Miguel Barroso Ayats had a hypnotic intelligence. When he spoke, he strung together a narrative in which he illuminated the dark areas and distrusted the bright ones. He was gifted with the virtue of understanding, as if he had the solution to any enigma, hence why Felipe González, Zapatero and Pedro Sánchez came to him to interpret their dreams. That made him the first great ‘spindoctor’ of a Spain still pacified in democracy, along with his partner and friend, José Miguel Contreras. “The Migueles,” González called them when he still did not distinguish them and they helped him prepare the debates against Aznar.
Throughout history, he advised the PSOE and reformed its frameworks, giving them new content, staging, and confidence. Refuge values ??that will articulate a new story of social democracy without mothballs. Hardened in the anti-Franco struggle, “in the war,” as Jaume Roures said when he told me that they were going to buy books from Leviathan. As a young man he was active in Red Flag, but his flight would be much higher, without ties or militancy, driven by a distinctive seal that his peers did not have: the literary vocation in which he ignites that mysterum fascinans and gives life a vibrant intensity. .
Miguel Barroso died on an evil January 13 of a heart attack in his house in the center of Madrid, having just arrived from Havana, with the last vision of the palm trees dancing on the shore. Writing with cold hands is not a good sign. Because he has left a lover of life, an Aragonese with many heads but only one heart. “I’m convinced that if he could, he would take all the bad shit out of him and angrily say not yet,” Josemi Contreras tells me. Barroso had several lives, also the proud father of Cristina and Camila (from her marriage to my dear colleague Charo Izquierdo). And Miquel, 15 years old, an exceptional boy who has already been to the moon and back.
I met Miguel with Carme Chacón, in one of the happiest summers of our lives. They formed a fascinating couple, and the long after-dinner conversations illustrated the greatness and misery of the human condition. He always recognized the dimensions of the playing field, whether in politics or pleasure. Lover of the Caribbean – Cuba was his second homeland – he discovered the most beautiful place in the Tropics: Samaná. We spent a summer in Las Terrenas, under slow fans and swings; It was August 2008 and Carme had to stay for the crisis cabinet. Warm rains, deserted beaches, sounds of the small jungle. He warned me: “At night, this looks like Mogambo.” The exotic and the authentic. Sun.
On one occasion, he took a group of friends to Tangier, convinced that it was another paradise where we had to buy an apartment. They were surreal nights in the Old Mountain where mint tea and cigar smoke mixed. We also enjoyed his acid humor and his stories of entanglements in Viso, with Enric Juliana, Millás, Cayetana Guillén and the pregnant Carme.
He never represented the dark man who pulled the strings in the shadows, on the contrary, he was passionate about plurality, a facilitator, a believer “of laissez faire, laissez passer.” His novel, Ants in the Mouth, was made into a film by his brother, Mariano Barroso. Much has been made of his merits, among which is having conferred autonomy on public television in addition to promoting new channels and changing the model of private television.
After Carme’s death, when I resumed the book project, we had several talks and he was tremendously generous, even though forcing him to remember meant removing the sadness. When I handed in the original, after a few days she called me: “I can’t get past page 7, I start crying, I won’t be able to read it.” He suggested that a friend of both of us, José Andrés Torres Mora, do it. There were no corrections. No trace of the hard and impenetrable man.
Barroso chose to be invisible even though he supported the socialist presidents with many of his ideas. He always collaborated for free, except for the year and a half in which he was communication secretary; There he received calls from political opponents and took a step back. “I am too misanthropic, I have enough intellectual arrogance to not tolerate idiots, I have no phlegm, and I don’t see myself changing my register either. But above all, I have no vocation for transcendence”, he told me about this episode. Barroso was a brilliant journalist, a flânneur, a zascandil – defined by another of his great friends, Luis Fernández – He maintained a strange relationship with secrecy; I remember his joy when the CIA files were opened, that was the trigger for his book: “A Sensitive Matter (Three Cuban Stories of Crime and Betrayal”)
The press fascinated him. He loved to read it on paper during the weekend. He returned through the front door to Prisa – where years ago they wanted to cancel him – as an advisor to El País, and together with Pepa Bueno and Jordi Gracia, he enjoyed a sparkling life. He was married to the Cuban anesthetist Dreydi Monduy.
On Sunday, July 23, after the ballot boxes were counted, I sent him a message: “Your hand was noticed at the end of the campaign.” “Joana, I am in Cuba crying” (with emotion) And after the investiture he wrote to me: “it is about presenting the Catalan dispute as an anecdote from the past. The issue is not Puigdemont or Feijoo. It is progressivism or reaction. From Washington to Buenos Aires or Zaragoza.” She always looked at the horizon with a very fine sense of smell to identify the air of the times. He didn’t understand miniatures.
The year went quickly for Miguel Barroso, the journalist who dreamed big.
