Professor Luis Aguilar, R.I.P.

No eyes twinkled brighter, and no Georgetown professor’s history lectures were infused with more joy than those of Luis Aguilar, who passed away in Miami last night.

In a lecture in his Revolutionary Movements in Latin America course, he used an anecdote to teach that the concept of democracy carries different meanings in different places. Professor Aguilar told us about a political rally he attended in rural Peru, where he stopped listening to the high-minded rhetoric and approached a campesino at the back of the crowd to ask him what democracy meant to him. “La democracia,” he replied, “es que nadie me pegue” (“that no one beats me”).

He was Cuban to the core – maybe that’s why he had such a sense of hospitality that he invited students to his home one night to drink wine and talk – but his national experience was not central to his teaching. He had attended school with Fidel Castro and his impressions of that experience, as I remember, almost had to be dragged out of him by students.

His post-professorial newspaper articles in El Nuevo Herald nearly always included references derived from his classical education that made me scramble for the reference books.

Those articles also evinced a generous spirit; Armengol reprints a poetic one in his blog, where a prophet answers the question, “When are we going back to Cuba?”

El Nuevo’s obituary is here.

[Herald photo.]