DATA OF INTEREST
GUEST:
Carlos Alberto Montaner
HOST:
Anaeli Ibarra
Synopsis:
Carlos Alberto Montaner Suris´ tells the story of his early opposition to communism as the triumph of the process known as the Cuban Revolution, his vision of what the government called the “Lucha contra Bandidos”, or the “Struggle against Bandits” as the “largest campesino revolution in Latin America,”
Bio:
Carlos Alberto Montaner Suris
(Havana Cuba, April 3, 1943)
Carlos Alberto Montaner Suris is a Cuban journalist, writer and politician, who also holds Spanish and U.S. nationality. His work has been recognized by institutions such as the government of Madrid and the Instituto Juan de Mariana. Until 2011 he was vice president of the Liberal International. The government of Cuba, however, considers Montaner to be a U.S. agent, and has tied him to terrorist activity in his youth, accusations that Montaner has denied on various occassions. In the United States, Montaner studied literature at the University of Miami, and after receiving a Masters in this field he left for Puerto Rico. He taught at the university level there from 1966 to 1970, when he traveled to Madrid to study a doctorate at the Universidad Complutense. During the Spanish transition to democracy, he was involved with Spanish liberal groups.
Multiple newspapers in Latin America, Spain and the United States reprint his weekly column. He has been a professor at a variety of universities in Latin America and the United States and has published over 25 books, several of which have been translated into multiple languages. Among the most well-known and widely-published are: Viaje al corazón de Cuba, Cómo y por qué desapareció el comunismo and Libertad: la clave de la prosperidad. Two of his most polemic and reproduced essays are Manual del perfecto idiota latinoamericano and Fabricantes de miseria, both co-written with Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza and Álvaro Vargas Llosa. Montaner is also a novelist and published his first work of fiction in Spain in 1972, a novel titled Perromundo, 15 years later, in 1987, he published Trama, which in later editions will be titled 1898: La trama. In 2011 Montaner published his third book of fiction, La mujer del coronel, and in 2012 his fourth novel, Otra vez adiós.
In 2017 the Colección Fugas publishes a special 50th anniversary edition of his first fiction book, Póker de Brujas y otros cuentos, which includes an ample interview by Luis Leonel León titled 50 preguntas 50 años después (de la primera vez) in which Montaner talks about his life and work. In 2019 he published his memoirs, Sin ir más lejos. Although he has resided in Madrid since 1970, for several years now he has also had an office in Miami and, since 2010, after becoming a commentator for CNN en Español, spends more time in Miami than in Madrid.
