — that is, Stalin's secret police — took over Republican Spain.  The result was one of the major political tragedies of the century

Among the things the reader learns from Chapter Nine (The High Noon of Aggression) is that during

the rest of 1937 and well into 1938, many thousands of POUM members, and indeed other Leftists of all descriptions, were executed or tortured to death in Communist prisons.  They included a large number of foreigners  …  Among those … who managed to escape were Orwell and Willy Brandt, the future German Chancellor

Indeed,

Andrès Nin, the POUM leader [was] the model for Orwell's hero Goldstein in Nineteen Eighty-Four …

Although "Germany, Russia and Italy [all] had gangster dictatorships", ironically,

On the whole, European Communists were safer in their own fascist homelands than in the 'Socialist mother-country'.  Roy Medvedev, the independent Soviet Marxist historian, noted:  "It is a terrible paradox that most European Communist leaders and activists who lived in the USSR perished, while most of those who were in prison in their native lands in 1937-8 survived.' 

 … The purge coincided with Stalin's massacre of his own party in Russia, and it bore all the marks of his methods [what with] the former Barcelona convent of St Ursula [becoming] known as 'the Dachau of Republican Spain'

 … It was one of Spain's many misfortunes at this time that her … Civil War coincided with the climax of Stalin's great terror 

 … Stalin was having his leading agents killed all over the world in 1937-8.  And, as in Russia, virtually all the creatures who helped him to take over the Left in Spain, and then to terrorize it, were murdered in turn       

And, perhaps as interesting is the group, the circle of intellectuals, that Orwell also managed to "escape" from:

… Throughout the Spanish war, Stalinism was assisted not only by superb public relations but by naivety, gullibility and, it must also be said, the mendacity and corruption of Western intellectuals

 … The intellectuals of the Left did not want to know the objective truth; they were unwilling for their illusions to be shattered.  Many of them treated 'the Party' with abject subservience

 … The attempt by Western intellectuals to defend Stalinism involved them in a process of self-corruption which transferred to them, and so to their countries, which their writings helped to shape, some of the moral decay inherent in totalitarianism itself, especially its denial of individual responsibility for good or ill

More generally, from Paul Johnson's previous chapter (Chapter Eight), The Devils, we learn the many ways in which the autocrats of the left (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc…) and of the right (Hitler, Mussolini, Pétain, etc…) inspired, complemented, and even conspired with, one another:

 … the way in which the pursuit of Utopia leads the tiny handful of men in power abruptly to assault a society many centuries in the making, to treat men like ants and to stamp on their nest

 … It was Stalin who pointed the way to Hitler

 … Under the influence of Stalin, the German CP made no real distinction between the Social Democrats ('Social Fascists') and Hitler.  Their leader, Ernst Thälmann, told the Reichstag on 11 February 1930 that fascism was already in power in Germany, when the head of the government was a Social Democrat

 … Like Lenin he [Hitler] was a gnostic

 … From the end of 1936 to the second half of 1938, Stalin struck at every group in the regime  …        He had been in secret negotiations with Hitler since 1935.  The following year he persuaded the Nazi government to concoct forged evidence of secret contacts between the Soviet army commander, Marshal Tukhachevsky, and Hitler's generals; it was done by the Gestapo and transmitted by one of its agents

One of my very first posts on the internet, 20 years ago or more, was about Chile's Allende and Pinochet, but used the Spanish Civil War to make a significant point:

Again and again, the truth eventually reveals how the sequels "of arrests, death, torture, and exile" are often worse under would-be leftist authoritarian régimes than under rightist ones. Stalin, of course, killed far more people than Hitler did, and a … best-seller (Checas de Madrid by César Vidal) teaches that the Spanish Republicans ran a series of sinister detention centers patterned on the Soviet Checas, which savagely tortured and often slaughtered its prisoners, without the slightest hint of legality; the dead and disappeared in the province of Madrid alone were, in only a couple of years, almost four times as numerous as the victims over 17 years of none other than… Chile's Pinochet (almost 12,000 in Madrid versus some 3,000 in Chile). In the Miami Herald, Carlos Alberto Montaner added that before going after alleged criminals abroad, such Europeans as Judge Baltasar Garzón would perhaps do better to start bringing their own killers (both left and right) to justice.

The main post on Paul Johnson's Modern Times (A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1990s) — with many more excerpts from the 780-page book — is here:

• "Hitler remained to the end a socialist"; the Führer "was totally irreligious and" wanted to hang the Pope in St Peter's Square

Bottom: The trailer for Land and Freedom, Ken Loach's pro-Republican film but with a handful of scenes critical of the Soviet presence in Spain