Lundy, remembrance and oblivion

By Carlos Alberto Montaner*

In his memoirs, President Clinton mentioned one of his professors at Georgetown University with a touch of admiration. It was writer Luis Aguilar León. The irony is that Aguilar made a strong impression on the student, but the impact was not reciprocal. Lundy, as we his friends called him, did not exactly remember when that rosy-cheeked and willowy young man attended his European history classes, a collegian so alike the other young men who listened to his brilliant dissertations, forever sprinkled with humor and juicy anecdotes. Nor was it strange that Lundy would dazzle his interlocutors. It happened when he delivered lectures, when he chatted in small groups, or when he was interviewed on radio or television. Quite simply, the angel of communication had touched him.

It is sad that Lundy did not live to see the end of this nigh-infinite Cuban tragedy. Because he knew Fidel Castro back in elementary school and later went to high school and university with him, he never held out much hope for the revolution. The revolution was Fidel, and Fidel was a detestable bully. At the time, Lundy knew that Batista was a disgrace for Cuba, but he never doubted that Fidel was a gangster who would irresponsibly destroy the country, the consequence of the lethal sum of a bloodthirsty temperament, ocean-deep ignorance, and a spellbound society. So, in the early days, while he could, he denounced the way the dictatorship was being forged and even took arms to combat it, despite the deep repugnance violence caused in him. Finally, after all was lost, he again followed the academic road -- he had been a university professor in Cuba -- and began his long and intellectually fruitful exile.  

Lundy has died in Miami at the age of 82. It was the worst of news, but 82 is a reasonable age. The way in which he met his end was not, however. Alzheimer's disease struck him with the methodical cruelty that form of senile dementia attacks its victims. First, it erases words and whole sentences. Later, it trips the tongue and muddles the thoughts. Later yet, in something like successive waves, it makes faces, people and events disappear. The past -- which is the only life we really carry inside -- vanishes. The disease steals it and leaves us vulnerable in a world that suddenly becomes foreign to us. It makes it disappear, like the evil magicians do with the defenseless princes in the more harrowing children's tales.

I really cannot think of a worse punishment for Lundy, a person blessed with a luminous intelligence and an invincible sense of humor, cleverly buttressed by his contagious laughter and his roguish glance. Ronald Reagan, who suffered from that disease and who also poked fun at almost everything, had the courage to make jokes about it. “It's not so bad,” he would say, consoling himself. “Every day you meet someone new.” And so it is. A moment comes -- a terrible moment for those who survive and love the patient -- when everyone is new people, including Vera Mestre, that extraordinary and beautiful woman who accompanied Lundy for half a century until she closed his eyes with her final kiss. There are no longer any children or friends, because the memory is gone and the brain, perplexed, cannot even accumulate new experiences and plunges the person into a devitalized indifference. There is no life “back when.” Nor is there a tomorrow. One's existence becomes a dense, fleeting and slippery now.

In addition to his essays, lectures and longer reflections, Lundy deserves credit for two of the most disseminated and successful articles in the history of Cuban journalism: “The time for unanimity” (1960), the last critical column published in Cuba against the dictatorship, on the eve of the confiscation of Prensa Libre, the last independent newspaper left in the country, in which Lundy warned against the horrors of totalitarianism, and “The prophet speaks about Cubans” (1986), an ironic article about the paradoxical idiosyncrasy of his compatriots, written in the style of Lebanese writer Khalil Gibran but in a jocular tone that sweetens the criticism without reducing its underlying severity. 

Two years before his death, when Lundy had lost many of his faculties but still retained his charm, he asked me to send him off with an article like this one, after he died. I agreed to write it, but, to cheer him up, I begged him to join forces with me and write Castro's obituary together. (In the end, these long political duels are reduced to who dies first, because we are all exhausted.) Lamentably, he declined.

In My Life, Clinton says that when he talked with his Cuban professor about his vocation, at the time hazy and multiple, as happens to intelligent youths, Lundy told him that choosing a career was like choosing a wife from 10 beautiful brides. You're always left with the painful memory of those you never married. Lundy was a good professor, the former president wrote, but the bride he truly loved was Cuba, and he had lost her forever. He died with that sorrow in his heart. [©FIRMAS PRESS]

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Coda. A few days after Lundy's death, another intellectual of great stature passed away: his schoolmate Gastón Fernández de la Torriente, professor emeritus at the University of Arkansas. In October 2006, Leonardo Fernández Marcané, former professor at New York University and a regular contributor to Diario las Américas, also died. Like Lundy, the two were part of that first batch of intellectuals who came into exile in the 1960s, made a name for themselves in U.S. universities and left behind a mountain of valuable writings. Both of them were my friends. Both of them deserve an homage from Cuba, once the country is free.