The last death of Ramón Mercader
By Jorge Semprún - 20/10/1978

In the early 1960s, any visitor to the Cuban Embassy in Paris would be usually welcomed by a distinguished-looking, white-haired lady of a certain age who was apparently in charge of the reception and the telephone. However, one day someone realized she was actually Cuban-born Caridad Mercader, or better said, Caridad del Río, who had been married to the Catalan Pablo Mercader and given birth to Ramón Mercader, Trotsky’s assassin. How had she gotten that job? Who had put her there? Be that as it may, her presence was deemed unusual, not to say offensive, to a number of the Cuban Revolution’s official representatives to Europe. For instance, Martha Frayde –then Cuba’s delegate to UNESCO, a woman with a spotless record as a fighter who is now facing outrageous charges of being a spy at the service of the U.S.– managed to inform Raúl Roa of such a disturbing fact. A few days later, Mrs. Mercader disappeared from the Cuban Embassy in Paris. According to all existing historical records and objective data, Caridad del Río Mercader was recruited by Stalin’s intelligence services and not entirely unaware that they also did her son Ramón. Is she still alive? If she is –which is likely to be the case, for her death would have surely made headlines everywhere– how could she be feeling on this new anniversary of her son’s death? Ramón, who was trained as a killer for being a faithful, selfless and unconditional member of the PSUC and, coincidently, died in Cuba, as if his entrance to the abode of the deceased would be like going back to his mother’s lap and the sinister haven of a stifling and deadly maternity…

Some months ago, a Catalan newspaper reported Teresa Pamies’s comments about the publication by Editorial Grijalbo of Georges Soria’s Guerra y revolución en España, a true monument to historical fallacy and a full-blown fact-twisting enterprise. (These are my words, of course, not Teresa Pamies’s.)

What had moved her enough to make her voice so many schmaltzy reminiscences was one of the book’s countless photographs –Soria, in 1937, had been the author of a forgotten pamphlet about the POUM (the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), described as a hotbed of spies at Franco’s service– where she recognized her old comrade-in-arms Ramón Mercader, the young communist militant from back in the glorious days of the civil war. In other words, Ramón Mercader was one of us –and the very thought of it terrifies me– one of so many loyal fighters who were parishioners of Stalin’s church, eventually recruited for the shadiest and most criminal counterrevolutionary undertakings.

Today, on this anniversary of Ramón Mercader’s death, after so many decades of stubborn and baleful silence, will the devoted militant’s comrades say anything? Will they finally, without risk but also without any remarkable merit, speak out and tell us the truth of their long-lived memories and everything they know about those days?

At any rate, let us hope that, when Ramón Mercader’s mortal remains are buried in Cuba, someone will very discreetly place on his grave the Hero of the Soviet Union medal he received for killing Lev Davidovich Bronshtein. Mercader was Stalinism’s exemplary hero. That is, exactly what a communist should never be.