From Xico

Hello. Cuba, If you behave yourself, we will help you.

I guess John Kerry still believes in US exceptionalism and US superiority (a tad different from exceptionalilsm) and that everyone wants the US´s help.. In Washington on the 23rd of February, he spoke about what he called"Cuba´s possibility of a transformation", thanks to the US's new policy toward Cuba.

Then he said, surprise, surprise, that the lifting of the embargo means that the Cuban government won't be able to blame the United States for the embargo.  "They will have to assume responsiblilty for their own mistakes."

He acknowledged that the embargo, which lasted sixty years, had accomplished nothing.  He finished up saying that the new policy doesn't ask what "the Cubans can do for the United States, but what the United States can do for the Cubanos and for Americans."  This seems an echo of John Kennedy saying "Ask not what you can do for your country...." Who knows?  In any case, it sure sounds like arrogance to me, but maybe I'm prejudiced.

Which corporations are jumping up and down with glee right now?

Take a look at Kerry's photo in La Jornada.  Here´s the link.

And I think it is arrogance which permits the US to say the embargo accomplished nothing.  First of all, what did the various US governments want it to accomplish, realistically?  Did they think that since the Cubans couldn't get cake or new cars, an embargo would drive them to overthrow Castro? And at what price?  Rather, I think the embargo hurt Cuba in economic ways, but the country was not anxious to substitute US hegemony for Castro.  Are they now?

Grains of Salt Included in Gray Areas

In my last post I talked about moving to more nuanced views of the world -- of the dangers of black-and-white thinking.  I mentioned Jeffrey Goldberg's visit to Fidel Castro in Cuba as a startling example of not just Castro but Goldberg dealing in grays.  Today I want to add that we have to see not just issues but each other in shades of gray.  ¡Nobody's perfect!  Which makes me think of our (ridiculous and hypocritical) insistence on candidates' purity, baseball players' purity, and Lady GaGa's anything but.  

We are mixed messengers bearing mixed messages, to say the least.

So anyway, Goldberg's report of his visit to Cuba didn't go unremarked in Cuba.  You will remember, Goldberg mentioned that Castro said something like the Cuban model wasn't even working for Cuba anymore (the anymore is important.)  Apparently this statement caused some problems in Cuba.  Castro said Goldberg had misinterpreted him.  But please note, Cuba is laying off half a million workers in the public sector which employs most Cubans and is urging them to seek private sector jobs.  

Goldberg reports the following mistranslation of his post

:"Not alone has he said things like this before, but the on-the-ground absoluteness is that it is a adage that the Cuban archetypal is not working, and that is why they are starting this all-embracing agreement with privatization," Goldberg told reporters.

If that's what the Cubanos read, I can see them getting miffed.  Goldberg is having fun with this.  The site he got the translation from appears to be a site which posts machine translations online.  Check it out.

After you stop laughing, think about it: how can we be so absolutely sure of anything if even (especially) machines don't even hear or understand what we're saying!

 

 

Thanksgiving in Veracruz with Art and Fish Part II:

Our second stop on Thanksgiving was at the fototeca barely off the main square in the historic district.  The fototeca* in Veracruz is a library for photos of Veracruz: an archive, really, for rescuing and conserving photographs both historical and modern.  It also has extensive galleries for photo exhibits and a jam-packed bookstore. As usual in Mexico, the bookstore contains everything from tourist guides and souvenirs and children's books to the classics and scholarly historical works and everything in between.

We saw an exhibit of photos by Pedro Meyer, a Mexican known for his use of digital techniques, among other things.  His work veers from very classic-looking black and white portraiture to fantasy.  Here is a link to his web site where you can learn a great deal about him in English. 

The exhibit we saw is called Herejias, or Heresies.  It is being shown in over twenty galleries around the world simultaneously.  We were captivated.  Below is a sampling of his work.  And please remember, the process of transferring the works from the one hanging on the wall to the little one on my website really does damage.  So this is just for a bit of flavor.

Below are a series of snapshots of Meyer's photos that we saw at Fototeca de Veracruz.

 

This is a portrait of Alicia Alonso, a great Cuban ballerina.  When I was a child in the 1950s I saw her dance as a guest with the American Ballet Theater with which she had also received training.  Her story is moving.  She is a gallant woman as well as a great dancer and a passionate devotée of both ballet and Cuba.  Here is a good mini-biography from Wikipedia.

 

This is called Fumando Aire, Smoking Air.  It looks to me more or less like Pedro Meyer, so it may be a self-portrait.

 

La Pierna de Godzilla -- Godzilla's Leg.  I don't know if Meyer knew Godzilla was a gorilla and was playing with the name, or what.

 

La Plantación.  This picture was taken in California.

 

El Consejo de Finanzas -- The Financial Advisor.  This was taken in New York City in the 1980s.  It seems quite appropriate for today.

 

Tiempos Bíblicos -- Biblical Times.  This was also taken in New York City and it also seems a good photo for the times we are living in.

 

Vermeer en La Habana -- Vermeer in Havana.

 

La Llegada del Hombre Blanco -- The Arrival of the White Man.  This was taken in Oaxaca.

* There are several fototecas in Mexico and Spain. Fototeca is related to biblioteca, the Spanish word for library.

Now it can be told: Castro Backs Obama

As mentioned, the dominant story in the newspapers I saw was the tragic plane crash in Mexico City yesterday which killed the number 2 man in Mexico's government, among others. 

But still, here is some commentary on our US election from the Mexican press.

In El Diario de Xalapa of today, Miguel Hernández, the correspondent from Cuba wrote, "Castro 'Votes' for Obama." Actually I knew about this yesterday, but I didn't want to run the chance, however tiny, of negatively influencing any voters who might deem this reason to shift their votes from Obama, so I didn't mention it.  AMLO was bad enough...though I don't think that Americans who know who AMLO is are likely to hold his support of Obama against Obama.  Here in Mexico, Cuba is not regarded as the Evil Kingdom.  Not a perfect place by any means, but interestingly the conservative president of Mexico, Felipe Calderón has taken part in discussions with Cubans over illegal immigration and has encouraged trade talks with Cuba. 

So here is a hasty translation of Miguel Hernández's column.

Favored in most polls, Barack Obama received the backing of Fidel Castro on the same day as the American presidential election.  Castro considered him "without doubt, more intelligent, learned, and even-tempered than his Republican adversary.

In his most recent article in the press, released this Tuesday [Fidel Castro writes a regular newspaper column], the convalescing leader who is now 82 years of age, reserved his praise for the Democratic candidate.  "Obama is considered the best political orator in the United States in the last several decades," he added.

This past May, after Obama gave a talk before the National Cuban American Foundation (FNCA) in Miami, Castro directed directed both criticism and praise at him considering him "the most advanced candidate for the presidency from a social and human perspective," and said that he didn't harbor "rancor" because "he had not been responsible for the crimes against Cuba and humanity," but at the same time he indicated that [Obama's] proposal for Cuba could translate "into a formula for hunger for the nation, remittances as alms, and visits to Cuba from the Cuban-American  community  as propaganda for consumerism."

The Democratic candidate has promised to eliminate restrictions on trips to Cuba and on remittances, to establish a dialogue with Cuban president Raúl Castro "without preconditions" and to eliminate the commercial embargo if Cuba begins to open up to significant democratic change.

"I don't doubt Obama's sharp intelligence, his polemic ability and his work ethic.  He is a master of communication techniques and is superior to his rivals in electoral competence(...); he is without doubt the image of a pleasing human being," wrote the Cuban Leader in an article in which he agreed that in Miami the Illinois senator had attributed "to the Cuban Revolution an antidemocratic character lacking with respect to liberty and human rights," exactly "the same argument which, almost without exception, US administrations had used to justify their crimes against Cuba."

But yesterday Castro's message had only praise.  "I've observed the fight between the contenders.  The black candidate, who astonished so much by obtaining his nomination in the struggle against strong adversaries, has articulated his ideas well and has hammered them home in the minds of the voters(...)

"Obama," he added, "is defiant. I think that he has run and will run growing risks in a country where an extremist can legally acquire sophisticated modern weapons on the street(...).  The United States is more worried about the economy than the war in Irak.  McCain is old, bellicose, uneducated, not very intelligent and not healthy," said the former [Cuban] head of state.

The African-American leader has said that at arriving at the White House he would not eliminate the embargo but would be willing to undertake a dialogue with the principle authorities of the island.

HOW Many People Did You Say Were in Mexico When Cortés Arrived?

The tulipanes de la India, the big soft red flowers that grown on trees around here in early summer had fallen on the bumpy stone walkway at La Orduña.  I meant to take a picture after tai chi: a nice arty shot, colors and textures competing nicely.  But I had heard a noise -- I thought something dragging behind the car -- during the second part of my drive to class.  When I checked after class, I discovered I had a completely and totally flat right rear tire: llanta ponchada, completemente sin aire .  So I forgot about the picture.  

So this is an indirect way, or maybe a direct one, into asking about whether what you see is what you get, or why do we notice what we notice and what does that all have to do with history and interpreting the world around us. 

In my last post, I talked a little about the size of the indigenous population of Mexico around the time of the coming of the Conquistadors.

I don't remember hearing much about population sizes when we rushed through Cortés's conquest of the Aztecs in high school many years ago.  From then until a few years ago, I carried around the notion that of course the Spanish conquered the Aztecs: they had guns, horses, armor, whatever: they were after all European.    I wasn't alone. 

Automatic assumption among Westerners (and maybe particularly among Americans)  of conquest being a manifestation of European superiority to the rest of the world began to change in the 1960s and 1970s. Cultural sprouted, culture wars broke out.  Colleges and universities opened departments of black studies, women's studies, Chicano studies.  Political correctness entered the vocabulary. 

I myself was a beneficiary of these changes.  After two years in the Peace Corps in Uganda, I came back as a graduate student in history at the University of Minnesota where they had a brand new collection African history courses and some excellent professors.  Having been in Uganda, it didn't seem the least bit a matter of political correctness to think that African history was worth learning: I knew it was, and I was really curious to learn more about the deeper past of where I had lived.  Living oversea remade the box of my brain into a more complicated shape which held new kinds of information and new thoughts about it.  There were passageways for non-European ideas to make their way in.  And there was a bright light shining on my realization that western individualism, capitalism, etc. etc. were really only one culture's way of shaping lives and perceptions.

(As an almost complete non-sequitur, David Brooks's column today was an excellent discussion of "harmonious collective" outlooks vs. individual outlooks, how they differ, and how the former is more attractive than we may have thought.  My only complaint is his last line.  He said, referring to the "harmonious collective" that "It’s certainly a useful ideology for aspiring autocrats."  I would think he would know better: both kinds of ideologies have been useful for aspiring autocrats.)

In the late 1960s and 70s a lot of ummm junk scholarship, propaganda, really, was churned out to support growing militancy among people who really and truly had been kept down. This stuff fed into the hostility and noisiness of conservatives (think The Closing of the American Mind by Harold Bloom).  But basically, the changes were good because if the world was becoming more densely woven together, if strands of cultures were being stretched from one continent to another, we really had to learn to recognize how varied the cultures of the world are, how many different answers to human problems exist. And actually how many ways there are to cause human problems. 

We need the approaches this vastly more varied world. The answers we Americans thought we had aren't turning out to work so well. 

So back to the population of Mexico at the time of Cortés arrival, and to what happened to it after he came.

Well, not quite.

Remember, Columbus landed in the New World in 1492.  By the 1519 when Cortés arrived on the southeast side of Mexico,  the Spanish had set themelves up in Cuba.  Columbus had landed there in 1492.  In 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued a Papal Bull commanding Spain to "conquer, coloize, and convert the Pagans of the New World to Catholicism."  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Cuba, n.11)  Columbus returned in 1494 and explored the south coast, including what today is Guantánamo Bay. 

After colonizing Hispaniola, the Spaniards started establishing settlements in Cuba in 1511.  The Spaniards were brutal to the people they found there, burning alive many leaders and massacring most of the rest of the population with extraordinary brutality.  According to Wikipedia, by 1515 the local population was effectively destroyed "as a culture and a civilization."  The destruction of so many people, the death of more from disease, and the flight of the rest meant that the Spaniards could not find cheap labor.  In 1513, they began importing slaves from Africa.

The Spanish seem to have gotten themselves firmly established quite fast in Cuba: by 1517, in fact.  The govenor, Diego Velázquez de Cuéllar who had arrived with Columbus on his second voyage, was already interested in further explorations to the west.   In 1518 Governor Velázquez sent an expedition also to the Yucatan, and another followed (There had been a first voyage in 1511).  Juan de Grijalva, the leader of this group landed on San Juan de Ulua, and it was news of his arrival which reached the Aztecs in Tenochtitlán. (You can read a little about it here.) So Moctezuma was well aware there were foreigners sniffing around when Cortés travelled the coast of Yucatan and then landing on what is today the coast of Veracruz in 1519. 

It wasn't hard for the Aztec emperor to learn about the arrival of the Spaniards.  The central and southern parts of Mexico were heavily populated at the time, and communication from shore to center quite good.   As I mentioned in my last post, there may have been as many as 25 million people in the area.  And they weren't just standing still.  In fact, some scholars think that the Aztec Empire might have been one of eight cultures which were on the brink of being able to move outward to find the larger world if Spain hadn't. The other seven are Polynesia, the Incas, Japan, China India, Islam, Latin Christendom.  (Francis Brooks, p.131) 

But within 150 years of Cortés's conquest, the population of Mexico had been reduced probably by 90%.  What happened?  No.  It wasn't weapons.  And it wasn't simply disease.  And it wasn't inferior technology.

Don't worry, more to come. 

Below is a picture of a stone road not far from where we live.  Our dogs Giaco and Cosi can be seen in it.  This would not have been a prehispanic road, because as you may or may not know, the indigenas managed to achieve quite a remarkable civilization without wheels and without beasts of burden.  These two lanes would have been for something with wheels. 

Che Guevara at Harvard (sort of)

There's a neat collection of blogs at Harvard called FinalClub.org which essentially posts summaries of the lectures of various classes.  The one I've been following is on American protest literature, and this particular entry addresses the 1960s, particularly through the lens of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  It is indeed interesting, and with a very telling critique of the failure of non-Civil Rights protests. One of the main criticisms of protest in the US at the period, and to some extent since, is that it turned into a movement of consumers rather than actors.  The blog entries are summaries with commentaries on the lectures, not the lectures themselves, and boy are they tantalizing.  However, in their own way, they are also adequate for casual readers like me. 

So all of this is because the lecture addresses the commercialization of Che Guevara:

Here is Stauffer’s trenchant point: redefining protest as a cultural act (an expression of freedom through sexuality, drugs and alcohol) is the establishment’s primary method of co-opting political protest. Whenever capitalist industries figure out how to make money from the activist ethos, they effectively reroute political transformation back through the sphere of consumption. (A recent example of this was the fad – no largely past, thankfully – of plastering image on just about everything possible. I once saw the Che image on a wall clock. Talk about the vacuity of commodification. Anti-capitalism sells! The best Che shirt Your Intrepid Blogger has ever seen had a caption below the standard image that said, “Your Logo Here.”)

Cuba yet again: post-Fidel

When it comes to Cuba, and Israel's enemies, for that matter, our tendency in the U.S. to demonize ends up causing us a lot of problems.  Cuba's government is a family-run dictatorship on a poor island.  It is a complicated affair because the people on the island themselves have a lot of mixed feelings about their situation, kind of like people in a dysfunctional family where there are parents who may be way too harsh but insist they are doing it for the kids' own good.  But Cuba remains a culturally vibrant place with a very high literacy rate, for instance.  We are not doing anybody any good by insisting that, in our own view, it is the monster under the bed and it needs to be feared and isolated.

Here is a link to an article on post-Fidel Cuba.  The author is on the faculty at the University of Nottingham in Britain which has a Cuba studies program in partnershiip with the University of Havana.

A Bit More on Cuba

According to this slide-show history of the great and mysterious old gangster Meyer Lansky in today's NY Times, Lansky had an apartment in the same building as one of my close college friends AND in Cuba he built a huge resort hotel and casino and shared the gambling profits with Fulgencio Batista, the dictator that Castro overthrew. 

Incidentally, I worked at LIFE magazine in the mid sixties in the department that integrated advertisements and articles into the magazine.  In those days, there were what seemed an incredible number of regional editions: six.  These six editions were characterized by inserts of a number of pages with regional advertising.  Anyway, I was in charge of maintaining the "dummies" of all the magazines -- the national as well as the regional -- as they proceeded through all the steps to publication.  This meant I spent my time cutting and pasting, cutting and pasting as articles changed, and new ads came in and so forth.  Literally, in those ancient days, I would get copy printed haphazardly on big pieces of newsprints, cut it more or less down to size, slap tape on the back and then slap rubber cement on the tape so that I could easily pull it up from one page of the "dummy" and paste it down on another as the editors changed their minds from one day (minute) to the next about where it should go. Articles weren't supposed to reflect negatively on advertising (a plane crash on the same page as an airlines ad, for instance), colors weren't supposed to clash, ads weren't to reflect negatively on stories ("the family that prays together stays together," which was a public service ad, for instance, next to a story about the Pope as a possible Nazi sympathizer.)

So back to Cuba.  There was in my office at LIFE a Cuban refugee, a very dapper man from a family that was prosperous in Cuba before they had to make a run for it. I remember him as being pretty nice and not overtly political, but when the subject of Castro and the Revolution came up, he would shake his head and wonder why the campesinos had wanted a revolution: at his father's place, they always had enough to eat and shoes to wear and Sundays off for church.

Che, The Movie

At Cannes, Steven Soderbergh presented a perhaps not quite finished version of his new movie, Che, starring one Benicio del Toro.  In describing the movie, A.O.Scott is skeptical about Che's nature and legacy.  Che, according to Scott, seems to have turned into a revolutionary who came to believe the old saw that the ends justify the means.  There's plenty to discuss here, for sure.  Anyway, Scott is not at all sure the movie, like many fine movies he sees, will ever make it to the shores of the U.S.  I'm pretty sure, in its finished form it will make it here to Mexico.  I don't know enough at all to make grand pronouncements about Mexico, but being human, I do it anyway.  THIS grand pronouncement is that it seems that there is a less shocked, more nuanced view of history and historical figures here than in the states because perhaps people have learned through experience that principles and real life come banging into each other all the time, and that sometimes real life and high principles just don't go together.  We've I think masked this truth from ourselves more successfully in the U.S. in some ways, certainly regarding our past as a nation.

Anyway, you can read A.O.Scott's interesting article here.