José María López Lledín


José María López Lledín was an elegant vagabond known as El Caballero de París who wandered the streets of Havana and was a well-known cult figure.

Biography

José María, the fourth of eleven children, was born at 11 a.m. on 30 December, 1899. Traveling in the German passenger ship , he arrived in Havana at twelve years of age on 12 December, 1913. His mother was Josefa Lledín Mendes and his father was Manuel Lopez Rodriguez; the owners of a small vineyard, they produced and sold wine and Sherry. He was baptized in the Parish of Salvador de Negueira.
According to his sister Inocencia, he worked as a tailor and in a bookshop. Later he worked as a waiter in the hotels Inglaterra, Telegrafo, Sevilla, Manhattan, Royal Palm and Saratoga.
There are many stories as to why he lost his mental sanity but all of them converge on the fact that he was imprisoned in the Castillo del Príncipe in 1920 for a crime he did not commit.

Aristocracy

Anybody that lived in Havana in the 1950s remembers El Caballero de París. Arquitecto Cheo Malanga writes about the one time that he saw el Caballero de París:

Mental disorder

He was late in life diagnosed as suffering from paraphrenia, a late-onset mental disorder featuring such symptoms as delusions and hallucinations; it does not have any negative symptoms such as the deterioration of the intellect or of the personality. He was a patient of Mazorra, the Psychiatric Hospital of Havana.

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