Larry Trask 1944-2004

Professor Larry Trask, who has died aged 59, was one of the very few outsiders recognised and celebrated by the Basque people as a master of their extraordinary language.
Known as Euskera, it is one of the most mysterious of the world's languages - an "isolate" unrelated to the Indo-European languages which surround it. Its origins have puzzled scholars for generations, some thinking it related to the languages of the Caucasus, some that it derives from the non-Arab languages of North Africa and others believing it developed in isolation.
The obscurity of its origins is matched only by the difficulty of its grammar, syntax and pronunciation. Among other complications, it possesses a grammatical form known as the ergative case, which forces the addition of a "k" to the subject when it has a transitive verb; the form of auxiliary verbs can convey a lot of information about the subject in a sentence, and about the direct and any indirect objects.
There is a popular myth in the Basque country that, many centuries ago, Satan arrived on a proselytising mission but, after 10 years of trying to lead the Basques from the path of righteousness, he gave up because the only words of Euskera he could master were bai eta ez ("yes and no").
Trask was one of the few outsiders to succeed where the Devil had failed. He was an honorary member of the Euskaltzaindia, the Royal Academy of the Basque Language, and the author of several textbooks and monographs on the subject as well as on broader themes of language and linguistics.
Trask's interests centred on the pre-history and evolution of Euskera, though on his personal website he recorded an exasperated plea for no one to come near him with some preposterous new "discovery" linking Basque to "Minoan, Tibetan, Isthmus Zapotec or Martian". Instead, his diligent scholarship on subjects such as etymology, classes of verbs, borrowings into Euskera from the Romance languages or the neologisms created by Basque cultural nationalists, brought a fresh breeze into the study of the language.
Robert Lawrence Trask was born on November 10 1944 at Olean, New York state. His family background was a blend of Celtic, German and Scandinavian, and his path towards Euskera was a circuitous one.
His first degree was in Chemistry at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, followed by a Master's at Brandeis University. He signed up to serve a year with the Peace Corps as a chemistry teacher in Turkey, but had to flee his university post in Ankara when political turmoil exposed him to danger.
In 1970 he paused for a fortnight's holiday in England, a visit that was to last 34 years. In London he made his first acquaintance with Euskera and immediately became fascinated by the mystery of its origins. Diverting his scientific curiosity towards linguistics, he not only mastered the language but developed a formidable grasp of historical morphology, grammar, orthography and other branches of his new discipline.
After completing a doctorate on the language at the School of Oriental and African Studies, Trask began an academic career which took him from the Polytechnic of Central London to the University of Liverpool, where he lectured for nine years until his department fell victim to education cuts in the 1980s. In 1988 he went to Sussex University, where he became a leading figure in its School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences.
His impressive output of academic works included Towards a History of the Basque Language (1995) and The History of Basque (1996), as well as more general studies: A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics (1993); Language Change (1994); Language: The Basics (1995); and A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology (1996).
His writings were laced with good humour and readily accessible to the non-specialist; and the modesty with which he wore his learning endeared him to students and scholars both in Britain and in the Basque country, where he made many friends.
His first wife, Esther Barrutia, was a Basque from Elorrio, and when he attended a linguistics conference in Guernica, a famous bertsolari (an exponent of the Basque tradition of spontaneous oral versifying) declaimed an instant poem on the theme of love conquering language barriers.
After they divorced, Trask married his second wife, Jan. In his final years, he suffered a long illness which deprived him of the power of speech - though he maintained a lively correspondence with his peers by e-mail.
He died just as colleagues were preparing to present him with a festschrift.

• Robert Lawrence Trask, linguist; born 10 November 1944; died 29 March 2004 

[PUBLISHED IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, 16 April 2004. Photo from University of Sussex Bulletin]

Juanito Valderrama 1916-2004

Juanito Valderrama, who has died aged 87, was a giant in the flamenco world, one of the most popular performers and most innovative artists in this tradition of heartfelt and dramatic song rooted in the gypsy culture of Andalucia. His chief innovation within that somewhat conservative tradition was as a writer of his own lyrics. He was an accomplished cantautor (or singer-songwriter) decades before the term became a commonplace in Spanish popular culture.
In flamenco parlance, he was a cantaor, a performer of the cante jondo, the melancholy sentimental ballads typical of the genre.
One song more than any other is associated with him: El Emigrante, written by Valderrama in 1949, is an anguished ballad of yearning for what a Spanish emigre has left behind.
The date is crucial, for this was written before Spain became a country of mass economic emigration: the emigrés to whom it refers were, in fact, the hundreds of thousands of refugees exiled as supporters of the losing side in the Civil War that ushered in Franco's 40-year dictatorship.
Valderrama was also a successful impresario, nurturing the early careers of some of flamenco's latter-day greats, such as the late Camarón de la Isla or José Merce.
It is debatable whether he deserved to be called a sympathiser with the Franco regime - a charge that tended to erode his popular appeal in the last years of the dictatorship.
True, he had - in common with many another star in the flamenco firmament - performed for the amusement of the Caudillo and his cronies, for whom flamenco symbolised a pure strain of the Spanish culture they purported to champion. But there was another side to the story.
Summoned to perform for a hunting party in Franco's honour - an offer he could not refuse, on pain of imprisonment - Valderrama was told to sing El Emigrante.
He did so with some trepidation, and was astounded when the dictator himself requested an encore, describing it as a "wonderfully patriotic" number. The singer performed it again, hoping that its subversive message would go over the heads of Franco and his hosts. He got away with it.
In reality, the lyric had been inspired by the tears Valderrama had witnessed on the cheeks of Republican exiles, moved to grief by his performance at the Teatro Cervantes in Tangier; it was a quintessential protest song avant la lettre, scribbled on the back of his hotel bill.
Born at Torredelcampo in Jaen province, Juan Valderrama Blanca Valderrama grew up a tiny man with an impish grin usually topped by a typical flat-brimmed sombrero from Cordoba.
His parents were peasant farmers, and he recalled singing as a child to their olive trees, and accompanying his father to trade horses or mules at gypsy ferias.
His talent was recognised when he won a village competition at the age of eight. In 1934 he was recruited into the touring song company of Niña de la Puebla, with which he made his debut in Madrid's Cine Metropolitano.
When the Civil War broke out, Valderrama enlisted in the loyalist ranks (in an anarchist battalion) and toured the front lines, digging trenches and entertaining the troops and the wounded.
His artistic reputation helped him escape the reprisals visited on the vanquished Republicans in the post-war years. Instead, he dedicated himself to performing and promoting flamenco all over Spain and occasionally abroad.
Valderrama performed with some of the foremost names in flamenco - Aurora Pavón, Niña de los Peines, Pepe Marchena, los Gaditanos - but from the 1950s his shows extended beyond the traditional canon.
He had a keen sense of changes in public taste, attracting derision from certain flamenco purists when he interspersed conventional popular songs, or coplas, with those of the thoroughbred cante jondo.
He defended the practice as a means of widening the audience base for the authentic sound - and as a way out of the hardships facing a cantaor passing around the hat for a few pesetas.
His sternest critics derided him for participating in the watering-down of a passionate art form into a mass-market spectacle; what would nowadays be hailed as "crossover" was seen as heresy.
Valderrama's recording career began in 1935 and lasted more than six decades. More than 1,500 songs are left to posterity, though his repertoire was larger by far.
With his accompanist, el Niño Ricardo, he started writing his own songs; a dozen of the 300 credited to his pen were major hits. Apart from El Emigrante, his signature tunes included De Polizón (The Stowaway); Su Primera Comunión (Her First Communion); and Madre Hermosa (Sweet Mother). He also acted in seven films, of middling quality.
For many who lived through the bleak years of Francoism, Valderrama's voice was very much a part of the soundtrack, and consequently he fell somewhat out of favour with the public when democracy was restored, despite his impeccable Republican credentials.
He returned more fully to the flamenco tradition in the latter part of his long career, and was an acknowledged expert on the many local variants of Andalucian song, such as granaínas, malagueñas, bulerías, soleares, fandangos or cartageneras.
His constant companion for half a century was the flamenco songstress Dolores Abril, a teenager of striking beauty who was performing as Lolita Caballero when she joined Valderrama's touring company in 1954 and for whom he abandoned his first wife.
Divorce was not feasible in Spain in those days, and it was not until 1979 that he was able to get his short-lived first marriage annulled. A civil marriage to Dolores in 1981 received the Church's blessing six years later.
Valderrama formally retired in 1994, but made occasional television appearances thereafter. On February 23, the Andalucian regional government hosted a concert in Madrid in his honour at which he gave his last public performance. Soon after, he suffered a heart attack.
He was convalescing at his chalet in Altos de Espartinas, Sevilla, and preparing for an afternoon stroll through the neighbourhood when he died. He is survived by Dolores, their daughter Blanca and son Juan, himself a noted singer and actor.

• Juan Valderrama Blanca Valderrama, singer; born 24 May 1916; died 12 April 2004 

[PUBLISHED IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, 19 APRIL 2004]

Imanol Larzabal 1947-2004

Imanol, who has died aged 56, was one of the masters of Basque folk song and in later years a prominent critic of the separatist group Euskadi ta Askatasuna (ETA), for which he had previously suffered imprisonment and torture.
Imanol became a member of ETA as a teenager growing up in San Sebastian in the 1960s in the days before the organisation carried out terrorism; as a result of his involvement, he spent six months in prison followed by several years in exile in France.
In the 1980s, when ETA adopted a totalitarian terrorist policy, targeting journalists, politicians, academics and artists who disagreed publicly with its anti-democratic stance, Imanol spoke out against it and soon found his name featuring in pro-ETA graffiti as a "traitor", an "españolista", like his close friend (and former ETA comrade), the anthropologist Mikel Azurmendi. When the leader of ETA, Dolores González Katarain ("Yoyes"), advocated an end to terrorism and was murdered by her erstwhile colleagues, Imanol sang in a concert of protest in 1986. He was forced to stay away from the Basque Country from the mid-1990s.
Imanol Larzabal, usually known simply by his first name, was born in the Antiguo neighbourhood of San Sebastian, where the Basque language had been marginalised. Resistance to Franco found many forms of expression, and the 17-year-old Imanol chose his by joining a folk dance troupe, Argia. He was a dantzari until 1968, when he switched to singing.
During his imprisonment in San Sebastian, torture was routinely used on members of ETA. Imanol used his confinement to develop as a songwriter. On his release, he fled to France, where he started his recording career. During his exile in Paris, Bordeaux and Bayonne, he became a prominent protest singer.
Imanol's early records were produced to raise funds for Basque political prisoners. When the post-Franco amnesty allowed him home in 1976, he regularly performed for prison audiences. After one such concert at Martutene prison in 1985, two ETA terrorists serving life sentences escaped hidden in the huge loudspeakers that Imanol had used to blast his music across the prison yard. He was held at police headquarters until it was established that he knew nothing about the planned break-out.
While the Basque country progressed towards its present status as one of the most devolved regions in Europe, Imanol invested his energies in the promotion of its ancient language and the renaissance of its culture. He was a co-founder of the Korrika, an annual road-race that raises funds for adult classes in Euskera.
Above all he was known for his singing - one critic defined his style as "thunder harnessed". He leaves a huge volume of work, most of it in Euskera, from his first "underground" tracks written in prison and recorded in the 1960s under the pseudonym Michel Etxegaray, to last year's album, Versos Encendidos (Blazing Verses), a poignant set of 15 songs reflecting on his exile from Spain and within her borders.
His hit albums included Herriak ez du barkatuko (1974), Lau haizetara (1977), Jo ezan (1981), Orhoituz (1985) and Muga beroetan (1989). In the 1990s, he widened his repertoire to include songs in the Castilian tongue.
Despite constant insults and threats from ETA and its camp-followers, Imanol refused to quit Euskadi until his mother died in 1999. From October 2000, protesting that he "could no longer breathe freely" in Euskadi, he settled in Torrevieja, in Alicante. Imanol ventured home from time to time, giving a recital in the San Sebastian Kursaal in February 2003. His last concert was in Lasarte-Oria in January, and his last recording was of two songs in Euskera, one a tribute to the Basque composer Julen Lekuona.
Imanol died on 25 June after a brain haemorrhage: political slogans were explicitly banned at his funeral.
He was unmarried.

• Imanol Larzabal, singer; born 11 November 1947; died 25 June 2004 

[PUBLISHED IN THE DAILY TELEGRAPH, 10 SEPTEMBER 2004. Photo from Egin]

Marcelo González 1918-2004

From his appointment as Archbishop of Toledo at the end of 1971, Marcelo González was Spain’s senior Catholic prelate during 23 years that saw the church’s position transformed. He was uncomfortable witnessing the end of Francisco Franco’s “national-Catholic” dictatorship and the emergence of a vibrant and increasingly secular democracy.

The same Cardinal whose funeral homily praised Franco as “the father of our homeland” died in the company of José Bono, the Socialist Defence Minister. As president of Castilla-La Mancha, Bono had awarded González the region’s Gold Medal, and the two were firm friends; but for most Spanish progressives, within the church and outside it, González was seen as a relic of an age of reactionary clericalism.
Marcelo González Martín, son of a small businessman, enrolled in the diocesan seminary of his native province, Valladolid, at the age of 17 and graduated in theology from the Pontifical University of Comillas. He was ordained in 1941 and appointed to lecture in dogmatic theology at Valladolid, where he was made Canon of the Cathedral. His first bishopric was Astorga, in León, where he was consecrated in 1961.
His promotion as Coadjutor Archbishop of Barcelona came five years later, and he succeeded as Metropolitan Archbishop in 1967. The appointment displeased Catalonia’s Catholic laity, who launched a campaign called “Volem bisbes catalans” (we want Catalan bishops), arguing that the imposition of “outsiders” distanced the hierarchy from its flock.
González served just under five years in Barcelona before becoming Archbishop of Toledo and thereby Primate of Spain, with elevation to the College of Cardinals in 1973. The see of Toledo covers some 20,000 square kilometres and González made a point of visiting every parish within it. A relentless evangelist, he made the promotion of priestly vocations and the training of lay catechists his top priorities, opening new seminaries and training centres. The archdiocese was the first in Spain to set up its own broadcast outlet, Radio Santa María.
Although González voiced concern for the disadvantaged, he headed a Spanish hierarchy that was intimately identified with the winners of the Civil War. When Franco died in November 1975, weeks after signing five death warrants in the face of papal pleas for clemency, it fell to González to deliver the funeral homily. He made oblique references to reconciliation, forgiveness and hope – but the main thrust was “the shining light of gratitude for the immense legacy” the old tyrant left to “Christian civilisation, without which freedom is but a chimera.”
González took part in the conclaves that elected Popes John Paul I and II in 1978. He remained a vigorous advocate of conservative morality, opposing Spain’s democratic constitution because it neglected to acknowledge the sovereignty of God and opened the path to legalised divorce, birth control and general debauchery. In 1983, he made headlines by refusing Holy Communion to Franco’s granddaughter, on the grounds that her recent divorce made her an adulteress.
He retired in 1995 to his mother’s home village of Fuentes Nava in Palencia, where he died after a long illness.

• Marcelo González Martín, priest; born Villanubla, Spain 16 January 1918; ordained 1941; Bishop of Astorga, 1961-67; Archbishop of Barcelona, 1967-71; Archbishop of Toledo and Primate of Spain, 1971-95; elevated to Cardinal, 1973; died Fuentes de Nava, Spain 25 August 2004

[FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE INDEPENDENT, 30 AUGUST 2004]

Luís Nunes de Almeida 1946-2004

Luís Nunes de Almeida, president of Portugal’s Constitutional Tribunal and an ex-officio member of the republic’s Council of State, was on his way to deliver an annual lecture on constitutional law at Aix-la-Chapelle when he died of a heart attack in the Spanish hotel where he and his wife were stopping overnight.
Appointed in April last year to the office that made him the fourth most senior figure in the Portuguese constitution, he had served 20 years on the tribunal that assesses the constitutionality of laws and was its vice-president for 14 years.
His learned jurisprudence and impartiality were respected across the political spectrum, though his centre-left leanings were no secret: he served a term in parliament on the Socialist benches in the early 1980s, and played a major part in the constitutional reform that dissolved the Revolutionary Council and liberalised the economy.
In the aftermath of the 1974 revolution, he had been involved with the Socialist Left Movement (MES) and his penchant for backroom political machinations earned him his English-language nickname, ‘Plot’. In later years, he was an ally of António Guterres on the wing of the Socialist party that opposed alliance with the right-wing Social Democrats.
Nunes de Almeida had suffered a heart condition for several years and underwent a coronary by-pass. He had been through several stressful experiences in recent times. Earlier this year, he was caught up in the political crisis sparked by the appointment of Portugal’s then premier, José Manuel Durão Barroso, to preside the European Commission. President Jorge Sampaio sought his counsel on whether the situation demanded an early general election – the option preferred by a majority in opinion polls – or could be resolved by the appointment of the new leader of the majority conservative bloc, Pedro Santana Lopes, who took over as prime minister in July.
Nunes de Almeida’s name figured marginally in a long-running and labyrinthine corruption investigation known as the Moderna case, in which he and two other senior judges were alleged to have accepted fees and benefits in kind for giving classes in a private university. An investigation by the superior council of the judiciary found no basis for charges of impropriety.
The judge was a senior freemason, a member of the 33rd-degree supreme council in Portugal’s largest Masonic body, the Grande Oriente Lusitano, of which he was tipped as a future grand master. His funeral Mass was preceded by a private Masonic ritual, celebrated for the first time since 1882 within a Portuguese Catholic church.
Earlier in his career, he was a senior aide in the ministries of social affairs and industry, and chairman of the bankruptcy court. In private practice, he held several company directorships and was involved with the country’s leading business schools.

• Luís Manuel César Nunes de Almeida, jurist, born 16 July 1946; died 6 September 2004

[PUBLISHED IN THE TIMES (?)]

Juan Francisco Fresno 1914-2004

When Juan Francisco Fresno was named Archbishop of Santiago and Primate of Chile in 1983, succeeding the combative Raúl Silva Henríquez, Lucía Hiriart de Pinochet was heard to remark: “The Lord has answered our prayers”. But the dictator’s wife had misplaced her faith: Fresno, who has died aged 90, used his office to become a prime mover in the restoration of democracy.
His defining legacy was as architect of the 1985 National Accord, a pact between moderate opposition leaders and erstwhile backers of the military dictatorship, which paved the way for free elections in 1989. He was also successful as a mediator between Argentina and Chile in the 1984 Beagle Channel territorial dispute.
Fresno was born in Santiago, the fourth of five children. He studied at the city’s seminary, transferring to the Gregorian University in Rome to complete a bachelor’s degree in canon law. He returned to Chile for his ordination in 1937 and took up teaching duties at the seminary while working as a parish priest and a youth organiser.
At the age of 43, Fresno was appointed by Pope Pius XII as bishop of the new diocese of Copaipó, in the silver-mining deserts of Northern Chile, taking office in August 1958 and choosing as his episcopal motto “Adveniat regnum tuum” (Thy Kingdom Come). Promotion by Paul VI to the Archbishopric of La Serena followed in 1967, and there he made his mark in reinvigorating parish life and fostering priestly vocations.
Chilean Catholic opinion was deeply divided between left and right in the decades of the 60s and 70s, some throwing in their lot with Salvador Allende’s Popular Unity coalition and others backing the conservative forces behind the military coup that ousted the socialist government in September 1973. Fresno refrained from active engagement in secular politics, chairing the country’s Episcopal Conference from 1975 to 1977 and serving Rome’s Latin American College.
Meanwhile, Catholic activists came to the fore in the resistance to Augusto Pinochet’s junta, with the Vicariate of Solidarity becoming a trusted channel for funding and practical support to the oppressed from solidarity movements in Britain and elsewhere. Fresno’s predecessor as Archbishop of Santiago, Cardinal Silva Henríquez (1907-99), was a particular irritant to the regime and the ruling clique hoped for an easier ride under the new primate.
His appointment to Santiago coincided with an upsurge in resistance. The clandestine left mobilised major waves of strikes and even the right was inching towards an accommodation with democratic forces. Fresno nailed his colours to the mast within days of becoming Archbishop: “It is natural that differences should arise between people”, he declared, “but when we all seek to build a better world, we must seek a path and I believe that path to be dialogue.”
Made Cardinal by John Paul II in May 1985, Fresno served six years in the archdiocese and hosted the April 1987 papal visit. But the real high point of his archiepiscopate began in August 1983, when his palace was the scene for a secret meeting between opposition leaders and emissaries of the military regime. Within two years, Christian Democrats Patricio Aylwin and Gabriel Valdés, Luís Maira of the Christian Left and Andrés Allemand of the conservative National Union Movement cobbled together the National Accord for a Transition to Full Democracy. Fresno acted as honest broker in the first pact uniting a broad spectrum of Chilean political forces since the 1973 coup. To his great satisfaction, this laid the basis for the resounding “No” vote in the plebiscite of October 1988 that ousted Pinochet from office.
Fresno defined his pastoral mission as the pursuit of a Chile that would be “a land not of confrontation but of mutual understanding.” Reconciliation remains, however, more of a desideratum than an accomplished fact, so long as Pinochet eludes justice and the “disappeared” under his tyranny remain unaccounted for, their torturers and killers unpunished.
After his retirement on age grounds in March 1990, the emeritus archbishop, a former president of the NGO Cáritas Chile, lived modestly in a house behind the Dehesa parish church in the capital. Although blind and a wheelchair user, he continued to visit the sick and help in parochial work. He died from acute kidney failure.

• Cardinal Emeritus Juan Francisco Fresno Larraín, priest, born 26 July 1914; died 14 October 2004

[A VERSION WAS PUBLISHED IN THE GUARDIAN, 1 NOVEMBER 2004]

Néstor Baguer 1921-2004

Several remarkable careers ended with the death in Havana of the Cuban writer Néstor Baguer, aged 83.
First, there was the lifelong journalist and intellectual, who published his first articles at the age of 14 and went on to work for the country’s major newspapers and radio stations, a founder of the journalists’ union and, in recognition of his articles and books on the correct use of Spanish, a distinguished member of the Cuban Academy of the Language.
Next came the outspoken dissident agitator, using Miami-based news agencies and websites to campaign for over a decade against Fidel Castro and expose the miseries of everyday life under the dictatorship. Fêted by the anti-communist lobby in exile as the doyen of domestic resistance, he was an honoured guest and protegé in the United States Interest Section at the Swiss Embassy in Havana. Reviled by his former colleagues in the Cuban media, he was expelled from the Academy and his press credentials were withdrawn.
Last year, Baguer revealed his third personality. Since shortly after Castro’s 1959 revolution, he was the priceless “agent Octavio” for the Cuban secret service, infiltrating dissident circles and filing meticulous reports on their activities and funding. His espionage only came to light when he gave crucial testimony against 75 activists jailed last April for “conspiracy with the USA to undermine Cuba’s national sovereignty”. His cover blown, public honours were restored and he was acclaimed as a hero of the revolution.
Néstor Baguer Sánchez-Galarraga was born in 1921. With fellow-students at the Instituto de La Habana, he founded the magazine Siboney, writing extensively on cultural themes. He went on to study journalism and business administration in the United States, later spending eight years in Peru where he first came into contact with communist groups.
On his return to Havana in 1958, Baguer joined the opposition to the corrupt dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, welcoming Castro’s guerrilla victory the following year. He became active in revolutionary politics alongside his journalistic work – for the foreign trade ministry, the national airline, the newspapers Trabajadores, Juventud Rebelde and Granma Internacional, and radio stations including Cadena Habana, Radio Metropolitana and Radio Habana Cuba. As an enthusiast for the Spanish language, he wrote several books and a popular newspaper column promoting correct usage and analysing Cuba’s creole hybrid with its African and North American influences. This earned him membership of the Academy, which elected him honorary treasurer, and invitations to conferences around the Spanish-speaking world.
His relationship with Seguridad del Estado, Cuba’s secret police, dated from the 1960s. His articles on the export potential of Cuban honey led indirectly to a trade mission to London, where he struck an advantageous deal for Cuba’s government on a purchase of dredging vessels. There, he was approached by a CIA agent whose offers of reward to help sustain the trade blockade on Cuba were politely declined and duly reported to the Seguridad.
By the time of his formal retirement, Baguer was one of Cuba’s most respected journalists. So it was extremely gratifying for the dissident groups to find him beginning, in his old age, to grumble about the hardships of life in Cuba, setting up as a freelance and filing copy to the US-funded Radio Martí and websites, like Cubanet and Cuba Press, hostile to the Castro regime. In 1993, he joined the Independent Press Association, APIC, which billed itself as Cuba’s first independent news agency, and provided an outlet for stories about human rights violations and routine privations under communist rule. His florid prose became that of an ardent counter-revolutionary. Thus, in 1997, he wrote: “Those who suffer are those of us who live here, within the monster, fighting for democracy and freedom using civilised and peaceful means”.
In reality, Baguer was one of a team – seven men and five women – assigned to infiltrate the opposition and gather intelligence on its links with foreign diplomats as well as exile circles in Florida and Spain. Some of them reached the very highest levels in the small organisations they joined: one chaired the Human Rights Party, another was Baguer’s number two in his press agency, and none of them blew their cover until last year. Baguer had renewed his ties with the secret service in the early 1990s, determined to use his journalistic skills in the service of the beleaguered revolution, even if it cost him close personal friendships.
Known among his fellow spies as “El Profe” (the schoolteacher), the elderly agent Octavio spent 11 years ostracised by his fellow professionals in the state-run media. They ridiculed him as a stooge of Washington and Miami, and when cycling to work in Havana, they hated to see him whisked past in a diplomatic limousine. He was a sell-out, a turncoat, a senile old fool seduced by the lure of the dollar. Expulsion from the Academy of the Language and the journalists’ union followed.
Baguer was warmly welcomed at the US Interests Section, where many of the dissident publications were produced – and where, he claimed, they were often drafted or corrected. He later exclaimed: “The more gross a false news story was, the more they’d pay for it. I saw these guys handing their articles in to the Interests Section to be sent on to Miami. What kind of journalist would have his copy revised by a foreign government that’s attacking his own?”
To keep up his cover, Baguer would plausibly report, for instance, that residents of Havana had taken to chopping up park benches for firewood. He collected evidence that the US National Endowment for Democracy was a major channel of funds to dissident groups, which also had backers in Miami and Madrid, and that activists were constantly quarrelling among themselves about which of their leaders was trousering the money. To the dissidents, he invariably came across as a friendly, hospitable, avuncular figure always willing to lend a few dollars or help place an article in the Miami Herald.
In March 2003, Baguer convened the National Workshop on Journalistic Ethics, a meeting of 34 dissidents in the official residence of James Cason, Washington’s most senior diplomat in Cuba. Days later, the Interior Ministry rounded up 75 people in the biggest crackdown on dissidents for many years. They were put on trial for treason, with sentences of between six and 20 years imposed. Baguer testified against Raúl Rivero, lately a cause célèbre for the pressure group Reporters Without Borders, whom he admitted admiring as a poet and writer but dismissed as a “moral ruin”.
In his last years Baguer returned to the payroll of the national news agency, AIN, and was still writing columns and preparing an autobiography – to be entitled Octavio – when he entered hospital four months ago. His loyalty to the Comandante en Jefe was rewarded with several medals and the Dignity Prize of the journalists’ union. Fidel himself, nursing a broken knee, was unable to attend the funeral where Baguer’s flag-draped coffin was escorted by uniformed Interior Ministry troops, but sent a personal wreath. Baguer is survived by his ex-wife, Nora Lamboley.

• Néstor Baguer Sánchez-Galarraga, journalist; born 22 August 1921; died 25 October 2004

[PHOTOGRAPH FROM GRANMA]