¡NO PASARÁN!: 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.

Read the whole thing.