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Political Testament of Miguel Angel Quevedo
English translation by George L. Moneo
Copyright © 2003 George L. Moneo | All Rights Reserved
 Bohemia
Magazine was the most popular news-weekly in Cuba and Latin America.
Millions of readers followed its political journalism and editorial writings
week after week. Intellectuals and politicians from all over the Latin
world would send their writings to Miguel Angel Quevedo, Bohemia’s
publisher and editor, in the hope of seeing their words published in this
prestigious journal.
From
Madrid, Spain to Santiago, Chile to Buenos Aires, Argentina, Bohemia
became the principal voice of opposition to the administration of Carlos
Prio Socarras and in support of the insurrection and revolution against
the regime of Fulgencio Batista. For decades, Bohemia was enthusiastically
scooped up every week from corner news-sellers and news boxes. On July
26, 1958 the magazine published the infamous Sierra Maestra Manifesto—a
document that purported to “unify” the opposition groups fighting
Batista’s regime. On January 11, 1959, one million copies
of a special edition of the magazine were printed. That edition sold out
in just a few hours.
After
a few months, however, Quevedo, among others, saw that the fruit of their
work—the big lies mixed with unquestionable truths—infected
Cuban society and had destroyed it. Bohemia contributed to its
own destruction and to the destruction of the free press and basic human
rights that had existed until that time in Cuba.
Miguel
Angel Quevedo was able to leave Cuba. But his exile and freedom only increased
his feelings of guilt over the suffering of the Cuban people. His guilt
overwhelmed him and in August of 1969 he committed suicide. Prior to killing
himself he mailed a letter to one of his most distinguished collaborators,
the journalist Ernesto Montaner that, in effect, became his political
last will and testament.
Mr. Ernesto Montaner
Miami, Florida
August 12, 1969
Dear Ernesto:
By the time you read this letter you will have already heard the news
of my death on the radio. I will have committed suicide—at last!—without
intervention from you or Agustin Alles who prevented my previous attempt
on January 21, 1965.
Do you remember? You entered my office that day to deliver one of your
articles. We spoke for a while.
You noticed, though, that I was not in the dialog. You noticed that I
was worried, sad—very sad—and profoundly exhausted. And you
told me so. I thought of my sister, Rosita, whom I adore and my eyes filled
with tears [. . .] I confessed to you that at the moment you arrived in
my office I was thinking of blowing my brains out. And I even mentioned
that my only worry was Rosita seeing me lying on the floor in a pool of
blood.
I did not want to leave her that last image, having decided—and
I even told you I had considered shooting myself lying down so that upon
seeing me she would think I was sleeping.
I remember the look of shock and pity in your face. You stood up, went
to my desk, and removed the bullets from my revolver. And there, sitting
in my chair, you said, “you’re crazy, Miguel, crazy.” You
spoke to me of God, of the eternal damnation of my soul, of the brevity
of life, of how much Rosita needed me and how I would be leaving her alone
in this world. You spoke to me of many things. And, seeing that I did
not give a crap about any of them, you threatened to call Rosita and the
Bohemia employees and tell them. I begged you not to do this. I
comprehended the level of responsibility I had thrust upon you with my
confession. I swore to you that, on Rosita’s life, I would not do
it.
Convinced—for the moment, at least—that you had deterred my
suicide, you left my office. You encountered Agustín Alles as you left
and told him of our conversation. You and Agustín went to see Dr. Valdes
Castillo. You both called me from Dr. Castillo’s house and had me
speak with him. He is a doctor of exceptional talent. He wanted to see
me urgently, but I never saw him. We did, however, speak often on the
telephone. When he did not call me, I called him. We spoke every day.
I never again spoke again to you, however. Forgive me, but I thought you
had betrayed my trust divulging something I had told you as a friend in
a moment of weakness. And you and I never had any communication, until
today, where not you, Agustin Alles, Valdes Castillo, nor anybody
could deter me from the road I was determined to travel. You are reading
a letter from an old friend, a dead friend. Valdes Castillo was right
when he affirmed that the idea of suicide passes through the mind of the
patient in the form of smaller and smaller circles, each circle getting
smaller until it becomes a point. I have reached that point.
I know that my grave will be littered with a mountain of reproach. They
will want to characterize me as the “sole guilty party” in the
tragedy of Cuba. I do not deny my errors or my guilt in any way. What
I do emphatically deny is that I am the “sole guilty party.”
We were all guilty to a lesser or greater degree of responsibility.
We were all guilty. The journalists who covered my desk with damning
articles and exposés about the politicians. These very journalists who
were nothing more than seekers of fame and adulation and gladly satisfied
the masses’ insatiable and brutal desire for revenge. They wore that
badge with honor. It didn’t matter who the president was; nor did
it matter that these very leaders had implemented good laws and reforms
in Cuba. They had to be attacked and, if necessary, destroyed. The same
masses that elected them now asked for their heads in the public square.
The people were guilty. The people who wanted Guiteras, and Chibás, and
who lauded Pardo Llada. The very people who bought Bohemia, “the
voice of the people.” The people who followed Fidel from Oriente
province all the way to the Columbia Camp.
Fidel is nothing more than the result of the clash between demagoguery
and stupidity. All of us contributed to his creation. And all of us, because
we were resentful, demagogues, stupid, or evil, were guilty of helping
place him in power. The journalists, who knew Fidel’s playbook, who
knew of his participation in the Communist-inspired Bogotazo, who
knew of the assassination of Manolo Castro, who knew of his “gangster”
activities at the University of Havana, demanded an amnesty for him and
his accomplices for the assault on the Moncada Barracks when he was in
prison.
The Congress was guilty in approving that very amnesty law. The radio
and television commentators who regaled the congressmen with praise for
passing the law and the trash applauding that same Congress from the bleachers
were guilty.
Bohemia was the echo of the street—the street that applauded
Bohemia when it invented the lie of “the twenty thousand dead.”
A diabolical lie, invented by the alcoholic Enriquito de la Osa who knew
that although Bohemia was the echo of the street, the street also
echoed what was published in Bohemia.
Guilty were the millionaire businessmen who gave Fidel more and more
money to topple the regime. The thousands of traitors who sold out to
this bearded criminal and who cared more for profits from contraband and
theft than about Fidel’s actions in the Sierra Maestra. Guilty
were the priests in red robes who sent young people to serve Castro
and his guerillas in the Sierra, and the Church itself, officially backing
the Communist revolution with fiery sermons, exhorting the Government
to hand in the reins of power.
The United States of America, embargoing arms, destined for the Batista
regime and intended for use in its war against the guerillas, was guilty.
The U.S. State Department, supporting the international cabal, directed
by Communists, which took possession of the island of Cuba, was guilty.
The Batista government, and its opposition, were guilty. Because of false
pride and not wanting to give in, they failed to reach a proper, peaceful
and patriotic agreement. Guilty, too, were those that Fidel secretly sent
to sabotage the negotiations and ensure their failure.
The abstentionist politicians, who closed all doors to all electoral
solutions, and the press, like Bohemia, who played their game and
refused to publish anything related to those elections, were guilty.
All of us were guilty. All of us. By sins of omission and sins of commission.
The old and young, the rich and poor, black and white, the honest and
the dishonest, sinners and saints. Of course we had to learn the bitter
lesson that the poor were the most “honest” and most “virtuous”
of us all.
I die disgusted and alone. Condemned, without a country, and abandoned
by friends to whom I generously gave financial and moral support during
the most difficult days. Friends like Romulo Betancourt, Figueres, Muñoz
Marin. Those titans of the “democratic left” that we discovered
had very little of the “democratic” and so much of the “left.”
All of them, cold and dehumanized, abandoned me in my fall. When they
became convinced I was truly anti-Communist, they demonstrated they were
truly anti-Quevedo. These men are the presumed founders of The Third World:
the world of Mao Tse Tung. I hope my death has some meaning and that it
inspires soul-searching for those who can learn the lessons. So that the
press and journalists can never again be the tools of the uneducated and
uncontrolled mob. So that the press ceases to be “the voice of the
street” and becomes a guiding light along that street. So that the
millionaires no longer give their money to those who will, in the end,
take it all. So that advertisers refuse to place ads in publications that
are tendentious, that plant the seeds of hate and infamy, that are capable
of destroying the moral and physical integrity of a nation (or of an exile
community). So that the people wake up and repudiate those sellers of
hate, whose fruits, we have seen, could not have been more bitter.
We were a people blinded by hate. And we are all now victims of that
blindness.
Our sins and vices were greater than our virtues. We forgot the words
of Núñez de Arce: “When a people forsake their virtues, tyranny will
rise from their vices.”
Goodbye. This is my final goodbye. Tell all of my compatriots that, with
arms crossed over my heart, I forgive them so that they can forgive all
I have done.
Miguel Ángel Quevedo
Caracas, Venezuela
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