Dies at 90 years old Josep Maria Cadena, erudite of the Catalan press and promoter of 'Avui'

BarcelonaHe didn't write for ’ARA, but readers saw him a lot in this newspaper: followers of Miquel Ferreres' cartoons often found him drawn in the jokes, accompanied by his colleague Josep Pernau, observing human and social miseries with elegant perplexity. Pernau died in 2011 and now Josep Maria Cadena leaves the Catalan press orphaned of a benchmark, whether as an active journalist, as a promoter of media and institutions in the field, as an art critic, and as a tenacious scholar of the country's publications, especially if they were satirical. His monographs on Catalan cartoonists –Opisso, Junceda, Apa, Perich...– are essential canonical works for approaching these authors.

“I am a survivor, but not immortal,” he used to say to anyone who approached him in recent times to hear one of his many anecdotes. Born in Barcelona ten months before the outbreak of the Civil War, in 1935, he began working at the EFE Agency and later at Diario de Barcelona. It was the 1960s and even then he began to seek the union between journalism and humor with the section Gente de pluma y lápiz. Meanwhile, he was looking for a way to organize the journalistic sector for the end of Francoism. And so he founded the Democratic Group of Journalists, as well as being part of the boards of directors of the old Association of the Press of Barcelona and, later, those of the current College of Journalists of Catalonia.

In the 1970s, he launched the newspaper Avui: his signature was the one requesting permits to create what would be the first newspaper in Catalan. Of course, even though he was to be its first director, one day Josep Faulí told him in the corridors of Diario de Barcelona in his last period, before being signed byHe also served as director of Hoja del lunes in its final period, before being hired by El Periódico de Catalunya as editor-in-chief, and also writing articles as an art critic until 2010. More than three thousand artists passed under his expert judgment. Among the awards he received are the Creu de Sant Jordi in 1996 and the Ciutat de Barcelona in 1995, the Mañé i Flaquer of journalism in 1972, and the National Culture Award from CoNCA in 2015.

Representing a type of journalism that, lacking Google, relied above all on its own culture, readings, and memory, Josep Maria Cadena was aware that his was a dying breed. “In the newspapers where I worked, they sometimes said, ‘ask Cadena,’ because they didn’t know,” he recounted, quite cunningly, in a recent interview in the magazine of the College of Journalists, published a few months ago. “I, on the other hand, knew who many people were. And sometimes I also knew things that were better left unsaid. Like some radio presenters to whom they gave a flat. I ran away from that. I never wanted to get paid extra by the newspapers. That didn’t happen much before, because they tempted you, but I never sold myself. And that makes me feel good.”