El mañana que nunca llegó

One phone call is enough to shatter decades of apparent certainties: "I'm not sure it was worth it." With that sentence begins this unclassifiable book, the lucid memoir of a man who staked everything on a utopia. A correspondent, photographer, university professor, and activist for a cause that earned him exile, the Spanish-Argentine Víctor Steinberg--an exceptional witness to an irreplaceable era--unflinchingly reconstructs his odyssey across half the world and offers us a privileged account of it. Famine and pogroms in the USSR drove his grandparents to a Buenos Aires of uncertain promise: in that Jewish home, the Spanish Civil War and the legacy of Nazism heightened his parents' awareness and shaped his upbringing. That young communist shared an editorial office with Rodolfo Walsh, confronted Videla, and saw Troxler and other Montonero comrades die; he witnessed in Madrid the return of the Pasionaria to the Cortes and followed the execution of Puig Antich; he accompanied Palestinian exiles in Athens; he captured with his camera the struggle in Chile against Pinochet. But tomorrow never came, and the great revolutionary dream brought about the end of innocence. Here he confesses it.