Life in Central America

Progress is bad

Did I catch you attention? Good! Now let me explain myself.

I was raised, like most good Americans, to believe in Progress (with a capital P). It was the American Way. But now, in my old age, I have to ask myself: is the world better now than it was fifty years ago? The answer, of course, is: yes and no. But if I were God, and could put all the ways the world has improved on one side of a scale, and all the bad things on the other side, the results would be obvious. The scales would tip so far everything would fall of off them.

Progress doesn’t have to be bad. But like everything else is has to be under our control, not the other way around. As it is, we are on a treadmill, where we have to keep running faster and faster just to stay in one place. Just to try to stay in one place, which is impossible because we keep changing the world with all our huffing and puffing.

This is not a cheerful thought, but it has a flip side too: once we understand what is going on, maybe we can to something else. Maybe. Maybe we could be skeptical about all this wonderful progress, and proceed more cautiously, instead of rushing headlong into the future. We might be running of a cliff - or into the ocean, like the lemmings.

Let me give you a personal example. I loved computers, software, and the Internet. I knew they were good. But I was fooled into spending much of my life serving them - or more realistically, serving the people who took control of them. And now, when I try to warn people about the dangers of computers, software, and the Internet, they don’t listen to me. They think I am deluded, and obstructing progress – me, the same guy who served the software gods so faithfully!

Well let me tell you something. I have seen these gods in their underwear, and the sight is not pretty. If you want to serve someone, pick someone else, because these guys will kill you.

“Now, now”, you say, “Calm down, it’s not that bad, it couldn’t be.”

“Is that so,” I say, “Well just take off your blinders and look around - and look at computer voting, in particular. You like the idea of computer voting because you think it is progress, whatever that is. But lets anonymous persons control our voting. Now if that isn’t important, what is? This is the perfect example of bad progress.”

The resurrection of Che

I have never understood the appeal of Che to so many people. He is a cultural icon, a symbol, like Marilyn
Monroe. In life, she was one of the most miserable persons on earth, in death she is immortal. Like Che, she had the good fortune to die at exactly the right time, in exactly the right way – otherwise she would have been someone like Liz Taylor, who just faded away (while she was putting on a lot of weight.)

Che was 39 when he died in 1967. He was no longer young, but as an icon, he is a young man. He appealed to the young of the sixties - young, middle-class rebels like himself. They needed an icon, and he fit the image perfectly. The resemblance to the Christ story is uncanny, and is probably the reason conservatives hate him so much. He has stolen their imagery.

The photograph that appears on his posters was taken by accident. He was attending a public function, seated in a platform with the other important people - but he was seated in the back, out of view. At one point, he got tired of this, stood up, and left. A photographer in the front row snapped his picture as he stood up. He later gave this photo to an Italian publisher who made the poster that made him famous.

To understand Che the icon, you have to understand his times, you have to understand the Sixties. Understanding Che the person is interesting, but this doesn’t explain Che the image, which is something else entirely - just as it was with Christ, after he was resurrected, who was also the product of his times.

The last chaper of the book Compañero is the best chapter, because it goes into this. Let me quote:
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Che Guevara’s death gave meaning to his life. He came to symbolize revolution and self-sacrifice. The youth of that time found its distinctive mark in a blend of idealism and felt omnipotence which only turned to action in 1968, but had been building for years. “We must be realistic and demand the impossible.” The exuberance, the narcissistic determination to have and achieve everything announced the advent of the will, where Che lived and died.

Guevara, through his volunteer work, personal asceticism, and international soliditary, tried to link the individual efforts of today with the social and political utopia he invisaged for the future. For the last time this century - and doubtless for a long time to come – it seemed reasonable to seek to change the order of things according to a pre-established plan, different from anything already in existence.
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I liked this passage especially:
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The Sixties mainly affected the sphere of power and powers: those infinite, meandering channels of power beyond the state that circumscribe, order, classify, and delineate human lives in modern societies - and the need to resist these powers, erode their prerogatives, question their legitimacy, and deny their permanence.
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I wish I could write this well, and I agree completely.

Che Guevara

I was never much interested in this guy, but someone gave me a book about him. I opened it up and looked at a picture showing his dead body in Bolivia. This interested me, but I lost interest when I read a short section of the book at random, and I was going to trade it for another book.

But then a started again at the beginning, and found he was an interesting person - and also a writer, like me. I have just finished reading about the Cuban revolution, and his part in it, about half of the book. Che was a communist (with a lower-case c), he was also enamored with the Soviet Union at the time. He broke with it later. He was an idealist, and when he found out what the USSR was really like, he couldn't stand it.

However, this was later and he was largely responsible for Cuba's alignment with Russia - along with Raul Castro, the brother of the big man. Castro himself, according to this book, was (and is) a consumate politician - a power person, to use my terminology. A dictator who is still in favor with the people (that's why the Bay of Pigs failed). Che and Raul had secret meetings to set up the new government while Castro was away trying to trying to get support from the US.

This is a debate Che had with Enrique Oltuski, who would later have a very complicated career in the Cuban government: he was a high-level minister several times, and also spent time in jail. Anyway, this was the exchange:
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Oltuski: All the idle land should be given to the peasants, while heavily taxing the large factory farms in order to buy their land with their own money. Then the land would be sold to the poor farmers at cost, with loans for production.

Che: What a reactionary idea! How can we charge people for the land they work? You are the same as all other the people who come from the plains. [According to Che, the true revolutionaries came from the mountains, and the people in the plains and the cities were unimportant.]

Oltishi: For crying out loud, what do you want to do? Give it to them? So they can let it go to seed, as they did in Mexico? Men must feel that it takes an effort to get what they have.

Che: (shouting as the veins in his neck stand out) You're full if it!

Oltuski: Anyway, we must disquise things. Don't believe for a moment that the Americans are going to sit idly by and watch us do things so openly. We have to play it smart.

Che: (scathingly) So you are one of those who believe we can make a revolution behind the backs of the Americans. What a shitface you are! We must make the revolution within a struggle to the death against imperialism, from the very onset. A true revolution cannot be disguised.
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'In a true revolution.', he often said, 'Alienating the bankers, landowners, or America was of no importance.' He considered confrontation with the United States indispensible, because he wanted Cuba to align itself with the USSR.
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You probably know the rest. A confrontation with US was not exactly a good policy. And Che himself tried to export the revolution, Cuba style, to Africa and Bolivia. And he ended up a corpse.

The Dream Bearers

I just got my book of poetry by Gioconda Belli, called From Adam's Rib. Poor Adam didn't know what he started. These poems were written in Spanish, with English translations on the opposite page.

THE DREAM BEARERS (Los portadores de sueños)

In all the prophecies
the destruction of the world is written.

All the prophecies fortell
humanity creating it's own destruction.

But time and life endlessly renewed
also engendered a generation of lovers and dreamers;
men and women whe dreamt not of the world's destruction,
but of building a world of butterflies
and nightingales.

From an early age, they were branded by love.
Behind their everyday appearance
they hid tenderness and the midnight sun.
Their mothers often found them crying over a dead bird
and years later, found many of them
dead too, like the birds.

These beings lived with translucid women [mujeres traslúcidas]
and left them impregnated with honey and children
who grew like grass under the caress of rainy days.

This is how the dream bearers multiplied in the world,
fiercely attacked by those who bore catastrophic prophecies.
They were called deluded romanics, inventors of utopias.
They were told there words were old -
which was true, since paradise has been an ancient memory
in the heart of humanity.
Those who accumulated riches feared them,
and hurled their armies against them.
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Maria's comment. Esta poco loco. [She is a little crazy]

Gioconda Belli was part of the Sandinista revolution, and wrote the book Country under my skin, which I have written about previously.

You will have to wait for her photo, because I have to get a whole roll of film developed first.